Don't stop the spin - please!

Record stores - like Homer's Music in Omaha - are disappearing before our very eyes

“We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.” “No Surrender” Bruce Springsteen

Omaha’s “Homer’s Music” record store: The last of a dying breed

One by one, they are becoming extinct. Once upon a time, they were an oasis of sounds, fresh, new, challenging, maybe even life-shaping. Often cluttered, generally messy, the air filled with music and sometimes incense, sometimes other fragrances, (possibly illegal) wafting through the air, walking into your local record store was often entering a different, non-corporate world, seemingly an escape from adulthood, maturity, responsibility.

In fact, some of the artists whose work you might have sought out ended up extolling some of those very virtues behind, on top of or beneath a thumping beat, you just didn’t tell any grownups. Right, Bruce (Springsteen!)

Most of them are gone, now. Philadelphia’s legendary Third Street Jazz and Rock record store at 10 North Third Street, Waterbury, Connecticut’s matchless Brass City Record at 489 Meadow Street, Vinyl Fever here in Tallahassee, Florida, even Rockbottom in Nashua, New Hampshire where I grew up, they’re all gone. For decades in some cases.

One remains: Homer’s Music on 1210 Howard Street in Omaha, Nebraska. Thank God!

Let’s face it, everything is online now. If there’s an obscure song you want to hear - say Bruce Springsteen’s “The Big Payback” or Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street” or The Clash’s “Groovy Times” - great hard-to-find tunes that might have had you ransacking record bins across the land years ago - you can now go to YouTube, find them and give them a listen in seconds. I just did.

You’d have to be a fool to NOT love that convenience but at the same time, haven’t we lost something precious? That ache, that quest, that curiosity to hear that one damn song and to go to all ends of the Earth to find it. Where would you look? In a record store. Would you buy something that you might hear for the first time in the store? Would the guy or woman working there recommend something to you? They had a WHOLE RECORD STORE to listen to. Wouldn’t their opinion matter?

Growing up as a Bob Dylan fan, I’d heard and read about his angry, explosive “Royal Albert Hall Concert” in 1966, the one where a fan, angry at Dylan’s decision to surge into raucous rock and roll, hollered out “Judas” - prompting Bob’s angry response from the stage “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar.” Then, Dylan, turning to The Hawks (soon to become The Band) with an order “Play f-ing loud” before kicking into the most triumphant/defiant “Like A Rolling Stone” of his career.

Searching for that bootleg record for years, the Third Street Jazz and Rock store had it. Once I got it home, it sounded even better, more exciting than I could have imagined. Was the illicit nature of its acquisition part of it? Of course! (For those completists: It was actually the Manchester Trade Hall. And Columbia finally got around to officially releasing not only that show, but the whole damn tour! (36 CDs’) Uh, yeah, I, uh, have them all. (“It’s research, honey…for my Dylan book.”)

While I didn’t find any bootleg albums at Homer’s - well, I sort of bought one, Neil Young’s “Down In The Rust Bucket” a live performance originally debuted on his Neil Young Archives, not an official record-company release - happily, Omaha’s Homer’s Music proudly remains, just as cluttered, overstocked and delightfully dusty as it ever was the first time I wandered in there 31 years ago, visiting the Nebraska city for the Florida State’s appearance in the College World Series.

In those days, there were two kinds of record stores; those that stocked the regular old releases on Columbia, Capitol, Reprise…and those, like Homer’s, where you might find a bootleg recording or two, some concert surreptitiously taped, probably by accident (wink), or studio recordings that for one reason or another the artist chose not to officially release.

While the artists rightfully complained that bootlegs were stealing their money, didn’t they have enough already? And hey, no artist’s career benefitted more from that whole bootleg scene than Dylan. Even if he lost some money on the bootlegs, the mystery surrounding the outtakes or concert performances just enhanced his career. Finally, Columbia issued “The Bootleg Series,” a slew of previously unreleased material for the devoted/obsessed fan. Had the bootlegs not happened, Columbia might not have aquiesced.

