I don’t remember the first album that I bought. Talking to my friends, this puts me squarely in the minority, as the purchase of one’s first very own vinyl was, for our generation, something of a landmark occasion. My purchase would have been around 1978, so it was likely “Sesame Street Fever” or “Grease,” or some awful K-Tel disco compilation that my rock and jazz-loving parents would never have otherwise allowed in the house. (I was 8, folks, cut me some slack).
And at the time, there were plenty of places locally to buy from. Champaign-Urbana was full of record stores, among them, Musicland at the mall, Record Service at both Lincoln Square and on Green Street, right in the heart of Campustown, and then, across the street, on the second floor above Murphy’s, there was the record store that was also a local cultural phenomenon: Record Swap.
The very climb up the stairs to Record Swap told you just about everything you needed to know about how vibrant the independent music scene in C-U was in the ’80s and ’90s. Plastered over the graffiti covered walls were the posters for upcoming rock shows featuring Black Flag, American Music Club, Didjits, Dead Kennedys and Smashing Pumpkins. There were flyers looking for drummers, guitarists, lead vocalists to start a garage band in the hopes of being able to put up some of their own show posters.
And once you got to the top, neatly organized rows of albums, each with their own uber-cool hand-drawn tab. A 99-cent bin. Used records. Local music section. Rare imports. Independent and underground movies on VHS. Posters covering the walls featuring The Clash, Tom Waits, Bauhaus. T-Shirts. Buttons. Two resident cats, Marley and Phaser.
The employee likely to be working the front was Charlie the Quaker. Charlie was an enthusiastic fan of underground music, and played his favorites on the local radio show “The Quaker Goes Deaf” on the community radio station WEFT. He and owner Bob Diener, who was more the reggae-and-world-music fan, lovingly placed stickers on the sleeves of the records gracing Record Swap’s shelves: “Like Ministry? Try Manufacture,” so that ordinary everyday people, like yours truly, might be able to get a leg up on discovering great new music. They were our Pandora.
The music that you could find at Record Swap was new, even if it was old. Formative. “The Swap” provided a culture that encouraged you to find interesting stuff. And it was addictive. It had teenage boys riding their skateboards all the way from the Cherry Hills neighborhood to discover bands like Nick Cave and Scratch Acid.And have their musical horizons expanded. Carrying home plastic handled bags with the SKA-inspired logo of Record Swap showed that you were definitively and utterly cool.
Diener moved Record Swap in 1999 from Green Street to its new location at 114 E. University in Champaign. Its appearance is recognizable to those of us who grew up visiting that upstairs room, but the music culture has significantly changed, both in C-U and worldwide. And as a result, Record Swap is not the cultural mecca that it once was. But it has stood the test of time that all of the other area record stores have succumbed to.
From the street, its storefront might appear as an anachronistic curiosity to non-townies. Vinyl is just not the medium that we think of anymore when we are curious about finding new music. We can download nearly anything we want to our iPods; plug a few favorites into Pandora to automatically churn out some fresh stuff; keep it in the background as we go about our lives. It’s hardly the same as buying a new, exciting record and listening to it over and over until you can scrape up the money to buy another.
I’ll leave it to you to decide which avenue is superior. But luckily, Record Swap is still around so that we may have both.
Diener shared some words of wisdom with me recently during “Shop Local Saturday.” This same man who helped provide a musical education to so many youngsters in C-U, myself included, now spoke to me as a mom: “Encourage diversity in your kids,” he said. “You never know where that musical seed will sprout that will lead to a lifetime of music appreciation.”
My 4-year-old has become enamored lately of Queen. He can listen to “We Will Rock You” over and over until he’s dizzy from playing air guitar. He prefers the Pocoyo-animated version on YouTube, but I’m going to take him to Record Swap so that he can look for Queen’s original 1977 album “News of the World.” And I bet we can count on Diener to suggest something else he’d like, too.
Erin Nieto has lived in Champaign-Urbana for nearly all of her life, and heads Erin S. Nieto Fine Art Appraisal in addition to being a busy mom of two. More of her essays on motherhood and culture can be found at www.cheapisexpensive.net.