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Bookhouse joins a long line of awesome independent jazz from Minnesota

May 31, 2013 in Events, Photos, Songs | No comments

Bookhouse, a local jazz trio that includes members of the Painted Saints and the Poor Nobodys, is releasing a new double LP this weekend. What’s especially unique about this – beyond the fact that its a jazz record actually getting pressed on vinyl, something rare these days – is that the songs all come from Angelo Badalamenti’s score for the 90s TV series Twin Peaks. I interviewed all three of them (Paul Fonfara, Josh Granowski and Chris Hepola) for the City Pages’ Gimme Noise blog – you can read that interview and hear a track from the album here.

One of the things I asked the fellas from Bookhouse about was if they thought their album would turn some people onto jazz, people who would otherwise not likely be interested in the sort of records labels like ECM were putting out in the seventies and eighties. I thought it would be interesting to present tracks from some of the awesome local jazz LPs that have passed through the shop (a collection of recordings we’ve been compiling for quite a while) as a tribute to the Bookhouse boys. Minnesota is best known for it’s garage rock legacy (which we celebrated in a post here) but we also have a history of creating unique jazz records. We are, according to one of the A&R guys at Numero Group, the private press capitol of the country, and a lot of those unique independent records from the 60s and 70s were wild jazz outings. Here’s a few we’ve seen:

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“Men from Mars”

The Solstice album is a soul-jazz gem. Several tracks feature vocals but the highlight of the album is this bass-heavy jam with a spacy title.

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“Just the Studio” by the Whole Earth Rainbow Band

This exciting performance isn’t even the best thing on this album! The first track on either side of our copy of the LP are unplayable because it has a mean warp. The portion of their “1 2 3 4 Free” recorded at the Cafe Extempore that we can play is awesome!

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“Right Triangle Exploration” by the Whole Earth Rainbow Band

This album is a favorite in our Minnesota jazz collection, and this track captures why we enjoy it so much. There’s not much to be found out about the WERB online, but several of the performers appear on other local jazz records from time to time.

While we don’t know much about the band, we do know the names of their dogs – Cruiser, Collette, Kinder McDoogle and Barney.

Percussionist Steve Kimmel of the WERB lent a little of his magic to the Natural Life album. You have probably seen this one before, as its one of the more common 70s Minnesota jazz albums. We’re guessing that’s because it sold well, and no surprise because it’s very good. Also very good is Robert Rockwell III’s solo album, Androids, and we’ve chosen to add the title track from that great record.

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“Androids”

We recently posted a tribute to Dick Ramberg, a traditional jazz clarinetist who passed away this spring. He was an exceptional soloist and you can hear a great performance on the Hymie’s blog here.

We also posted an awesome pair of singles by a local exotica band from the 60s, the Ron Hamar Trio. You can hear those here. Ron Hamar’s son came into the shop some time later and told us more about his father, and that he was still alive. We hope to some day interview him and learn how a man from the Pacific Islands came to be leading a band in the Twin Cities. We’d also love to find and hear the third Ron Hamar Trio single!

This Morris Wilson album was probably the awesome-est crate diggin’ find of our pre-record store guru days. Just look at that price tag! This was probably the best dollar ever spent, not because we could sell this record on eBay for a fortune but because it’s one of the best Minnesota jazz LPs of all! “Saxophone Disco” and “Rusty McDusty” have already been featured on the Secret Stash compilation of local soul/funk from the 60s and 70s and so we chose a different track today. Here’s “Flute-t-Booty” which captures Wilson’s Rahsaan Roland Kirk-inspired flute playing.

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“Flute-t-Booty”

Bookhouse is playing a release show for their album, Ghostwood, tonight at the Ritz Theater up in Northeast. Brute Heart is playing an opening set. Laura and Dave from Hymie’s will be there spinning wild jazz records, including some of those heard here today. Twin Peaks super fan and album producer Jamey Erickson will host a costume contest, so dress as you’re favorite Twin Peaks character if you’re planning to go. Doors at 7pm, $10, 21+.

Join us this evening for a “Light Lunch”

May 29, 2013 in Album reviews, Events, Songs | No comments

When I was a kid our mother drove us around town in a blue Chevrolet Malibu which would later be our first car. Before it was ours the radio was always dialed to WLTE (because that’s how you tuned a radio in those days, you actually dialed it). They’re the “Lite FM” station that went off the air in December 2011 to become some kind of bullshit pop country. If you grew up in the Twin Cities around the same time there’s a good chance you rode around in the back of a similar car hearing the same blend of mellow country and soft rock on the way to the Red Owl (hey, maybe we passed each other on one of those errands!).

