WAXING PHILOSOPHICAL

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.

Currently located in a building the Lincoln Park locals fondly remember as the old pierogi factory, Hello Records began life in 2010 in Corktown, helmed by musician and record collector Wade Kergan, who cut his teeth as a longtime employee of the storied Record Time in Roseville. The old location was cramped and homey, but its nearness to the city center allowed for some foot traffic (a rarity here in Motown), a growing number of regulars, and an occasional visit from celebrities who found themselves looking to kill some time in Detroit. (Apparently Quentin Tarantino enthused about the soundtrack LP selection. Go figure.) After a few years of this the usual bugaboo of new landlords with dollar signs in their eyes forced Hello to close up shop right around the time of the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. Things were predictably grim until the fall of 2021 when the new store opened its doors onto Fort Street in the working-class enclave of Lincoln Park. But why Lincoln Park?

Often lumped in with other working-class suburbs southwest of Detroit as “Downriver,” Lincoln Park, for better or worse, can feel like a city trapped in time, existing in a hazily remembered 1970s forever. Fort Street, once a major artery in and out of Detroit before 1-75 was built, is lined with the kind of small businesses you just don’t see in Modern America: the appliance repairman, the cobbler, the bowling alley, the used-tire shop. I could probably give you a pretty good socioeconomic reason why a record store like Hello exists here. If this were a car magazine I could point to the large number of autoworkers who live in this hometown of Preston Tucker. If this magazine trucked in U.S. history I could gesture vaguely at the Ecorse River and how Chief Pontiac once rallied an army of tribes there to attack the British at Fort Detroit and how that had something to do with the town’s gritty resilience in the face of empire. This is CREEM magazine, though, so I’ll keep it simple: The MC5 are from fucking Lincoln Park.

THE COW HAD TO UISIT THE BUTCHER SHOP.

It seems the citizens of Lincoln Park still know how to rock. During my weekend at Hello there was a slow trickle of customers, I’m sure lessened by the aforementioned football and snow. As the hours passed, an eclectic clientele came through. Those not merely in for a browse and a warm-up while waiting at the bus stop all left with something. The newly displayed Christmas records got a look over, but the white-haired lady opted to apply her zip-lock bag full of quarters toward John Denver’s greatest hits instead. A family of three left with Stevie Nicks for mom, Rolling Stones for dad, and the Metallica single “One” for the kid. Regulars came and went with varying stacks of used and new releases. The phone calls came in with a steady rhythm. “Will you hold that rerelease for me?” “Do you have any Taylor Swift?” “Do you have the new Olivia Rodrigo?” “My granddaughter wants Taylor Swift...” At one point an older gentleman came in blaring Olivia Rodrigo from a hidden phone, drowning out the staff pick of a Gabor Szabo long player, yet after browsing left with a Doors record. Someone (a famous DJ? An influencer?) came in for an impromptu photo shoot of him thumbing the merchandise and left just as quickly. CDs seemed to be in demand. Did they make a comeback? Did they ever go away, or are they just now getting to Lincoln Park? Sadly, nobody bought the Red Wings 1997 Stanley Cup Championship CD with a live set from Starship and CD-ROM bonus screensavers. All in all, it was peaceful. The steady, barely perceptible drumbeat of commerce didn’t drown out the music.

Now here’s where I come clean: There’s nothing inherently special about Hello Records. I’m sure you might have a store as good as it in your own hometown or maybe the next town over. It’s no marvel, just a decent neighborhood hang. For instance, Hello has a great R&B and soul section, but I suppose any Detroit-area store would be laughed out of the state if it didn’t. Local rap and dance music has a place of honor there. Whatever cross section of customers I was able to sample might have left with records you could hear on any classic rock station with a morning show hosted by somebody named Doug and the Wacko, but the selection is both broad and deep, curated without being too fussy. Dig a little deeper in the rock section and you can find things like Silver Bullet Band-adjacent Teegarden & Van Winkle’s debut for a decent price. Great Funkadelic records hide right below your eyeline. There’s a decent amount of new records too. The local section, unburdened with the arcane number-keeping of a consignment system, brims with promise. The small staff here all play in bands, and their support of the local scene, whatever that is, is heartening. The new one from Christopher Alan Durham & the Peacetime Consumers, Kicks or Macabre, catches my eye. I had recently stumbled across their set at a bar that blew me away and was happy to see some recorded evidence of their existence in the light of day. Hey, they even have old issues of CREEM for sale. You know, back when it was cool.

Hello Records does the little things right. In any part of the music business nowadays, that’s a rare and good thing. Like the rest of us unlucky bastards, Wade and staff do more than half their business online. After all, we all have to keep the beans in the pantry somehow. That’s the nature of the beast we’re astride. It’s the kind of animal that extrudes music through playlist algorithms, paying musicians nothing but air on the other end. It adds ridiculous service fees and takes merch cuts. It charges too much for a beer and turns fans into followers. It doesn’t care about us. It almost certainly doesn’t care about an old lady mulling over what to spend her bag of quarters on. It shits where it eats. There aren’t many places for somebody to interact with music that don’t have that animal stink about them. Hello Records smells of old vinyl and the Ronsonol lighter fluid they use to clean the sleeves of their old price tags. That suits me just fine. If I’m gonna be pulled apart and sold for making music, I’d rather it be in a butcher shop like this. Like the other soon-to-be obsolete stores along Fort Street, I’m glad it is here. I hope you have a store as good as it in your own hometown. Or maybe the next town over.