to have a good friend who was living in Lincoln that I was penpals with. We exchanged tape letters for years where he would send me Peel sessions, tapes of shows and talk about new records. I would do the same for him. Anyway, I just wrote off to Factory one day being a fanboy asking that Joy Division come to Texas and how much I loved them. I sort of forgot about it, then one day this cool package showed up. And for a 19 year old kid that was pretty magical. Now I just need to find my Scritti Politti letter from the same period, ha!
Me and Blake are the owners with nine employees: four full-time folks, and five part-timers (that work a couple shifts a week). A lot of jobs are shared. But folks will have an area that they keep up with - ordering, running the front counter, buying used, inventory. A couple of the folks keep track of all the online sales (Amazon, mail orders, Discogs, eBay).
A few come to mind: Yo La Tengo, Gary Wilson, R Stevie Moore, Rorschach, Milk Music, Peelander-Z, Tiny Vipers, Thurston Moore, David Kilgour, The Bats, Razika, Lydia Loveless. A few that we had early on, where the audience wouldn’t be able to fit in the shop now, are Band of Horses, Beirut, Dr Dog, and Black Angels. I’m probably forgetting several.
I notice the shop often opens new lines, areas and display systems. Is it always going to be an evolving thing?
I was speaking to Jagjaguwar and Secretly Canadian about your store, they’re both big fans! Having a strong relationship with labels and artists must be pretty important? Who are particularly supportive?
What is your buying process, broadly? There are several people that help do the buying. We consult with each other on quantities, band, like “Ok, so how many of this Haxan Cloak reissue will we need?” Everybody kind of has their own area that they keep up with - reggae, jazz, experimental, metal etc. Who else do you have at the store and what sort of responsibilities do they have? Or are you a complete tyrant?
Yeah, it just sort of evolves. We had been wanting to expand our audio equipment area for a while, and when we added one of the adjacent spaces to the shop we knew we wanted to dedicate a lot of space to that. As well as to DVDs and videos. We recently expanded the area for cassettes too. Who have been some of your favourite instores over the last eight years?
For sure. I have known a lot of the Secretly folks for a while, plus Phil from Dead Oceans and Brian from Western Vinyl both live in town and we have been friends for a while. What they are doing is super smart, in terms of economies of scale. They can have a big record, but yet still know how to make money on a record they are gonna sell just a small number of. They also distribute loads of labels we love like Sacred Bones, RVNG, Awesome Tapes, Family Vineyard, Numero,
“I’ve been listening to and buying records for over 35 years now and every week I discover something I have never heard of. Long live Spherical Objects!”