...and that remind me (No. ??? in a series)

Sitting here listening to Mahler’s 3rd Symphony…

…and that reminded me of when I first heard the music of Gustav Mahler. I’d bought an album of his second symphony conducted by Bruno Walter. I saw it in the classical bin at Friends records store. The cover art was really cool and I liked the idea of a “Resurrection Symphony”.

I was actually working at Friends at the time. I used to patronize the store on a very regular basis before I got hired. The owner, Stan, enjoyed talking to me about music. I think he was impressed by my ability to predict which albums would sell a lot of copies. At any rate, he offered me a job without my even asking for one. I didn’t even have to fill out an application. I may have said something before then about how I thought working in a record store would be an ideal job, perfectly suited to me. But I never flat out asked him for one.

Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity. I loved that job, and as you would imagine, I did very well. Some people might get bored to the point of madness having to alphabetize record albums. But I kind of enjoyed it (though it did get a little tedious by the time I got to the jazz section). I liked stocking them. I REALLY liked playing them on the store’s stereo system.

One of my favorite in-store albums was “Boy” by U2, which had just been released. Absolutely NO ONE knew who they were. They were still playing clubs at the time. Their first show in Oklahoma took place while I was at Friends. I didn’t hear about it until it was too late to attend (a similar situation occurred a few years later when REM played the Bowery in OKC---the first show they ever played in the state).

After I’d been working at the record store for a couple of weeks I decided to move to Shawnee, where the store was located. This was just before I got married. I needed to get out of my parent’s house.

There was a four apartment duplex just across the street from the store. It was leased by the same old man who owned the building that housed Friends. He was a pretty nice guy, so I assumed the apartments would be decent. It wouldn’t be hard for me to rent one of them. They weren’t too expensive and I could afford it. He showed it to me and I have to say it didn’t look like such a bad place at first. I was going to move into the unit on the west side, upstairs. Just a one bedroom, one bathroom set-up, with the kitchen sort of joined to the living room area.

I got move in and prepared to do the same with Barbra, my fiancé. Didn’t have much. In fact, all we had to sleep on was an old twin size bed. I’m not a little guy and Barbra was almost as tall as I am, so I have NO idea how we managed that.

I should have known it was not going to e a good situation when the guy who lived in the apartment below us, who looked and smelled like he hadn’t bathed in a considerable amount of time, caught me leaving the house and asked me if I got high. From the looks of things he probably wasn’t offering any…most likely looking, and, even more likely, hoping for some charity bud. At the time I was VERY anti-drug, so this concerned me.

We used to spend the weekends, my days off, with my dad, who lived about 25 miles away. One morning we returned and were shocked to find that the record store had burned down to the ground. It was awful. I’ll never forget it. It was a total loss. There was a charred copy of Springsteen’s “Born to Run” propped right where I’d left it in the window, it’s edges black as coal.. Wouldn’t have done potential looters any good to venture into the ruins for some free records. The building was gutted.

Immediately I walked over to Stan’s house…he lived nearby in a nice house he’d only recently bought when he’d re-located the store from Norman to Shawnee. When he opened the door I could see it in the expression in his face. He was still kind of dazed. He sort of filled me in on the particulars of the incident and told me another building had already been leased. He said we were going to re-open the store beginning the next week. Most folks probably wouldn’t have been able to do that, especially on such short notice. But he had a brother who owned a record distribution company. Stan got all of his product from him before the fire, and had no trouble getting credit to re-stock the new store.

I was told that at the time of the fire that Stan had just stood there in front of the building, staring at it with a hopeless look in his face. Some said he cried, and I wouldn’t doubt that he did, even though he was a very tough guy (a Vietnam vet, even). There were some other people who said he’d set the fire himself, for the insurance money to buy a more suitable building (the one that burned was much too large).

I doubt very seriously if any of those rumors were true. That’s not the kind of person I remember Stan being. It’s not something he would have done.

Anyway it only took one day to get the new store up and running, putting together racks and shelving, as well as re-stocking inventory. I was surprised it didn’t take much longer.

Actually the place we moved into was a better location than the one we’d come from. It was located on a fairly busy street not too far from a main thoroughfare. We were practically next door to Oklahoma Baptist University, and there was a very popular BBQ joint between us and there. Across the road was a convenience store where I would fetch drinks and snacks for myself and whoever was working the shift with me (didn’t have anything like that at the old place, so it was a nice touch).

This is kind of crazy, but sometimes when I was working with Stan I would bring back the latest issue of Hustler magazine from the store during a snack run. He found the magazine quite amusing. He would laugh at the cartoons and thumb, disinterested, through the pictorials. He was very nonchalant about it. It was a joke to him. I felt the same way. I’d grown out of Hustler a long time before that, and was probably in my “only-reading-the-articles-in-Playboy” phase.

Unfortunately I started doing some real shitty things. I would special order cassettes in other people’s names and take them home without paying. One time I even stole a whole box of record albums…at least 30 of them. They had been part of an “extra shipment” that I didn’t think were inventoried. I hand-picked the albums from the bundle Stan had made a deal for. I don’t even remember which ones I chose, other than “The Essential Jimi Hendrix” and a replacement for the copy of Aerosmith’s “Rocks” that I had sold some time before.

Not too much later the store received a promo copy of REM’s “Chronic Town” EP. It was their first record and I fell in love with it (and the band, too). I played it in the store as often as I could get away with…even though we had the promo, Stan didn’t want to stock it, so he didn’t want us playing music that we couldn’t sell. I used to spin Joy Division’s “Still” LP quite a bit until he informed me of the rule. It made sense, I had to admit, but it was a shame that the customers we generally catered to weren’t into the underground and college rock that I was so fond of.

So I decided to take the record home and put it on a cassette tape so I could listen to it at home and in the car on the way to work. By this time my wife and I had moved away from the crappy apartments…the guy in the unit next to ours used to very loudly verbally abuse his wife with his kids in the same room…I remember hearing them crying. We called the law on them once, but all it got us were mean stares from the guy when we passed him. The cops seemed impotent to do anything about it, as it persisted…when it got to the point where we couldn’t take any more, I moved Barbra to a house in the country, about 25 miles from the store.

Anyway, I dubbed it onto a high quality metal cassette (remember those, audiophiles?), along with Magazine’s “After the Fact” retrospective (another one for which we had a promotional copy but no intention of selling).

It was only a couple of days later when Stan asked me to come into the back room with him so we could “have a little talk”. He asked me if I’d been taking stuff from the store. Which, I well knew, meant “are you stealing from me?” I knew he had me dead to rights. I felt pretty bad about it, but I wasn’t about to confess to all that theft.

I told him that I’d taken a few records home and taped them. Of course, he knew more than that. I don’t think he would have minded me borrowing the albums if I’d only asked. But he wasn’t going to press me on the more serious charges. I don’t know why…I mean, he was a very nice guy, but he was also a savvy businessman in a situation where he could have really taken me to the cleaners, as it were. He was like, “Well, you know you can’t do that, so…”

He gave me a choice. He said I could quit, and if I chose to do so he would not put the transgression on my job record. I wouldn’t have a spot on my record when I looked for another job. He was willing to give me a good reference if I made that choice. OR I could just let him fire me, and have a hard time getting a job, as he would be compelled to tell prospective employers that I was a thief. Basically he wanted me to leave on my own accord so he wouldn’t have to pay unemployment.

Of course I quit…

I regret, even to this day, what I did. Not just because it’s such an obviously shitty and wrong thing to do…but I knew I wouldn’t find a job as good as that one. I had decent relationships with the other employees…I knew my stuff, and enjoyed recommending albums to customers, who usually came back to me for more…But maybe most of all I regret betraying Stan. He was a great boss and didn’t deserve to be messed around by someone he trusted. I’m sure he thought of me as a good employee…and this is how I repaid him, by swiping stuff I probably wouldn’t have bought even if I’d had the money.

The fire insurance paid for a nice, new building that was constructed in the original location. Friends did very well while LP records were still the primary medium of recorded music . Eventually I began to do some business with them, and it is a testament to Stan’s integrity that he often came on to the sales floor and spoke with me…never brought any of the bad stuff up. I think I may have told him I was sorry, that I was more or less a kleptomaniac back then, but he wouldn’t hear it.

Things changed when CDs began to make record albums obsolete and independent bands (without major labels) became popular. Stan’s brother had difficulty adjusting to the new distribution methods that became the norm and closed his business. I guess this was a crushing blow to Stan and Friends records in general, because it wasn’t too long afterwards that he closed up shop, too. He leased the building to a copier store and took a job in a managerial position at a factory. I never saw him after the store shut down.

But…when I worked at CD Warehouse almost 20 years later Stan’s son was a regular customer. I remembered when his dad used to bring him to the store, about the time when he was 2 or 3 years old. He would tell me how Stan was doing and I would tell him stories of the Friends records days. That was really cool.

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