WAXING PHILOSOPHICAL
Our Motor City stalwart gets his fingers dusty at Hello Records.
It is the weekend after Thanksgiving. The first substantial snowfall of the season will come through on Sunday, blanketing the Metro Detroit area with a thin crust of white ice for the week ahead. It will seem like a kind of purification after this weekend grinds to the end, marked as it was with the twin American obsessions of football and commerce. The football will come on Saturday afternoon with the U of M/Ohio State game. This yearly celebration of neighboring-state hatred and stupor will break our way this time, temporarily abrogating the need to avoid streets crawling with angry drunks—only happy ones. Of course, the commerce will begin in earnest on Black Friday. Everybody with their stalls out, wares out, hands out, fingers waggling toward your pocket. Sure, I could and will bemoan the capitalist urge to suck dough through increasingly small holes; especially if it’s the big boys (Amazon, Spotify, CREEM Inc.). But sadly I am but a wretched musician—desiring artistic purity—who knows if I plan on keeping myself in canned beans I need to suck hard too. I need to be the best damned vinyl and garment salesman there’s ever been in the Midwest punkadjacent indie music biz. With that money-grubbing impetus firmly in hand and my hunger for beans growing, I felt I had to visit the marketplace of my silly dreams, to see the consumer and the exchange of dollars. I needed to spend a weekend down at the local record store. The cow had to visit the butcher shop.
Although far from the heyday, Detroit tenaciously holds on to the handful of independent record stores in the city and the near suburbs. When another one closes—and they are almost always closing, never opening—the bereaved know not who to blame besides the shadowy figure of capitalism or the grinding rock of time as it turns old ways into dust. Record Time, Car City, Stormy, the record store roll call of the dead is limitless. Of the living there remain many fine shops that have yet to die. There’s Peoples in Detroit for soul and R&B, Threads in Hamtramck for techno, Street Corner in Oak Park for a little bit of everything, and dozens more. There’s a couple of stinkers too, inexplicable in their survival: overpriced dust catchers, vinyl-stacked tombs, oddly stocked boutiques, and the ones that are more Funko Pop emporiums than record stores. I decided to go to one of the good ones: Hello Records in Lincoln Park.