There was something daring, almost counterculture about record stores like these. There was no Internet in those days. AM Radio was so-so, FM Radio was great in some places like Boston with the immortal WBCN. But record stores, that was the place to find obscure records, sometimes imports, like Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry’s first solo album “These Foolish Things” or the original Clash album, not released in America right away.

Record stores were a resource if you knew how to use them and what to look for. Sometimes, you might know a helluva lot more than the stoned college kid who can point you to the Allman Brothers but there were some, like the late Walt Quadrato at Brass City Records, who was a long-distant advisor. I’d visit the store maybe once a year but Walt remembered me and he might cut you a deal on a rare, overpriced, impossible-to-find Dylan film “Eat The Document” or recommend a really well-recorded Springsteen bootleg. He knew what I liked and knew what record, VHS tape or CD might scratch that itch.

And if he did that for me, whom he saw once a year, can you imagine how many people he impacted in running that store for as many years as he did?

Back in November, Bob Dylan finally got around to releasing his long-awaited follow up book to his acclaimed “Chronicles, Vol. 1” with an unusual coffee table-sized book “The Philosophy Of Modern Song.” In it, Bob writes in the second person (how odd is that?) and he goes on to talk about songs of all types and descriptions, many you’d never heard, others you can’t believe Dylan is writing about - Perry Como? Cher?

Many of the early reviewers of the book pounced on that oddness theme and to me, seemed to miss one of the important sidelights of the beautifully constructed, carefully planned layout - photo after photo of, yes, RECORD STORES. Why, it was even on the back cover.

When I wrote my review, I made sure to note that Dylan presented these record stores as almost sacred places. Let’s face it, if it weren’t for the record stores in Hibbing where he grew up, who knows what might have happened to him?

Then something neat happened. On Thanksgiving Eve, on a whim, I was sure that people were missing Dylan’s point about record stores. Like Homer’s Music.

So I decided to email my review of “The Philosophy of Modern Song” to one of the greatest - and first - of all Bob Dylan experts, the professorial Michael Gray, who now lives in France. Gray wrote “Song And Dance Man” in 1971, the first book-length look at Dylan’s writing and somehow, after checking his book out of the Milford, N.H. library that summer, I, uh, forgot to return it. (Still have it).

Since I went on to write three editions of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography" for McFarland and Co., it might be one of those rare forgotten-to-return library books that sprouted three more.

Perhaps I ate too much turkey but I thought, well, why not share MY review with Gray, with whom I’d had occasional exchanged messages. So I did, hoping he might say something about what I noticed about the record stores. Wonderfully, he wrote right back. I could hardly believe it.

“You make a brilliant, huge point about the book by having paid such close attention to the pictures rather than the text,” he wrote. “Your thesis that the real thrust of the book is a memorialising of record stores, and the joys of discovering and loving music via such places - this is inspired, and a unique take on the book - the most interesting take of any review I've read (and I've read all too many)… Where is this fine piece seeing the light of day? It deserves to be seen widely.” (My “Philosophy Of Modern Song” review is on this site already - if you’re interested.)

So as I wandered through Homer’s Music, wondering how long they could hold out, it felt like old times. I found a fabulous CD “The Best Of Sun Rockabilly” - (Sun Records in Memphis is where Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and others got their start) - for $4.99 (!) and a hard-to-find Carl Perkins CD “Go CAT GO” with “Blue Suede Shoes” with Eric Clapton, cuts with John Fogerty, Johnny Cash, Tom Petty, Paul Simon, Bono, and Ringo for a DOLLAR!

As I paid, I struck a conversation with a smiling tall man with a long gray ponytail and full white Santa Claus beard. He told he started working there part-time after he retired from his stressful job in real estate.

“I’m the happiest guy ever making minimum wage,” Mike said, laughing. “When I get home, I get to play DJ for an hour to get my wife to sleep. And working here, I have plenty to pick from.”

Most of the rest of the world is fine with getting their music where they get it. Spotify or Amazon Music or wherever. As for me, I’m part of a generation that will always treasure the treasures you might find (like I did!) in a record store. Me. Mike. And Bob Dylan.