April 21st 2012. We’re one month away from the annual celebration of music, vinyl and the places we go to get our music. Record Store Day is about a lot of things and one of those things is community. If you read through the quote section of RSD’s website almost every artist/manager/producer claims the importance of hanging out at the record store, meeting people that like the same music, discovering new bands, meeting girls, making friends, starting bands, you name it, it all came from the record store!
Here in Portland there are 18 music shops participating in this years event. There are thousands of stores across the country involved. (Find one near you at the RSD website) Bands and labels create unique content to give away and sell throughout the day with tons of great deals on CDs, Vinyl and more.
Iggy Pop is sitting at the helm of RSD as the official “Ambassador” of the event. Here’s what he has to say about it: “A person should have a personality. You won’t get one dicking around on a computer. It helps to go somewhere where there are other persons. Persons who are interested in something you are. That’s how a record store or any shop that’s got some life to it should work. It’s not about selling shit. I got my name, my musical education and my personality all from working at a record store during my tender years. Small indie shops have always been a mix of theater and laboratory. In the 50′s and 60′s the teen kids used to gather after school at these places to listen free to the latest singles and see if they liked the beat. You could buy the disc you liked for 79 cents and if you were lucky meet a chick. Clerks in these places became managers, (like Brian Epstein), label heads, (Jack Holzman) and Faces on album covers (like me). Personally I feel best in a store that, while staying small and socially relaxed, still keeps a complete variety of music types and non musical recordings on offer. I’m aware though that a lot of great places are genre-specific, like dance hall shops in Jamaica or Compas here in Little Haiti. In Europe and on the West coast the same goes on for Punk and Goth. All of this is cool and has a much bigger future than most people realize today. When the record and record store businesses began to die at the turn of the new century, they deserved it because they got too big too boring and too plastic. As Record Store Day Ambassador for 2012 I feel like a representative from some exotic jungle full of life and death and sex and anger, called upon to wear a leopard skin and translate joy to the world of the dead.“ –IGGY POP
So mark your calendars and start getting ready for tons of cool stuff and special deals, and in the meantime, why don’t you head down to the record shop, pick out a stack of vinyl and hang out for a while.
www.recordstoreday.com