And those good folks at WLTE (who were pretty callously dismissed by the fuckers from the CBS Corporation, if you ask me) shaped a lot of my musical interests by the time I started bringing home record players from the Goodwill in our neighborhood. Take away that radio station (and while we’re at it KLXK) that neighborhood thrift store and my mother’s patience with my penchants for bringing home albums and these words wouldn’t be here today. Hard to say where Hymie’s Records would be, but I know I’d have a real job somewhere and you’d probably be reading some stupid shit from the people at BUZN 102.

I never outgrew the 70s pop I grew up hearing on my mother’s radio, and I’m finding myself not alone in recent years. Whether its fun cover bands (think E.L.nO.) or soft rock retro bands like Gayngs and Night Moves, we’ve seen a lot of stuff here at Hymie’s that suggests a revival. We’re also selling a few more Brewer & Shipley records than we had before.

Enter Light Lunch, the first release by Heavy Deeds, a collaborative side-project band that insists it’s not a side-project band. Their five song EP is out now on vinyl (and as a download on the bandcamp page here). Recorded and released by Neil Weir’s Old Blackberry Way, it handily blends the reverb-rich, slightly psych-y shoegaze aesthetic we’ve come to expect from the veteran studio/new label with the rich nostalgia I’ve just shared. Give it a listen: Light Lunch is as rejuvenating as a sunny afternoon in your garden.

The title is apt – at twenty-four minutes Light Lunch is likely to leave some at the table unsatisfied, even if the small portion served delivers. We were disappointed with the disc’s brevity but enchanted by what it accomplishes in so short a span. Ironic, we suppose, considering how long in making this tiny treat has been.

The nice folks that make up this band you may just be hearing of for the first time hardly come from nowhere. Collectively they’ve contributed to Polica, Pony Trash, Robust Worlds, Vampire Hands, Web of Sunsets and a smattering of other local mainstays and favorites. Each has brought the insight of experience and confidence of accomplishment to this hardly-new but just released recording. You can hear nearly all of this in the first track, where a slow-building confessional along the lines of Chris Rose’s Robust Worlds takes on an ensemble cast. Drummer Alex Rose holds this expansion together with the confidence of a straight-up pro (a pattern that repeats itself throughout Light Lunch) and as the song grows the group joins together in the most satisfying harmony vocal performance we’ve heard on a new local release in a while. In solo appearances throughout Sara Bischoff’s performance as a singer is distinctive and moving.

And it gets better from there.

If you can’t hear these folks easing into “One Toke Over the Line” after hearing the title track you’re too cynical to enjoy the record anyway. Maybe playing the third track, “Islands,” will help to cure you. It’s a ear-catching blend of sounds from several eras – A refreshing reminder of Seals & Croft’s “Sudan Village” as much as of mid-90s pop along the lines of Lambchop or the Silver Jews or the shoegazing records familiar to Old Blackberry Way’s walls. It’s that first feeling that sticks with you, though, and that’s a courageous choice for a band these days. After all, seventies soft rock is hardly on the vanguard.

But look, a record like Year of Sundays is super common these days because they sold millions of them in the seventies. And that’s because listening to them made people feel good, and there’s nothing wrong with that even if it isn’t as cool as it was in 1971.

And in its brightest moments, Light Lunch is a far more satisfying seventies update than the lauded Gayngs record, which always felt sardonic to those of us who still listened to the light stuff. It’s also less rooted in the past, airier than the labored-upon and lush Night Moves album, Colored Emotions, but closer in feeling. We think it ought to be as successful as those two because it has something missing from most of the pop music we find people bringing to into the shop these days. Talking with the City Pages‘ Natallie Gallagher (in a story you can read here) Sara Bischoff said Heavy Deeds always joked they were a “family band.” That’s not lost on listeners like ourselves, exhausted with posturing and cynicism and, quite frankly, shoegazing. It’s about goddamn time the pop records we brought home stopped telling us what was wrong and started encouraging us to “be the grand believer in everything that [we] are.” Here is a record for the world around us, ideal perhaps for driving through it or walking in it or just having a picnic with friends.

