Dropping the needle on a decade Winnipeg vinyl aficionado has truly found his groove as record-and-tape shop celebrates milestone By: David Sanderson Posted: 12:53 PM CDT Friday, Jul. 28, 2023

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/07/2023 (1113 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Everybody remembers their first time.

A 15-year-old high school student recently called on the Winnipeg Record & Tape Co., a new-and-used music store at 1079 Wellington Ave. that toasted its 10th anniversary in business in June.

Cavin Borody, the store’s owner, correctly surmised it was the fellow’s initial visit to a physical record store, based on how overwhelmed he appeared to be, as he nervously moved from bin to bin, without laying a finger on any of the thousands of titles in front of him. It was only after Borody let him know it was perfectly acceptable to handle the merchandise that he began reaching for this record or that, to inspect each more closely.

“There’s an entire generation of kids that do all of their record shopping online and have never experienced picking up an actual album and studying it, front and back, versus clicking on an image on the internet,” says Borody, 65, seated inside his 1,200-square-foot shop, where a framed copy of the parody album Sesame Street Fever adorns a wall opposite the cash register.

“Some of them might not even realize these things truly exist. I kind of figured that’s what was going on with that guy.”

Through the years, many a young person has let Borody know his locale is where they scooped up their very first record. That’s always music to his ears.

“It’s the kind of memory that sticks with you, I believe. Personally, I know for a fact that I bought my first record at Eaton’s downtown, when I was seven or eight years old.”

And what was Borody’s numero uno? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is… Blowin’ in the Wind, by Peter, Paul and Mary.

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The same way other kids his age used to announce that they wanted to be a firefighter or doctor when they grew up, Borody would say he wanted to manage a record store. There was a small entertainment shop, Syd’s Carousel, close to where his family lived that had a record section. Come Friday night, while his dad shopped for groceries a few doors away, he would hang out at Syd’s, watching the owner position 45-RPM singles on a wall display, according to that week’s Top 40 sales chart.

“Every week I’d buy the highest debuting song, whether I’d heard it before or not,” he says. “Then I’d go home, and move my own records around, to match what was going on at Syd’s.”

By the time he was 12, Borody was catching a bus headed downtown on Saturday mornings, to hit Portage Avenue record shops such as Kelly’s, Music City and Mother’s. He laughs, saying while he particularly enjoyed the atmosphere at Autumn Stone, another vinyl mecca, he could never stay there for more than a few minutes, owing to the fact he was asthmatic, and “everybody was smoking pot.”

Borody, whose favourite musical genres to this day are rhythm and blues and Philadelphia soul, sold most of his records in the late 1970s, to finance a move to Toronto. He kept a few boxes’ worth, mainly old Motown titles, but when eBay came along in the late 1990s, he began posting those for sale, too, under the banner Motor City North.

Demand was strong, so much so that he began hunting around for more albums to peddle online.

“I started doing these deep dives on the computer late at night, and would find warehouses and liquidation companies full of records — all still factory-sealed — that had been acquired from stores that had gone out of business,” he explains.

He’d buy everything for a song, then have the lot shipped to his home in the Grant Park area. By 2010 or so, his two-bedroom house was so packed to the brim with albums that if he wanted to walk from the living room to the kitchen, he had to turn sideways to get past the floor-to-ceiling hoard. At one point his mother expressed concern that she was going to find him lying dead under toppled shelves, one day.

“It got to a point where I completely ran out of room at home, which forced me to go looking for a place to open a retail location, the sort I dreamed of when I was a kid,” he adds.

“It got to a point where I completely ran out of room at home, which forced me to go looking for a place to open a retail location, the sort I dreamed of when I was a kid.”–Cavin Borody

Winnipeg Record & Tape Co., a tag he chose for online search optimization, officially opened in June 2013 in a West End space formerly occupied by a woman who turned out high-fashion mukluks. Admittedly, he wouldn’t have lasted three years, let alone 10, if it hadn’t been for his “real” job.

Before signing the lease he read that the average lifespan of a small business was a little over two years. To ensure he could still pay the rent if he went a month without a single customer, he hung onto his position as a supervisor for an organization that assists people recovering from traumatic brain injuries, until his retirement from that job in 2021. For eight years, he clocked 100-hour work weeks — 40 hours at the recovery centre and 60 more at the store.

Initially, it was difficult to secure his “piece of the pie.” Rival record stores Into the Music and Argy’s had both been operating for years before he arrived on the scene, and both had what he calls a “ride-or-die” clientele — dedicated shoppers that would never poke their head inside his premises. The turning point for Winnipeg Record & Tape Co. came when he spent a few months visiting those very shops, together with other outlets in the city that sold vinyl, in an effort to determine what each might be lacking, in terms of product.

He was pleased to discover there was a scarcity of the styles of music he enjoyed most, namely soul, R&B, hip-hop, disco and jazz.

“The thing was, if a person came into my shop and asked me about heavy metal, I might blurt out Black Sabbath with a blank look on my face,” he says. “But if somebody else asked about Bill Withers, Al Green or James Brown, well, don’t get me started.”

Not only did Borody ultimately find his niche, Winnipeg Record & Tape Co. is the only Canadian record store cited as a must-visit in A Beginner’s Guide to Vinyl, a 256-page book written by Jenna Miles. Borody was busy behind the counter a few years ago when a shopper announced he’d travelled from New York City to see the store, which the book’s author described as “dreamy.” Borody beams, saying the person arrived with a copy of Miles’ tome in one hand, and walked out with a new Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes record in the other.

Back to the record-shopping days of his youth; Borody, who also stocks new releases by the likes of Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes and Phoebe Bridges (he jokingly categorizes the bulk of today’s music as “guys ready to jump off a bridge,” and “girls with a gun”) is currently toying around with the idea of offering weekly specials in light of his milestone anniversary.

Another of his favourite stores back in the day was Opus 69, a plastic purple bag from which is tacked to the wall over his left shoulder. The Kennedy Street shop used to stage a 9:30 a.m. weekend blowout sale, when popular new releases would go for as little as 99 cents.

“I still remember being 13-years-old, and standing outside of Opus with 40 others, waiting to buy Pearl, by Janis Joplin, for a buck,” he says. “So I’m thinking of doing something similar with older albums I have multiple sealed copies of, like Chicago V, by running online ads that will read ‘original pressings at the original prices.’”

“I sell a lot of what might be considered cheesy — always have — so no, you won’t encounter any judgment here. Quite the opposite, in fact.”–Cavin Borody

One more thing; remember the scene in the 2000 film High Fidelity when Jack Black as a record store clerk barks, “Do we look like the kind of store that sells I Just Called to Say I Love You?” when a customer asks for the Stevie Wonder smash?

That isn’t Borody, not even close.

“People have told me about going to (record) stores in Toronto or Vancouver and receiving a heavy sigh, when they ask for something by the Carpenters or Barry Manilow,” he says, mentioning he’s never met a Donna Summer song he didn’t love. “I sell a lot of what might be considered cheesy — always have — so no, you won’t encounter any judgment here. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca