Life is a
mix tape
Terry and Deon Borchard fell in love, raised a baby … and a record store By Leah Sottile
I
n 40 years, a lot of things can change. In the back office of the record store she’s owned with her husband for that long, Deon Borchard fiddles with the knobs on a stereo near her desk and suddenly the office — a space practically wallpapered in CDs and records — is filled with the warm, twangy vocals of a male country singer. With the music cranked, she’s thinking about all the things that have changed since the opened the doors of the Long Ear in 1973: the way she and her friends used to listen to records, how important their ritual of listening to a brand new album was to their lives. How music just seemed to matter more to people — like it was a part of their spirituality, almost. “We’d run down to our local record store, pick it up, run home real quick and we had a waterbed — because everybody had waterbeds — and light the blue candles and sit on our waterbed with the big pillows behind us and we would have big speakers around us and listen to the music. Didn’t say anything. Just listen to the whole side, and then get up and turn the record over and listen to the whole next side,” she says. “And then we’d talk about the record and say, ‘Did you hear him talking about this?’ ” The Borchards have owned The Long Ear for 40 years — moving the shop four different times and ...continued on next page
AUGUST 15, 2013 INLANDER 41