Those of us who haven’t given up on that easy edge we got from our parent’s records can tell. Heavy Deeds reminds us a lot of some of the awesome folk groups who have played here at Hymie’s (Aldine or Mages, for instance). Listening to a song like “The Great Believers” makes you feel good, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

You can hear Heavy Deeds perform songs from Light Lunch and more here in person at Hymie’s Vintage Records this evening at 7pm. Like all performances here in the record shop it is free and all ages. You can also buy for youself a copy of Light Lunch directly from the band!

Instrumental music

May 22, 2013 in Awesome-ness!, Events, Songs | No comments

There’s sort of boundaries to what collectors can find when they devote themselves to a single format. 8-Track collectors know what we’re talking about. We have always had a great interest in 45s, which is of course reflected in our large selection here in the shop, not to mention in the records we often play when we’re DJing at the Turf Club or other favorite venues around town. On his favorite regular gig, the third Monday every month, Dave plays exclusively 45s between sets by the Cactus Blossoms at the Turf Club – the music is mostly rockabilly, country and blues, and mostly from the mid 50s to the early 60s. Kind of a brief period of time, when you think about it.

The 45s really hit its peak as a format in the 60s and 70s, when millions upon millions of them were made. Fairly inexpensive to produce and market, the 45 made releasing your music accessible to most musicians through small, regional labels. Those singles that didn’t sell well, and really didn’t until the internet age leave the region where they were recorded and released, and or course now among the most collectable records of all. The idea that a band’s single represents the best thing they could fit into a one-inch band of grooves is extraordinarily exciting to us. That excitement is what keeps us digging for new singles – not just because they are rare and thereby valuable, but because we want to hear something we’ve never heard.

But the title of this post is “instrumental music” and that’s because the peak era of the 45 was also the apogee of instrumental rock. Today it is rare that an instrumental tune would become a hit, but in the 50s and 60s many did – many of these songs, like “Green Onions” or King Curtis’ “Soul Serenade” are songs you still hear on the radio from time to time. And many others, like this Link Wray single, have been very influential as well as popular.

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“Rumble”

Many 60s instrumental tracks capture a novelty, like a sound effect or an animal sound. Others invoke a mood, like “The Gallop” by the Chevelles, a really fun track that captures the feeling of a running horse.

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“The Gallop”

The best instrumental rock tracks were singles – albums by many of these artists were ultimately appealing primarily for the tracks found on their singles. The slow demise of instrumental rock might be something we could blame on disco, but the decline began earlier. We imagine it was partially driven by the rise of the singer-songwriter. When artists like Carole King or Joni Mitchell began spellbinding audiences with compelling narratives, the instrumental bands may have seemed anachronistic.

There are some good instrumentals by more recent bands, but few bands that specialize in instrumental music. You can see Man or Astroman? on their first visit to the Twin Cities in a decade next month (at the fabulous Turf Club!) – they took an innovative approach to surf instrumentals, embellishing their tracks with hilarious sound bites from B movies. We’ll certainly be there!

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“Surf Terror”

And we wish one of our favorite local bands could have a chance to open for them – Wizards Are Real is an instrumental rock group whose own description of their music captures what we love about it: “Concise, hooky songs challenge the notion that instrumental music needs to be melodramatic, bombastic and apocalyptic.”

Here is their latest EP, released a little over a year ago. It’s a 10″ record at 45 rpm, and whenever we play it we think about how we’d like to see a couple of the Wizards’ new songs released as singles.

They were the closing act for our Record Store Day block party this year, and as we were running around cleaning things up, we could hear their set. With each song, we’d think “damn, they’re playing all the hits!” But in fact, our favorite songs by Wizards Are Real aren’t really classic hits. We just think of them that way.

i like you

May 14, 2013 in Events, Songs, Uncategorized, Videos | No comments

This is i like you – they’ll be performing here at Hymie’s on Sunday afternoon at 3pm. We like their music a lot, and also their name. It reminded us of a song from Donovan’s Cosmic Wheels…

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“I like You” by Donovan

Call your mother!

May 11, 2013 in Events, Photos, Songs | No comments

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That’s the cowboy’s cowboy, Roy Rogers, reminding us that today is Mother’s Day. His rambling, cynical commentary is missing the history of our annual observation of maternity, even if its elsewise right on the mark:

Well we’ll just give her a day and it will be all right with Mama, and then in return she’ll give you the other 364.

