In 1975, Paul Simon released his fourth solo album, the sublime Still Crazy After All These Years.
The record won him his second of three Album of the Year Grammys (the first went to Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water). Accepting the award, Simon thanked Stevie Wonder for not releasing an album that year, as Wonder had won the award the previous two years (and would go on to win it again the following year).
Whenever I think about record store experiences, I always go back to my discovery of an obscure band called Witness (or Witness UK, as they were forced to identify themselves on early albums due to the existence of an American band also called Witness).
Their 2001 album Under a Sun was playing once while I browsed the racks at a used CD shop and I was so taken by the music that I went to the register and bought it on the spot. It’s the only time I’ve ever done that.
Usually when I browse CDs in a used music shop, I marvel at all the great deals I could have had if I didn’t have so damn many CDs already.
I’ll see a great Elvis Costello album for $2 or a little-known indie gem for a buck-fifty and envy the people who might stumble upon it after me and enjoy the thrill of discovery bundled with the satisfaction of a real bargain.
I suspect that I should be a Matthew Sweet fan.
Sweet is a power pop singer-songwriter of exactly the sort I tend to like. Artists such as Squeeze, Barenaked Ladies, Fountains of Wayne, Owsley and mid-career R.E.M. are all cut from the same cloth.
But as with Neil Finn, another power pop practitioner I should follow, I’ve just never gotten around to listening.
Whenever my wife sees a business that remains open despite improbable odds, she announces “that’s a drug front.”
You see a neighborhood mom-and-pop store that has somehow weathered the tough economy. She sees a drug front.
By her logic, there is no more obvious drug front than the Spec’s record store across from the University of Miami campus on US 1 in Coral Gables. That store has remained there for decades despite the collapse of every other brick-and-mortar record store in the world. It sits next to the Swensen’s sandwich and ice cream restaurant (itself a monument to perseverance through hard times), occupied by more employees than customers most days. Drug front.
