Benjamin Leatherman Tempe History Museum Eastside from p 16 up on all kinds of stuff: a lot of jazz, a lot of soul, R&B, first pressing of Funkadelic records. There was no Discogs back then, so they didn’t price them aggressively. Brodie Foster Hubbard, longtime patron: In high school, I was a regular. One day, I was really interested in a Minor Threat CD, but was hedging about buying it when Bob Schriner said, “Why don’t you just take it on me?” Okay, thanks! Matt Martinez, bassist: I first went there in high school. I remember being exposed this stuff I’d only read about in fanzines like Flipside. We’re talking pre-Internet before we had access to every scrap of knowledge. It all came down to selection. There were contemporaries like Stinkweeds and, to certain extent, Zia, that got some titles, but Eastside tapped more of the punk rock/ hardcore/garage rock, jazz, and reggae. They were also one of the first early adopters of European black metal [in the mid-’90s]. Jim Mahfood, artist and former Valley resi- dent: I’d say it was a critical hub for spreading music and culture because the guys that worked there, especially Mike, would notice what I was buying and they’d go out of their way to say, “Oh hey, if you like this, you should check out this.” They turned me on to a lot of music I wasn’t even aware of. There’d be times I’d roll in there with Z-Trip or another DJ and everyone would want to hang out a talk music, talk records. Hubbard: I hung out with a bunch of Tempe people at punk and hardcore shows. That whole area was the counter- cultural hub of the Tempe scene. Shows at Tempe Bowl or Electric Ballroom, house shows. And kind of the thing at the time was you either hang out at Casey Moore’s or you go to Eastside and find out where the party was happening. In the mid-’90s, Wood launched a small indie record label based out of the store. One The original Eastside Records location on University Drive in the mid-’90s. of its only releases was the Man or Astro-Man? 7-inch Needles in the Cosmic Haystack. Brian Teasley, guitarist, Man or Astro-Man? (in 2013): Ben wanted to do it. He did a Servotron 7-inch as well. It was cool. I think a lot of the groundwork Ben had done for us [in Phoenix] before or after he did the 7-inch with him. It was cool because it was so organic. Wood: Coop designed the label logo. A shark in a hotrod. Teasley (in 2013): My favorite show that we ever did in Phoenix was at Eastside Records [in the mid-1990s] when it was like 120 zillion degrees. Hundreds of kids showed up and it was so crazy, so much fun. It was like pass-out-from-heat- exhaustion kind of hot, but that was prob- ably my favorite thing we did there. I think partly it was the unpredictability of it. I think no one really knew that so many people were going to show up. You think of a typical in-store, where a band plays five songs and it never has the energy of a real show. And in this case it ended up being, like, such an impromptu thing. Pawlicki: We’d expanded to double our size around then, but it was almost solid people all the way through. I remember enough that there was people on the coun- ters and people standing on the edge of bins so they could see over the crowd. The place was packed. Our landlady was pissed afterward and banned shows there [for years]. New generations of music fans constantly discovered Eastside. They weren’t the only visitors, as neighborhood characters and famed musicians would stop in. Mike White/CC BY-SA 4.0/Wikimedia Commons Rock band Man Or Astro-man? played a wild show at Eastside Records in 1995. Mahfood: I moved to Arizona in ’97 or ’98 and I’d come to Eastside a couple times a Benjamin Leatherman Some of the odd artwork inside of Eastside Records’ original location. week, buying CD and records, and becoming friends with Mike and Ben. They started carrying my self-published mini-comics and zines and stuff. And all the money would go back to the store to feed my record habit. Ryan Avery, patron and musician: I’d discovered it through my friend Lena and I remember being blown away by the punk and ska selection they had. Just excited by the way they did everything with the [bin] dividers being hand-drawn or having old Japanese toys like [Shogun Warriors] by the ceiling. The music they were listening to was always cool and interesting. Emily Spetrino, patron: With kids my age, Stinkweeds was for the indie kids but the punks would go to Eastside, which were more of who I was hanging out with and ended up there often. Mike and everyone else working there were super-chill with letting a bunch of weird teenagers hang out there all the time. Schriner: Sonic Youth paid us a visit on their Neil Young tour. One of his fans complained about Sonic Youth in front of them. Michael told the guy he could pass on his feedback directly. >> p 20 19 phoenixnewtimes.com | CONTENTS | FEEDBACK | OPINION | NEWS | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | PHOENIX NEW TIMES JULY 28TH–AUG 3RD, 2022