You may have already heard a story on the radio or read something in Reader’s Digest about the history of Mother’s Day. The American Mother’s Day begins with an 1870 essay by Julia Ward Howe, inspired in part by the savage violence of the Civil War. It is both a pacifist document and a feminist document. I heard Julia Ward Howe also called for the government to require the use of compact florescent lightbulbs and low-flow toilets. Woodrow Wilson was the first President to recognize the day, and as his long form birth certificate remains hidden from the public, it seems only reasonable that we examine the ancestry of his mother. Jessie Janet Woodrow was, in fact, not an American mother at all but one of English descent – That’s right, the United Kingdom, where some still have the audacity to recognize “Mothering Sunday”, and place the Holy Virgin Mary above your mother. Your mother.

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This second track you’re hearing is “Love Your Mother” by Johnny Prophet, recorded with the Tommy Oliver Orchestra. We save it to share with you every year on this special Sunday. We also hang onto this promotional album called M is for Mother’s Day.

Here’s the Banjo Barons performing “My Mother’s Eyes / M-O-T-H-E-R”:

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Everybody knows that country music is all about lovin’ yer mama. From Hank Williams’ “I Dreamed About Mama Last Night” (Recorded as Luke the Drifter) to Johnny Paycheck’s “I’m the Only Hell Mama Ever Raised”, every great country songwriter had something to say about his mama. We’re including a recording of Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” for all of our lonely readers in prison – Heard here as performed by the Grateful Dead on the self-titled live album (In our system of naming untitled records by what’s on the cover this one is Skeleton and Roses).

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Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” is one of the best country songs ever written about anybody’s mama. Folksy, yet epic in its biblical illusions, this simple song written on Porter Wagoner’s tour bus ends with a moral only Dolly could deliver without irony:

One is only poor / Only if they choose to be

You can, incidentally, see the coat itself, along with the dry cleaning receipt on which the famous song about it was written, if you go to Dollywood. Maybe that’s where you’ll take Mama next year.

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When I was a kid my mother let me have any record from her collection I wanted (I didn’t want very many of them at twelve years old). Even now I still have copies of Alice’s Restaurant and Teaser and the Firecat with her familiar handwriting on them.

I am pleased to present a song from this album, There Will be a Light, by Ben Harper and the Blind Boys of Alabama, because its a favorite of mine. This 2004 disc was included in the recent vinyl reissue of Ben Harper’s catalog, but the LPs have become hard to find over the past couple years. If you bought an LP reissue of There Will be a Light (I could only afford one and chose Welcome to the Cruel World) you’re always welcome to come into Hymie’s and play it.

“If I Could Hear my Mother Pray” was written by John Whitfield Vaughn based on a piece by an English settler named James Rowe. A 1934 recording by Thomas Dorsey established it as a standard in gospel music. Pretty much everything Dorsey touched was gospel gold, and he is fairly regarded as the father of American gospel music. Meanwhile, although There Will be a Light is a very traditional gospel album, this is the only standard included. Most of the remaining songs are originals written by Ben Harper.

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The next song on our Mother’s Day playlist is by Bill Withers, one of Ben Harper’s key influences. His heartfelt song is not about his mother, but his grandmother. Grandmothers are, of course, mothers too. Here is his live recording of “Grandma’s Hands”:

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Bill Withers Live is one of the best live albums you’re ever going to find.

Grandmothers are mothers, too. There are a lot of other people who have to take on the roll of mother and hopefully there’s a special gift of homemade card greeting them this morning too. This last song by Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt (Originally by Sinead O’Connor) expresses not only the love of a surrogate mother but of any mother.

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This whole playlist is dedicated to my mother, who probably isn’t interested in most of these weird songs. I think she would rather hear one of the Cat Stevens records she let me have when I was a kid.

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The Lonesome Train

May 4, 2013 in Events, RIP | No comments

Today we want to re-broadcast (or re-post or whatever) an episode from one of our favorite KFAI programs, The Listening Lounge. In April they used an LP they found here at Hymie’s, which was broadcast on the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination – well, specifically it was broadcast on the day after Lincoln’s death, two days after he was shot at Ford’s Theater.

The program presents the journey of Lincoln’s funeral train in story and song. Making many stops so mourners could pay their respects, the train followed the same route Lincoln had taken five years earlier as the President-elect on the way to his inauguration.

After a 1654 mile journey, Abraham Lincoln’s body was laid to rest at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois on this day in 1865, one hundred and twenty-eight years ago.

There are limits to our website’s streaming, so we have split the program into three parts to preserve the sound quality. We’d like to thank Listening Lounge host Micah Whetstone for providing us with the audio – and also for his help on Record Store Day, while we’re at it.

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We’d like to conclude today’s re-broadcast of The Listening Lounge with an additional re-broadcast. Below is a sequence from I’ve Got A Secret, a CBS television game show, through which we can see with our own eyes the last surviving witness of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Samuel J. Seymour. It serves as an extraordinary reminder that the Civil War is not so removed from our recent history, and also of the fact that television has been misappropriating and misusing the extraordinary since its inception. Thank goodness there are people like the fellas at the Listening Lounge.

Barbara Jean’s Great Escape

April 26, 2013 in Album reviews, Events, Songs | No comments

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“The River”

There’s an old saying that you can take the girl out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the girl, and it’s something you can hear listening to Barbara Jean’s debut disc, the Great Escape. The title track might well refer to Jean’s move from Grand Marais to the Twin Cities. Her own description of the home she left, in a recent interview with the City Pages‘ Natalie Gallagher, certainly captures a sense of the sweet sorrow:

“I lived in the country, about ten miles out of town, on a farm, in a house that I built. It was very rural, very serene, very beautiful. I had wolves in my yard, deer… you could see the lake [Superior], a little sliver of it, from the porch at my house. It’s hard to explain,” says Barbara Jean of her home near Grand Marais. “I think the environment up there, anyone who’s been up there to the North Shore, you see how breathtakingly beautiful it is, and when you live there, I think it really becomes part of your consciousness — all that open space and the wildness of it just sort of gets imprinted on you in your psyche in a way that you don’t totally realize until you’re not around it.” (the whole interview is here)

There’s another familiar saying – this one best phrased by a cold weather songstress a generation removed – that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. The Great Escapes‘ greatest charm is it’s Minnesotan-ness. It’s Minnesooootan-ness. After a couple listens to this disc we didn’t even notice Tyler’s accent.

And being Minesooootan isn’t such a bad thing these days. Jean could do worse than to ride the Trampled by Retribution Near Sandstone tide. There’s been a well spring of roots-country bubbling up north for years, and here’s one of the best discs to rise to the surface this year, ranging from the barn dance stomper “Keep it Rockin’” to that heartbreaking title track. “The Fog” could have been a Stars and Satellites outtake and “Not What You Thought” has a nice Erik Koskinen feeling (who’s an adopted Minnesotan, of course, but we sure are glad to have him!). There is, in fact, so much good roots-country music from our fine state these days that Barbara Jean is in good company whether she settles down here or up there. She has just finished a short tour with southern transplant Chastity Brown and the City Pages‘ songwriter of the year Actual Wolf, and has a few gigs in May with the earlier-mentioned Mr. Koskinen.

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“Snowfalls”

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“Great Escape”

We were introduced to Barbara Jean by another north shore songwriter, Caitlin Robertson, at the Turf Club, and her disc has been spinning in the shop since (Caitlin two albums are featured in a post here). Barbara Jean probably disappointed a lotta folks up in the arrowhead in the interview we quoted above when she said, “the North Shore is great, but you can’t really go anywhere from there — it’s so remote and removed … I wanted to be in a place where there’s more venues, more people to work with and collaborate with.” Folks have said the same thing about the Twin Cities, however, so we suppose the grass is always greener, as they say.

On the Great Escape Jean alternates between the banjo and the fiddle or viola. Her banjo playing is clean and light, often providing as much movement as the album’s sparse percussion. Our only complaint about her fiddlin’ on the album is that it only appears a couple times. The driven, down-home “Keep it Rockin’” has a slow, cajun feeling, and on the honky tonk heartbreaker “Basket of Flowers” Jean sets the stage for her woe-is-me departure perfectly with a lovely melody. The album’s other distinct instrumentation is the pedal steel played by Andy Dee, which lends a soaring grandeur to several tracks much in the way the same instrument added to the Ericksons‘ latest disc, The Wild. Multi-instrumentalist producer Bernie Larsen provides the heartbeat to most tracks with a variety of keyboards, guitars and percussion.

There’s a bittersweet feeling to the disc suggested by its dark-skied cover art by Noah Prinsen. The light, airy arrangement for “Snowfalls” for instance is driven by Jean’s soft banjo rolls, but build around a sad story of a struggling relationship and the temptation to leave. “To make us both happy’s gonna take some real, real hard work,” Jean laments. The title track pulls together all these conflicting feelings – “There was hurt and heartache, but there was joy in there too” – and is the album’s most memorable moment. Jean switches to her fiddle for the closing track, a boozy lament along the lines of Woody Guthrie’s “So Long its Been Good to Know Ya” or “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad.” In the end, Jean’s Great Escape is a little sad, but not so heartbreaking.

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“Basket of Flowers”

Barbara Jean will perform songs from The Great Escape here at Hymie’s Records on Sunday April 27th at 3pm.

Hi

April 19, 2013 in Events | No comments

4/20 RECORD STORE DAY

Since a lot of you might be clicking on our website for the first time today, we’d like to introduce ourselves. We are a mom & pop record shop (literally) with a small staff. We are not a chain (we have only one location). We have a huge selection of just about every kind of record you can imagine, and we really hope you’ll come by to experience some of the awesome live music we have planned for the day, even if you’re not looking to buy any records.

This day is our live-action mix tape for the world – these are our favorite bands. These are the people whose music we sing along to & they’re all amazing people, dedicated to the music they’re making. The only thing we know for sure going into our biggest day of the year as an independent record shop is that nobody is going to be disappointed by the music, because these people are all really, really awesome.

39th Avenue Stage:

11:00 Brian Laidlaw and the Family Trade

12:15 The White Whales

1:45 The Prissy Clerks

3:00 Audio Perm

4:45 Big Quarters

6:00 Southside Desire

Hymie’s Stage:

11:00 Jake Manders

12:30 The Ericksons

2:00 Ben Weaver

3:15 Pennyroyal

5:00 Martin Devaney

6:00 Tyler Haag and the Bar

7:15 Chastity Brown

8:30 Wizards Are Real

In addition to all this awesome live music, our friends from Merlins Rest Pub will be pourin’ suds (21+ within the beer garden) and DJ Truckstash will be spinning his secret blend of country rock and rockin’ country. All for the amazing price of $0 (beer not included).

Our contingency plan for poor weather is to have an awesome time in the rain and snow instead of an awesome time in the sunshine. Either way, we’re planning on having an awesome time, so don’t worry about the weather.

Yes, we will have special Record Store Day releases, and yes we will have the second installment of Noiseland‘s American Buffalo compilation of gems that they have produced for local artists. One copy was autographed by the artists who appear on the collection. All of them will be given away free with any purchase of a new, local LP. The autographed copy will be given away at RANDOM to someone buying a local album.

Local roots-revival trio Corpse Reviver (Adam Kiesling, Mikkel Beckmen & Jillian Rae) have given us ONE COPY of their yet-to-be-released first album to give to the first fan of the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music to claim it. The trio performs songs from the legendary compilation, and the disc is really, really good.

We will also have free 45s from Red House Records of Dale Watson singing killer honky tonk songs from his latest album, El Rancho Azul. You can bet DJ Truckstash will be spinning that one!

Our favorite screen-printin’ poster artist Dwitt will be here, along with ceramic artist Ben Krikava and the Hymie’s artist-in-residence from Vinyl Afterlife.

In-store performance by Charlie Parr this afternoon – Lotta stuff going on tomorrow, too, but let’s take it one awesome day at a time

April 19, 2013 in Events | No comments

It was a little tough to look out at the snow, pretty as it was falling over Lake Street, with our block party just a short 48 hours away. Tomorrow’s forecast is looking pretty good, and we’ve had worse weather in the past. A little rain n’ snow ain’t gonna spoil an epic day of awesome music like this.

We’re starting things a little early, of course, with a special performance by Charlie Parr this afternoon. Charlie’s one of our favorite fellas in the entire world, in addition to being an extraordinary performer and songwriter. He released his latest album, Barnswallow, in February with a couple shows at the Cedar Cultural Center and we spun some records between the set, mostly blues and old time country. In a lot of ways Barnswallow is the best record he’s ever made, being both firmly rooted in the past (with classic Dave Ray and John Koerner songs) and in the present, with original songs that capture Charlie’s own unique way of telling a story. If anyone we know is living proof that doing what you love and treating folks well along the way will lead you to success, it’s Charlie Parr.

Record Store Day is the anniversary of the day we took over Hymie’s Records, and also the anniversary of the day we closed the old shop and set out to move it (all seventy-five tons) five blocks east to the new location. It seems like every April we accomplish the unimaginable, and each year friends from all around lend a hand to make it happen. Just last year Papa John made a huge investment in the building and replaced the furnaces, giving us the opportunity to knock out the walls around the listening station and change the entire layout of the shop – overnight we took out the walls, rerouting gas lines and venting and electrical conduit, cleaning everything up so the next day it was like nothing had happened.

We’ve had a shoplifter around the record store the past couple weeks. He’s been taking the records he wants and putting them inside 50¢ers. Last week he stole a copy of Imagine, which is so ironic we were left speechless. Guess he must have really needed that one. It happens from time to time that people figure out a scam like that and run with it until they’re caught, and in the end those little losses are completely outweighed by the good folks: the guys who bring their friends to the shop, or call a buddy when they see an album he’s been looking for. And then there’s the folks that lend a hand when help is needed, whether its for a big project like tearing out walls or a little project like tidying up the shop for Record Store Day. Just this week somebody brought in a cassette deck because he’d heard us mention ours was broken – turns out we’d fixed it for him a couple years ago free of charge and now he didn’t have a use for it anymore. What goes around comes around.

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“True Friends” by Charlie Parr

So anyways, we want everyone to know that nothing’s going to be cancelled on account of the weather, but the nice folks up at Chaperone Records in Duluth let us know this week that they’re not going to have the double-10″ reissue of Rooster in time for Charlie’s performance here this afternoon, or for Record Store Day tomorrow. Printing and pressing were delayed. We’re a little disappointed, having scuffed up our copy of the disc not long after it first came out in 2006 or so. But you can’t dwell on those little disappointments, and you can’t let ‘em get you down. Especially when the big picture’s lookin’ pretty good. If Charlie Parr’s coming to your shop to sing a few songs you must be doing something right.

There’s a lot of links in this post about our block party on Saturday – hope you’re ready to do some clickin’!

April 17, 2013 in Awesome-ness!, Events | No comments

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“Never Felt Better” by Big Quarters

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We’re all so excited for the Record Store Day block party this weekend. In addition to the great bill of bands playing on the stage in the shop as well as the stage on 39th Avenue – scroll down to see for yourself – we’ve invited back some of our favorite local artists. Screen artists Dwitt, who created a new poster for this year’s block party, will have a huge selection of posters, and Ben Krikava will be selling pottery. You probably remember these guys from the last couple block parties. Vinyl Afterlife will also have an expanded selection of the record label coasters and notebooks they make and sell here in the shop. The good folks from Gardens of Eagan will have seedlings for your garden, and Mother Earth Gardens has given us some “seed bombs” to give away – don’t worry, they aren’t dangerous and they don’t explode! It’s a little packet of soil and native wildflower seeds, and you can toss ‘em anywhere in your garden.

Another annual tradition of our Record Store Day block party is to have the awesome artists’ collective Rogue Citizen will be here to create art before your astonished eyes. We absolutely love these guys. Yesterday we took pictures of the art they left us with last April – you have probably seen these around the record shop.

These painters, illustrators, muralists and graphic designers can also, in their own words, be called upon to “assume the roles of promoter, printmaker, writer, agitator, or pub crawler.” Stop by and help them do these things. But don’t take them to the pub, take them to the Merlins Rest Pub beer garden, which will be set up on 39th Avenue and pouring local brews – from Harriet Brewing and Northgate Brewing – and cracking cans of Pabst from 1 to 7pm.

And earlier in the day, from 10:30-1, the Open Eye Figure Theater will bring it’s pedal-powered “Driveway tour” puppet theater by the block party to entertain the kids and adults alike. We’ll also have thousands of LPs and 45s outside for 10¢ apiece, so crate diggers are sure to have fun. DJ Truckstashe will be spinning records outside all day, so be sure and stop by and request a Roger Miller song or two.

And here, folks, is the bill for this year’s live music. We really couldn’t love all these folks any more than we already do, and we’re excited to have them all part of the party! The sound system is provided by our sponsors, Twin Cities Sound.