Today's the 3rd Saturday in April. Happy Record Store Day. If you're not totally buried under a mountain of laundry and other work you need to tackle, take a little time out today and visit a local independent record store in your town (if you're still lucky to have one). And if you can't quite make it outside...try streaming this great documentary on NetFlix. It's a sweet love song to a legendary indie record store and a great reminder to appreciate the shops that are still hanging on across the nation (and the world). This especially goes out to all of you iTunes/mp3 obsessed kids out there who have never set foot in a record store in your young lives or have only ever known big box stores, Virgin megastores, Tower records, etc. There's a whole record store culture that is sadly being lost. I could write a novel about it...and maybe one day I will. If it weren't for the awesome shop owners and workers at my favorite record stores back in Chicago and NYC during the 70's and early 80's, I might not have fallen as deeply in love with punk, garage, jazz, classical, no-wave, noise and so much more amazing, incredible music and art. And it wasn't all about dusty records -- those shops gave so many of us platforms to distribute our punk zines, indie label music and inspired radical and progressive thought and activism. Those shops helped connect and inform us crazy punks and other subculture/counterculture types in the eras before the internet. Absolutely priceless.
Any San Francisco, Berkeley and Hollywood folks out here in California, how about we pile as many people as we can inside our local Amoeba, Rasputin and other smaller shops, too??? On your mark...get ready...GO!!
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