♫Drove downtown in the rain, 9:30 on a Tuesday night...♫

That is almost totally wrong. It was noon on a Monday, the sunshine was brilliant, and it was on the outskirts of the Village of Williamsville rather than downtown. It was still an unexpectedly nice and memory-jogging experience.

I have been a loyal supporter of a long-standing record shop in Rochester called Record Archive. It is a just right blend of music, kitschy merch and even live performances. No store in the 716 has ever come close to matching it for the “service, selection and prices so low” that have been a staple of their tacky advertisements since I first moved there almost 40 years ago. After a fairly dull morning at work Monday- not unexpected from everyone being hung over, emotionally if not otherwise, from the Bills victory the day before-  I made an impulsive stop at a place on Main Street on the way to Wegmans that I had never checked out before.

My inspiration was seeing online posts for a local retro band with a Facebook friend of mine in the lineup. They're called Organ Fairchild. My dream is to someday see them on the same stage as another Western New York group called Harmonica Lewinski. One way to tell them apart is that the latter band doesn't have the Devil in The Blue Dress doing promos for them.

Organ Fairchild's namesake has.
 

Watch on YouTube

Da Boyz are on Da Bucket list of acts I really want to get out to see, but they've been touring far and wide and devoted much of the past week preparing for their appearance at the Borderland Festival- a newish weekend event at an East Aurora state park with many national acts on the bill as well.

Organ Fairchild has been posting that they just released a new album. Normally, I would travel to Record Archive to see if they have it, but I am in one of those unusual windows where I don’t yet have any scheduled appointments in Rochester. So when I was driving very slowly down Main Street the other day I remembered there was a fairly new record shop tucked behind the Verizon store, and I decided to finally check it out.

Like many of the kind, it has more of a selection of new music in vinyl than CD. This is that totally unexpected return to retro that has occurred over the last several years, likely making it necessary at some point for us to re-acquire a turntable, receiver and speakers of the kind that we got rid of almost 30 years ago. However, this place did have a decent selection of used music in the once-popular compact disc format, and even a few cassettes. At least they did in the local music section I was pointed to when Joe, the owner of the place, told me he did not have the Organ I was looking for.

 

What he did have, though, was a treasure trove of music by a number of performers I’ve become friends with and/or  seen performing live in various incarnations. Here are the three I walked out with:




Working up from the bottom, we have a band called Jelly Jar. I’ve never seen them in a live performance, but I went to law school with one of their members and I’ve known their bass player Bill Savino for over 30 years from various bankruptcy cases and seminars we’ve been participants in. Bill always seems like he’s just finished his 14th cup of coffee, and I was amazed that they got him to sit still long enough to record an album, but I have it now.

Moving along, I snagged a disk from a legendary local band called the Pine Dogs. I have seen several of their one-time members on a stage or two in other current incarnations. They did a reunion show at Sportsmen's over the summer that sold out in about 10 seconds, so I am finally going to get to hear them.

And then there are John & Mary. John Lombardo is a founding member of 10,000 Maniacs from Jamestown, while Mary Ramsey has sung and played strings for them on and off for most of their 40-plus year history. Mary just stepped down as their lead singer after taking over for Natalie Merchant almost 30 years ago, but remains a full-fledged Manialumna and since "retiring" has performed a few times locally with her own trio.  Her duo with John has been a side project dating back to before Natalie's departure from the full band, and we already owned their 1993 album The Weedkiller's Daughter that has had at least one track worked into Maniac concerts I've attended.  This newest find is also their most recent CD, from 2002, with full band drummer Jerry Augustiniak on drums and several other members and 10KM's longtime producer credited on the album.  It will provide the perfect soundtrack to my journey down the 90 tonight to see the newly constituted Maniacs beginning their 2023 tour in their hometown of Jamestown. Leigh Nash on vocals and Matt Slocum on guitar are joining from the longtime folk band Sixpence None The Richer, and we will likely hear some of their music as well as longtime classics from the Original Four (John, Jerry, Dennis Drew and Steve Gustafson), with local Buffalo string legend Sally Schaefer taking over Mary's parts on those instruments as well as singing backup. I've seen her at a number of Buffalo gigs and everybody's thrilled she's part of at least the local crew now.

It's a fairly early start at Jamestown Community College, my car key (and only my car key) will be safely stashed on a lanyard around my neck, and I should now have good listens before, during and on the way home from the show.

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Joe wasn't done with the memory-making, though, as my three oldish CDs went into an even older plastic bag:



Joe turns out to be the former manager of a Record Theatre store that, I'd forgotten, was once in this very Williamsville location probably 30 years ago.  I remember them much more from Rochester days, where they had a mall location downtown in Midtown Plaza and a bigger suburban shop on the Henrietta edge of Brighton.  I'm pretty sure I bought some of our final vinyl from one or the other of those- Talking Heads, maybe?- before Indigo Girls' Nomads, Indians, Saints became our first-ever CD purchase.  By far, though, their oldest and biggest location was in the heart of Buffalo at the corner of Main and Lafayette, billing itself as the "world's largest record store."

That's the Lafayette side of the building, as it remained preserved almost in amber until somebody finally bought the building about a year ago and has begun repurposing it.  It was the Main Street front of the building that really exuded something suggesting "World's Largest"- with tractor-trailer-sized posters of then-current record albums filling most of the front wall. One of the weirder ones that was up there for literally decades was an album by 70s group The Knack- and  not their somewhat successful debut Rip Off The Beatles Get The Knack LP but its followup that likely sold two copies in the entire country-



God. that thing creeped me out.

The weirdest thing you can see on the picture I stole of the building, though? WTF is "Music Plus?, you may ask.  Welp, in 1995, Record Theatre's owner got an offer he couldn't refuse to sell his chain of stores to that chain, which by then was part of, wait for it,...

Blockbuster Video.

Yup. A decade before they totally screwed their brand out of relevance in the home video market, the "Be Kind, Rewind" guys decided to get heavily into non-digital audio just as the digital form was taking over. A year later, they shut down the store and the entire brand, and the original owner took it back under the original Record Theatre name. It hung on for another 20 years at that and one other location until that legendary owner Lenny Silver died. The brand lives on only on retro websites and, it seems, in stocks of pink plastic bags used by a former employee who got into the business just as vinyl was making a comeback.

I will not desert Record Archive for this new find, but it's nice to have an alternative I can actually walk to.