When vinyl was king

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/03/2017 (3119 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dave Kornas guesses he was 13 years old the first time he stepped inside Wild Planet, back when the Osborne Village T-shirt shop was located on Portage Avenue, near Garry Street, and dealt almost exclusively in new and used vinyl records, CDs and cassettes.

“We drove in from Kenora, where my family lived, to visit my older brother, who had moved to Winnipeg a year or two earlier,” says Kornas, 37. “I wanted to buy some tapes, I think by Steve Vai, so my brother dropped me off (at Wild Planet). I walked in and saw this girl behind the counter with blue hair and a nose ring blasting what I later found out was NOFX.

“I distinctly remember thinking, ‘What is this music? Who is that girl? And what’s that smell in the air?’ I was just overwhelmed with the experience of being in a true, Portage Avenue record store and seeing and hearing it all for the first time.”

A few years ago, Kornas was sharing that anecdote with Jamie Mierau, one of his co-workers at a Winnipeg digital production firm. Mierau, 41, could “totally relate.” He told Kornas a story about the first time he took a bus from his home in East Kildonan to check out the Cellar, a north Portage Avenue record shop his skateboarding pals had been raving about.

As the two men continued chatting, it struck them they probably weren’t the only people who have fond memories of visiting downtown Winnipeg “back in the day” and returning home with a bagful of newfound, musical treasures under their arm. Before getting back to what they were doing, Mierau, an editor and director, remarked, “You know, that might make for a really interesting documentary.”

On March 11, Kornas and Mierau will host the première of New and Used: Winnipeg at the Gas Station Theatre. The 44-minute film features interviews with a who’s who of local record store pioneers, past and present, including Andy Mellen of Autumn Stone, Jeff Bishop of the Sound Exchange and Greg Tonn from Into the Music. The pair also sat down with more than a dozen musicians, writers and record collectors, asking them what influence vinyl frontiers such as Opus 69, Records on Wheels and Impulse Records had — and continue to have — on their listening habits.

(Spoiler alert: while filming a segment “starring” this record-rabid reporter, Kornas and Mierau instructed me to randomly choose an LP from my own shelves, pretending it was what I wanted to listen to next. Only instead of pulling out something remotely cool by the Dead Kennedys, Deja Voodoo, Derek & the Dominoes or even Jackie DeShannon — did I mention my albums are filed alphabetically? — the record I’m shown holding up is by — argh — John Denver.)

In 2015, Kornas and Mierau put together a five-page treatment, outlining what their documentary would cover. They approached the powers-that-be at MTS TV, hoping the people responsible for Stories From Home, that company’s Manitoba-centric film division, would be interested in backing their venture.

“I’m 51 in a few weeks so this sort of thing was right up my alley,” says Cam Benson, one of the MTS producers who gave the guys the green light, and provided them with the funding to see their project through. “We’d done a ton of music stuff in the past but the idea of a film focusing exclusively on record-store haunts was pretty unique — particularly the angle of what these stores meant to people (and) how there was this sense of community that developed because of them.”

About that “sense of community” Benson refers to: early in Kornas and Mierau’s film, which MTS TV subscribers can view for free through the company’s on-demand service, author and music historian John Einarson mentions how, to him at least, record stores in downtown Winnipeg in the 1960s and early ‘70s were “more than just places to buy records… they were cultural meeting places.”

Don Unrau, the founder of long-gone Pyramid Records, concurs, stating on-camera, “I met so many great people. You could be having a bad day and somebody would come in and… strike up a conversation and teach you something about music or life. It was a great time — the time of my life, as far as I’m concerned.”

“I think the thing that struck me the most while we were interviewing people was the impact the Portage Avenue (record) stores had, and how big an effect even a tiny place like Autumn Stone had on the city, in general,” Mierau says, mentioning he and Kornas ended up with more than 40 hours of footage, and that many of the people interviewed could have been the subject of a full documentary unto themselves. (Our favourite moment: When Jason Tait of the Weakerthans discusses how tripping over one of his band’s albums in a used record bin or thrift store one day will be “super, super cool.”)

“We don’t want people to think of this as a history lesson, though,” Kornas chimes in. “Obviously we mention some of the key shops and chat with people like Andy (Mellen) and Don (Unrau), but we also touch on the communal aspect of record-shopping, both in terms of what it was like then, and why it seems to be making a bit of a comeback today, thanks to places like Eat Em Up Records (on Sherbrook Street) and the Winnipeg Record and Tape Co. (on Wellington Avenue).”

Though Kornas and Mierau don’t pretend to be “big record guys” — after all, they grew up in an era when compact discs were the dominant playback format, they say — by the end of filming and editing, they had both invested in new turntables, and had begun replacing their most cherished CDs and cassettes with vinyl copies.

“Now that we have a kid, my wife doesn’t like us to watch TV when he’s awake, so we spin Raffi records instead,” Mierau says with a laugh. “Before Christmas, I was out shopping for new vinyl. I gave myself a budget and by the time I got up to $100, I started telling myself, ‘If I get this one it means I can’t get that one,’ which is probably the same experience the people we talked to had, when they were young, and sifting through record bins downtown.”

Tickets for the March 11 première of New and Used: Winnipeg are going fast, but if you’re interested, you can contact Kornas at davekornas@gmail.com. There won’t be a red carpet or valet parking, he laments, but there will be a cash bar, “cheese cubes” and a DJ, spinning — what else — vinyl.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca