FIND MORE MUSIC COVERAGE AT WESTWORD.COM/MUSIC MUSIC Spin On A RECORD STORE DAY TRIBUTE TO WAX TRAX. BY MICHAEL ROBERTS Saturday, April 23, is Record Store Day, a celebration of independent retailers special- izing in LPs, CDs and other products that music lovers can actually hold in their hands rather than stream on their phones. But while Wax Trax Records will be participating in the festivities, its two stores, located steps from each other on the 600 block of East 13th Av- enue, deserve a salute every day, just as they have since the operation came to life in 1975. For those scoring at home, that’s 47 years, and for more than thirty of them, Wax Trax has been among my favorite haunts — which makes me a relative newcomer compared to customers who’ve been going to the joint since the Gerald Ford administration. But I’m sec- ond to none when it comes to my fandom for what has rightly become a Denver institution. I grew up in Grand Junction and was raised by parents who weren’t exactly music connois- seurs. My dad owned three albums — a Louis Prima set (actually kinda cool), a collection of songs sung by comedian Jerry Lewis (more weird than cool, but it could have been worse), and a snoozy long-player by easy-listening pablum provider Ray Conniff (so uncool that it canceled out any coolness exhibited by the other two). Moreover, radio outlets in the com- munity essentially omitted anything program- mers considered too edgy, too loud or too funky. While in middle school, I purchased a 45 of Vicki Lawrence’s “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” under the theory that if I fi nally ponied up, stations would stop playing the damn thing every ten minutes. It didn’t work. A few years later, however, my cousin gave me a job at the stereo store he owned, and the business subscribed to assorted music magazines revealing the existence of incredible performers whose work I’d never heard — and none of them were regulars on The Carol Burnett Show. Before long, I became a subscriber to Rolling Stone (a rare personage in Grand Junction at the time). By the time I hit high school, I’d found several kindred spirits with whom I made numer- ous trips to Denver to see concerts such as 1979’s Colorado Sun-Day #2, featuring Ted Nugent, Heart, the Cars and UFO. Rock on! During one such visit, I went to Wax Trax for the fi rst time, and having come of age in a place where every business aspired to look like a branch of Sears, I was frankly scared to death. The store struck me as grimy and creepy, as did the patrons inside it. Only years later would I be comfortable enough to realize that these were actually my people. Wax Trax is participating in Record Store Day. After being hired as the music editor of Westword in October 1990, I returned to Wax Trax with a new perspective and a far better understanding of its history. The store was founded by Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher, who would go on to start a groundbreak- ing record label called Wax Trax!, based in Chicago. But they allowed Dave Stidman and Duane Davis, who purchased the business from them in 1978, to continue operating as Wax Trax, sans the exclamation point. The early years of the store are explored in Industrial Accident: The Story of Wax Trax! Records, a fi ne documentary that screened during the 2018 Denver Film Festival. But while Nash and Flesher went on to blow minds with the help of acts such as KMFDM, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult and Min- istry, led by Al Jourgensen, whose Colorado roots are explored in the 2003 Westword pro- fi le “Hometown Boy Makes Bad,” Denver’s Wax Trax had an equally noteworthy impact on the local music scene. Stidman and Davis not only employed uncounted numbers of aspiring musicians over the years, but they were open to every new genre or subgenre to come along, and their adventurous attitude was refl ected in the wide variety of record- ings they stocked, whether new or used. Of course, being on the cutting edge doesn’t always pay off in the moment. Last week I happened to be reading Head-On, rocker Julian Cope’s story of the Teardrop Explodes, the short-lived but seminal post- punk band of acid gobblers he led. In his account of the Liverpudlian outfi t’s second visit to the U.S. in 1981 (following a brief spate of gigs on the East Coast), he wrote about an in-store appearance at “Waxtrax,” as he spelled it, prior to a Denver date. At that time, the group had only just surpassed cult status in the U.K. and was barely a rumor stateside, so it’s no surprise that only three people showed up. Still, Cope remembered that the owners felt so guilty that they loaded him and his fellows down with free records as compensation. That’s how legends are made. Over the decades that followed, Wax Trax earned a reputation with vinyl addicts nationwide for both its amazing collection and the bargains contained therein. Years ago, I visited the store with a friend from New York City, who found album after album that he said would go for fi ve or ten times more in the Big Apple. The reasonable prices really hit home for me in 1995, when I purchased a vinyl jukebox — a Seeburg model from the late 1960s that makes a cameo appearance in the 1977 fi lm Saturday Night Fever. Over the quarter-century-plus since then, I’ve purchased literally thousands of seven-inches to keep the contraption fed, and a huge number of them have a Wax Trax tag on them. But while I occasionally joke that I’ve spent my children’s inheritance on records, that’s not actually true, since I picked up so many of them on the cheap. Here’s a recent example. The fi nal season of the excellent Netfl ix series Dear White People was presented as a musical, and the initial epi- sode from its last run, released in September, kicked off with an inspired version of “Round and Round” performed by R&B singer Tevin Campbell, who was only thirteen when it was released in September 1990. I had little memory of the tune, but when I researched it, I discovered that it was a forgotten song by Prince, who composed, produced and ar- ranged it. For months afterward, I looked for the 45 in every record store I entered, and I went into plenty of them, including joints in Nashville and Knoxville, Tennessee, and Ashe- ville, North Carolina, where I traveled over the holiday season. But a couple of weeks ago, I found a copy at Wax Trax — for fi fty cents. Metro Denver is blessed with a lot of great record stores — not just Twist & Shout, which founders Paul and Jill Epstein recently sold to longtime manager Patrick Brown, but also Recollect Records, at 1255 Delaware Street; the Angelo’s CDs and Vinyl branches in Den- ver and Aurora; Black & Read Music, Books and Games, at 7821 Wadsworth Boulevard in Arvada; Paradise Found, at 1646 Pearl Street in Boulder; and more. Still, Wax Trax remains special in part because of its longevity and continuity. The store is one of the few surviving businesses to pre-date Westword’s annual Best of Den- ver issue — it was named Best Record Store (New) in the inaugural edition, published in 1984 — and has somehow managed to get better since then. Moreover, both Stidman and Davis are still around, with Stidman a staple at the used store’s counter, where he can be found most days lovingly inspecting records that will soon fi nd new homes. Because at Wax Trax, every day is Record Store Day. Visit Wax Trax, 638 East 13th Avenue, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For more information, visit waxtraxrecords.com. 23 westword.com | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | WESTWORD APRIL 21-27, 2022 JON SOLOMON
