WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ITEMS LEFT OVERNIGHT OR DREAMS LEFT UNREALIZED
record store: an auto-biography

"To hell with your earth grammar."

About 10 years ago Lumpy and I sat at the old Expansion bar on Market street in San Francisco. We drank and grumbled about how movies like EMPIRE RECORDS and HIGH FIDELITY never got it right. We decided to write our own film. Ours would be called, RECORD STORE THE MOVIE (A TRUE STORY). First rule: NO PLOT. If you work in a record store your life really has no coherent plot. Lumpy and I got drunker (better) and finished the night with an outline scratched on a bar napkin.

Our co-workers added to the bar napkin/idea bucket and in time the bucket ... i don't know ... exploded maybe? ... let me try again ...

Over the next ten years the project sprouted into a game of hypothetical distraction to keep us from going mad while we performed our sub-monkey tasks behind the counter. A particularly horrifying retail transaction would often end with the phrase, "Fu#k it. That's going in the movie." I think we all knew that the movie would never be made but the idea of it occasionally kept us from degenerating into typical, bickering, infantile, self-important record store clerks.

Today our lives are very different. The industry roped it's own neck with an inflated $18.98 price point just as file sharing became awesomely convenient. I am personally conflicted because I like being employed but I LOVE watching corporate greed mongers fail on the global stage. Technology taught us a beautiful lesson: ANYONE with talent can produce, record and sell their own creation without the aid of focus groups or ENTER STOCK 3 HOUR LONG JELLO BIAFRA RANT HERE. So basically the power is back in the hands of the artists and the millions of industry middlepeople are doing their evolutionary do and dying off. Good riddance, you festering hack bastards! Oh wait. That's me. Record shops are the last scale on the ass fin of the old-timey music industry fish.

Crap.

Well. Lumpy got laid off along with many, many others. VIRGIN, TOWER RECORDS and a couple other chain stores dissolved. Last year our operation closed down its flagship store here in the city. The proud little cockroach shop where we work remains open but many of us are not sure how ... or why ... or when ...

So what do you do when you have little faith in the future? If you are sane you update your resume. You go back to school. You take active measures to provide yourself with a vague sense of control. But if you are mad you do as the madmen do. You mirror the absurdity of your situation as a method of survival. You pick up your instrument and play as the ship goes down. You make the fu#king movie.

This is our story ... what's left of it ... chapter one.

Love,
Bobby (Phil)