Buch Spieler Music History Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

Where Does All the Time Go?

The question should be 'what happened while it was going'?
Buch Spieler was much more of a chameleon back then, changing with the style of the times, reflecting the times as being that of style, more often than not over substance.

With this in mind, I'll attempt to cover the store's history around the time of the Reagan/Bush/Me/Me/Me era (oh, how we might try to forget that…)
Into the mix of Buch Spieler's inventory we introduced fashion, or as we liked to call it, "wearable art", from t-shirts and ties to socks and army surplus. We carried a line of merchandise that made us fashionably hip at the time - perhaps a little too ahead of the time for central Vermont. It was provocatively punk and uniquely urban in a state that at that time had more cows than people. It was provocative, fun and profitable. It seemed to make such good business sense.

Well, it did, just as long as we had staff members who were really interested in and responsible for maintaining Buch Spieler's 'fashion department'. While Linda Hogan, Ellen White, Jen Pratt, and Mary Admasian were here, Buch Spieler was the happening place for "wearable art". When they moved on (escaping the purgatory of retail in pursuit of other civilized careers), the 'fashion department' suffered. Being that I was hopelessly 'fashion challenged' beyond the basics of t-shirts and jeans, Buch Spieler's adventures in "wearable art" were abandoned.

Next came the monumental change that I really didn't want to face. The transition from vinyl records to cassettes was long, slow and agonizingly painful. After all, my love of records was one of the reasons I started Buch Spieler in the first place.
(Are you lucky enough to remember the times you arranged your body in a comfortable position, either wearing headphones or situated in the 'sweet spot' between stereo speakers, put on a record and focused your attention on listening to the music without any distractions other than the graphic art and liner notes of the record jacket?)

Cassette tape was certainly inferior to records in sound quality but cassettes were recordable and, almost more importantly, they offered the convenience of greater portability.

With the arrival of the SONY Walkman and the increasingly faster pace and mobility of people, I could see that the vinyl record's popularity as the format of choice for quality sound reproduction would eventually lose out to this new format of choice for convenience - the inferior sounding cassette tape. (Perhaps this is part of the reason why I never really liked cassettes.)

However, Buch Spieler did, after a valiant but futile effort to resist the inevitability of cassette dominance in the general marketplace, go all out with cassettes. Even though it felt like somewhat of a betrayal to the thing that got me interested in starting a record store in the first place, it was the right 'business' decision for the survival of the store. Technology was forcing change that would only accelerate faster in the coming years.

(Fred Wilber, November 2001)

History
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9