A Place to Hear and Be Heard

Going to a record store in Detroit back in primordial times was an all-day affair for me. Mainly because I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was nearly 19, making me a bit of a pariah in the Motor City, which has always frowned on public transportation. If you wanted to get anywhere in Detroit, you either stole a car or hitchhiked. For me, hitchhiking was the far more dangerous proposition, especially wearing the micro minis that were de rigueur during that not-so-loveable Summer of Love. But more importantly there weren’t very many record stores there, no matter what you’ve heard. Sure, Berry Gordy founded the 3-D Record Mart back in 1953, but less than a year later it was gone, swept away in an early economic deluge that sent the nascent impresario to the Ford Motor Assembly Line—and it was there, not dusting his unsold Duke Ellington and Junior Walker discs, that he came up with his idea for Motown Records.

Unfortunately, the closest local store was 50 miles away. Discount Records in Ann Arbor was only a little bigger than my childhood bedroom, but within it was a world of possibilities. There were flyers for bands playing at the nearby Grande Ballroom, and Jim Osterberg (a full two years before he would become Iggy Pop) was a stock boy there, wearing his hair just like Brian Jones did on the cover of Rolling Stones, Now! His hyper-thyroid blue eyes glowed deep, unknowable and just plain weird, as he stocked Balinese trance music next to Long John Baldry. His presence there gave the place an air of danger and cool—but the whole store exuded a kind of clubby feel. Jeep Holland, the store’s manager, would go on to form his own A-Square Records and book most of the bands in the area. He was fully aware of the importance of hiring fetching employees, and Osterberg was not the only one who looked like he tumbled out of a Yardley ad, or had come to work straight from a rehearsal with The Yardbirds.

In those days, perhaps less so than now, the record store trumped the supermarket for meeting members of the opposite sex. It made for un-self-conscious discussions about whether Captain Beefheart was more of a seer than Frank Zappa, or whether Eric Clapton was better off not joining Blind Faith. The discussions I had in the aisles of Discount Records, whether mating rituals or shared confidences, made me feel like I wasn’t so alone—that I had found my people, my discourse, my country. But never so much as the day when I first heard Led Zeppelin II through Discount Records’ tinny speakers. When I listened to “What Is And What Should Never Be,” I felt like Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham had written a song just for me, knocking me over with the force of religion and singing the words I needed to hear at that very moment. When I looked around the store, I noticed that everyone was equally transfixed. That is something that will never be replaced by a keystroke, a download or a file transfer. Nor would I want it to be.

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