Buch Spieler Music
The Spiel (Newsletter)
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We've Got | DJ Service | Cards
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Buch Spieler Music
The Spiel (Newsletter)
Home | Who What Where | What
We've Got | DJ Service | Cards
| Friendly Links
Chapter Four
The New Kid on the Block: a delinquent in a town of suits
Back in 1973, the medium for recorded music was 12" vinyl record albums. In our little 15X30 storefront, I had built multi-tiered, plywood record racks that ran almost the full length of both sides of the store. This design allowed us to show lots of album covers without really having a whole lot of album covers to show. After all, because we were pathetically undercapitalized, our initial, opening inventory was pretty pathetic - impossibly pathetic by today's consumer standards. But it was what we had to work with and we would have to make the most of it.
So, here we were, two long-hair non-business type socialist/artists starting up a business on a relatively desolate, dark, one-way side street in the heart of downtown Montpelier, Vermont - the smallest state capitol in America.
We were the outsiders, the young and restless new kids on the block determined to make a go of it in a town where the sidewalks were rolled up at 5pm and the retail scene was relatively antiseptic.
The powers-that-were and the patriarchs of the retail establishment dismissed us politely as 'unrealistic' but more candidly as 'weird, wacko and nuts'.
(Perhaps there is some truth to that. Here I am, twenty-six years of my life latter, practically institutionalized as a permanent fixture in this thing we call Buch Spieler).
(CONTINUED) written by Fred Wilber, November, 1999
