A New Lead

Today was the big hunt: 10 hours of walking and busing around Seattle checking out record stores (I also got fish n' chips down by the seaside market and made a few scenic detours). There were a lot of disheartening surprises--Bop Street Records not being open when I got there; two stores near downtown simply not existing; and another one on my list either moved or out of business. Rather than striking out, I found that luck was with me.

Funny enough, I ended up seeing a store out the bus window on my way downtown and stopped to find a few mid-nineties throwaways, and around the corner happened to be Easy Street, a new and vintage shop sporting what turned out to be the Record of the Day. I got the info for another record store I hadn't heard of and set off to find it in the Capitol Hill area.

Wall of Sound was the name of the place, and turned out to be a goldmine of handmade CD jackets. It would seem as though every town has a record shop in which they devote a special section of the store to handmade pieces, like Treehouse in Minneapolis, and Encore in Ann Arbor MI. Wall of Sound was that store in Seattle. I spent a good hour in there taking photographs and admiring the owner's eclectic European tastes in stuff that was meant to no doubt impress and embarrass people at a fancy party serving beers meant to produce the same result.

After catching a stunning view of Downtown and the bay from Queen Anne (a nice residential part of town) I wandered across the Fremont bridge to the campus side of the bay and found the boarded-up windows of the record store I mentioned that had up and left. And then things got strange…

I kept walking for another block and happened across a store, Jive Time, that was one of the missing stores that was supposed to be located downtown. Weird. I went in and told the owner about what I was doing, and he totally gave me a different story about handmade covers. Most people, and what I've gathered from seeing pieces in stores, maintain that they emerged with punk music in the late 70s when musicians, short on dough, or wanting to subvert the music industry started to do it themselves. Scott, at Jive Time, cited examples from the 60s when crazies or loners would put together their own covers of collaged mushrooms (for example). He said that Sun Ra started spray-painting his covers back in the 60s. Then he blew me away with an idea and a new lead that I haven't heard of yet: people going into department stores as early as the late 40s, singing along with prerecorded material and having their own voice cut to vinyl right there in front of your eyes! Interesting slant on everything, at any rate. Scott and I will get together next week to discuss his personal collection, so stay tuned. All in all, a successful day. I head to Anacortes tomorrow, a town 80 miles north of Seattle, and I'll write when I return.
Later,
james