Featured Essay: Three Services at the Church of In-store Play

by D. Mayo-Wells

Last summer I went record-store hopping with a musician I’d admired for more than a decade. In the car we chatted like we were instant old friends, but as soon as we got into a shop we’d split up, eventually drifting back toward the register, and comparing our hauls outside.

Maybe it’s because we’re both terminal introverts, but I think record shopping is solitary by nature, even when you’re with friends. Partly it’s physics; you can’t both look through the same bin at the same time unless you’re looking over someone’s shoulder. But I also think the rhythm of record browsing is deeply personal, maybe as individual as a fingerprint. How fast you flip through the bins, how long you pause for an artist or album you’ve never heard of before you flick past or pick it up to investigate further. With how much care do you slip a record from the sleeve, at what angle do you hold it to check for scratches? It’s intimate.

But there’s an exception to this rule of solitude. In-store play links shoppers in a communal experience. And the record store is the perfect place to discover new sounds. You’re already focused on music. There’s something almost spiritual about it, a purity to the experience that’s nearly unique. You’re not prejudiced by preconceptions from the album art, or the artist’s name. There’s not even a DJ voice to provide any context.

Snooty record store clerks are legend, not without some basis in reality. Sometimes in-store play is a challenge: are you cool enough to recognize this? Will this abrasive, or offensive, music drive you out, uncool person? But at its best, in-store play is a chance to make converts. Listen, have you heard this? It’s so good, you gotta hear this. I’ve found many of my favorite albums and artists this way. Here are three that still stand out.

I. Throwing Muses, Throwing Muses

1986, University of Maryland College Park Record Co-op, College Park, MD

The co-op was a tiny place tucked in a corner of the basement of the student union. Glenn Griffith, now of the long-running blog apessimistisneverdisappointed.com, was its indie buyer from 1988 until it closed in 1990, and helped confirm my memory: it really was barely bigger than a living room, just 3 or or 4 short rows of bins. Glenn says that Madonna and the “Cocktail” soundtrack paid the bills, but the end caps were always devoted to staff picks, not big sellers: Dead Milkmen, Game Theory, The Connells – and Throwing Muses.

Back then, I was working part time in an office on campus, and for a couple years, every payday I’d trek across a few acres of parking lots to change a little too much of my take-home into fresh music. Looking back, it’s a bit odd to me that I wasn’t caught immediately when “Call me,” the opening on Throwing Muses’ self-titled release, was queued up. But “Hate My Way,” with its staccato opening and Kristin Hersh’s confrontational “I could be a smack freak/And hate society,” immediately commanded my attention, and held it through the first, deceptively calm and gentle first verse. It was Hersh’s abrupt, vibrato-laden scream preceding “but so does my kitchen” that made the sale, though. After that I wandered aimlessly around the place all the way through the first side before I bought the record. Pretty sure I was late back to work; pretty sure I didn’t care.

II. Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville

1993, Third Street Jazz and Rock, Philadelphia, PA

Third Street was founded by Jerry Gordon, later of Evidence Music. It endured from 1972 to 1998, and eventually inspired the “all things jazz” website. It was massive, maybe the closest analogue on the east coast to San Francisco’s Amoeba Records, and had a similar vibe of having records that simply didn’t seem to exist anywhere else. (I remember seeing a bevy of pricey imports from goth-metallers Fields of the Nephilim, that I’ve never seen since, and that aren’t listed by Discogs or AllMusic. Memory is weird.)

In 1993, after a road trip to hang with a high school bestie (and record-buying spree enabler), I was standing in the checkout line with way too many albums when I heard a woman’s voice, a little gravelly, a little unsteady, claiming, “all the money in the world is not enough.” I thought it was cool, but I was already spending all the money I had—and then some. But by the time Liz got to the barb at the end of that chorus, “I loved my life/And I hated you,” I was all the way sold. There was a brief kerfuffle: did the store have another copy? Would they sell me the one they’d been playing? Eventually I prevailed, and somehow my credit card charge was approved. (Later, I was a bit smug because some people said that straight men – which was how I identified at the time — only bought that album because of the racy cover or the explicit lyrics. Nope, the anger was enough for me.)

III. Giant Sand, Ramp 

1995, Phantasmagoria, Wheaton, MD

Phantasmagoria had weird mid-life shift; after a decade in a big below-ground level space, in 1996, owner Bobby Rencher moved it a few blocks into the space occupied by the former roots-rock club Tornado Alley and retooled it as a rock club with an attached record store (meanwhile Tornado Alley’s owner Marc Gretschel opened a new club in the more upscale DC suburb Bethesda). The hybrid venue/store endured until 2001.

It’s still the downstairs room that I hold dear in my heart—it had room for way more stock. It was a 15 minute walk from one of the farthest-out subway stops, which meant it was a good place to find local releases for a little less than you’d pay for them downtown. 

But the score I remember best wasn’t local – it was from the other side of the continent, more than two thousand miles way. Tucson, to be exact. Ramp opens with “Romance of Falling” and “Warm Storm,” a helluva one-two punch. “This sky is falling!” Howe Gelb announces to begin, amid a veritable storm of guitars that I can only describe as “unruly.” Gelb has a genial, creaky, baritone – even now it short-circuits my ability to tell whether he’s in key or not; the question seems irrelevant. Paula Brown’s vocals, sweetly double-tracked, criss-cross and overlap Gelb’s, with Victoria Williams ghostly harmonies sometimes hovering over the mix. The rhythm section is impeccable, steady under all that chaos (a few years later bassist Joey Burns and drummer John Convertino will become the nucleus of the better-known Calexico). The songs careen between noise and gentle interludes; they sound nearly unperformable (although a few years later I’ll hear them performed). This is one of the times I don’t ask what’s playing; I sidle over and see it on its little rack, Ramp by Giant Sand. 

The clerk not only approves my purchase, he asks if I’ve ever heard Center of the Universe and when I answer “no,” he sends me back to the stack to pick that up as well. He was right.

D. Mayo-Wells is an ex-pat DC punk living in Providence RI. D. thinks staying open to new music is the fountain of youth, but their knees are not fully onboard. Online at summervillain.bsky.social