You may have seen stories in the news last month about the closing of the venerable Webster Records. The music store with its anachronistic red-and-white sign was a fixture on the Lockwood strip in Old Webster Groves for almost sixty years, and its many long-time fans were saddened to see an era end.
If you're a music lover who predates iPods and digital downloads, you probably have stacks-of-wax memories of your own about buying and accumulating records. For many young Americans during the mid-to-late 20th century, your record collection and taste in popular music really helped to define who you were.
When I was a teen-ager, it was almost a ritual to have friends come over to your room and sort through your 45s. I still have a tiny emotional scar from one of my buddies chiding me with "you got no soul," because he thought the Beatles, Byrds and Beach Boys records in my pile disproportionately outnumbered my Temptations, Miracles and Marvelettes. Help me, Rhonda.
In those days, trips to the record store were frequent because you wanted to have new releases as soon as possible — like we do now with movies on DVD. Since non-driving teens needed quick access to fresh songs, it helped to have a neighborhood music store which you could walk or bike to on short notice, without having to get a ride (and maybe without having to listen to your parents ask why you're wasting your allowance on lyrics like "yeah, yeah, yeah").
Webster Records undoubtedly provided that vital service for kids who lived nearby. For me, the place was The Record Bar on North Brentwood in Clayton. It was a big, bright store that also sold toys and posters and stuff, but the music was the real draw.
Another reason to go there on a regular basis was to pick up the latest "Sing Along Survey" from radio station KXOK, which provided a weekly ranking of the "Top 6 plus 30" popular songs. Better yet, the backs of the narrow paper sheets featured complete lyrics to a current hit. That knowledge came in handy, especially for songs in which the words were hard to understand.
I remember my sister being kind of embarrassed to discover that the correct line in The Fifth Dimension's "The Age of Aquarius" was "when Jupiter aligns with Mars" . . . not "collides with."
By the way, you trivia buffs and retainers of useless facts may know (or like to know) that The Record Bar was owned by the parents of Kevin Kline, the Oscar-winning actor and Priory alumnus.
Somewhere in the late 1960s, the record-buying processes changed, or maybe it just felt that way because I was driving. Instead of riding my bike to the neighborhood shop to get the latest 45, I'd take my car to a record 'superstore" to buy a 33 1/3 LP.
Suddenly everybody's music collections were made up of albums. Instead of record players, we were buying stereo systems. A needle became a stylus. The larger albums also took up a lot more space on a shelf or the floor of your room, but on the other hand, big LPs usually came with vibrant cover artwork or photos of the artists, and the back of the sleeve offered plenty of room for liner notes.
That phase seemed to be dominated by two chains — Peaches and Streetside Records — although you could find the latest popular albums at Famous and Stix, or even at a Venture store. I don't know how many Peaches or Streetside locations there were around town, but there were several of each. The Peaches chain exploded nationally, putting up dozens of stores in cities across the country.
Unlike a cozy venue such as Webster Records, Peaches stores were sprawling. The one on Hampton near Chippewa supposedly had a million dollars of inventory, in 1970s dollars. That's also before we needed to reduce our dependence on foreign vinyl. By the mid-80s, though, the Peaches empire had imploded, maybe because they simply had too many stores and too many records. They also invested heavily in those cool, wooden-slatted fruit crates designed to neatly hold a bunch of albums. Urban legends persist that Peaches went under because they didn't think consumers would give up their LPs and cassettes for CDs.
Fortunately for non-digital music fans, we can still find equipment to play our big old records. It may be more trouble to mess with a turntable, its arm and a foot-wide pressed disc — and you can't stick an LP into a slot on your car's dashboard — but after decades of playing records that way, it somehow just feels right. And sounds groovy.
Steve Unger has been professionally writing for 30-plus years to help companies sell stuff. His Journal columns are a labor of love to salute the people, places and charm of St. Louis. If you'd like to share a memory of St. Louis or just drop him a line, he can be reached at stevethewordguy@aol.com.
