Seventeen In ’88 – A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.
Raven Records Is Heaven!
Right around age seventeen I began to view record stores as sanctuaries, safe havens from the rigors of the outside world. Max and Elliot and I traveled regularly to Nashville to visit Cat’s Records or to sift through used vinyl at The Great Escape. Somewhere along the way these sojourns went from being merely pleasant diversions to being something else entirely – events to look forward to at the very least, a reason for existing at the extreme.
Cat’s was the best record store in Nashville. They had a knowledgeable staff, cool in-stores, and the biggest import/indie section I’d ever seen at the time. Somehow we got wind that Cat’s had another location in Knoxville, and subsequently one Saturday afternoon in April Max and I took a journey there. It was on this trip that we ended up stumbling on the record store that would eventually become firmly entrenched in my mind as my all-time favorite record store. The ideal record store. It was a little collegiate store called Raven Records - one of those perfect record store names, like Strawberries, or Licorice Pizza.
Look, I don’t wanna come off like the curmudgeonly old man who swears that things were better in his day, but really, even though record stores still exist as I write this (it was getting dicey for a while), and the experience of going to the record store is still a unique and wonderful thing, the record store experience is simply different now. Things are not different in ways that are better or worse, necessarily, but so much about the context has changed. In 1988 record stores were everywhere. I lived in a really small town and we had two of ‘em. The catch being that even though it was easy to find record stores, it was very hard to find really good record stores. And both of my little town’s stores were…not great, at least for the music-obsessed freaks like me. In keeping with the modest demands of the small town, they generally catered to the Top 40 common denominator. (Not that the Top 40 is or was an evil thing, by any means. But when it's basically the only option it gets old fast.) These stores were immaculately designed, extremely clean places, where the most adventurous music to be found tended to be the predictable college chart stuff – R.E.M., The Cure, P.I.L., etc. (Again, not a dis, big fan of all three, sheesh, you think I'm a damn snob?) At the time I didn’t understand why these stores wouldn’t carry stuff from SST or Touch & Go or Twin/Tone. Of course, now I recognize that they simply couldn’t afford to carry that stuff, the demand simply wasn’t big enough. I got a D in Economics, too. Regardless, this is why the trips into Nashville and Knoxville came to seem necessary – the record stores there were such a refreshing change from the norm, in so many ways.
Raven was the best of all. It wasn’t too big, but the place was a beautiful mess of music - rambling aisles stuffed with records, posters everywhere (Iggy! The Velvets! Some band I'd barely heard of called The Red Hot Chili Peppers and they're wearing nothing but socks!), handmade signs pointing the way to the clerks’ latest enthusiasms (This Butthole Surfers record will fry your brain beyond recognition! Into dreamy and ethereal? Try Cocteau Twins.). A loose, disheveled barrage of color and noise, it was the perfect antidote to the antiseptic chain stores.
On our first visit The Minutemen’s Double Nickels On The Dime was playing over the store’s sound system. I knew immediately upon hearing “Maybe Partying Will Help” that I needed to own it. In a classic moment of wizened record store clerk imparting wisdom to the eager young music fan, the guy behind the counter (not actually wizened, probably college-age) told me that I should just go ahead and buy two copies, because I was bound to wear the first one out.
I still have a flyer from Raven Records, and it is a wonderful thing. It’s a picture of Elvis, emoting dramatically into a microphone, with a caption that reads “Stop picking at my bones you vultures! Quit exploiting me!” Do record stores still create that kind of thing?
Probably. And this is one good thing about the slow fade/near-demise of music retail – if a record store exists at all today, chances are that it is a pretty good record store. It probably caters mostly to music enthusiasts, with a staff of well-versed aficionados. And I’m absolutely not meaning to advocate any kind of music snobbery, à la Jack-Black-dissing-the-“I Just Called To Say I Love You” guy in High Fidelity, amusing as that scene is. I’m merely pumping for enthusiasm and knowledge and creativity as opposed to corporate blandness and predictability.
Our first visit to Raven was on Saturday, April 9. Driving back from Knoxville, listening to The Minutemen’s Ballot Result (a last minute substitution for the out-of-stock-but-for-the-play-copy Double Nickels), we had a feeling of excitement and discovery.
For me, this feeling was enhanced upon learning that the Dodgers had beaten the Braves that day 11-3 (Valenzuela over Glavine, and who would have correctly guessed that day which of those pitchers would have the Hall of Fame career?), to win their fourth game in a row. Spring 1988 was coming along nicely.
