Going for a spin

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/11/2022 (1112 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

STEINBACH — S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!

For a person who chose Vinyl Experience as the tag for his new-and-used music store, Phil Wiens is surprisingly hesitant to take a trip down memory lane, when probed about his own initial experience with the format, which has been enjoying a renaissance lately.

Concerned his rock ’n’ roll reputation is going to take a direct hit if the truth gets out, Wiens, seated near a display wall adorned with coloured drawings of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, hems and haws before going, “ah, what the heck.”

The year was 1976. Wiens, now 61, was a student at Blumenort School, located a kilometre or so from the rural property he and his parents called home. One afternoon he paid a visit to Able Sound, in nearby Steinbach. He was familiar with the place as he’d bought a few 45 RPM singles there already, but this day was different: he had finally saved enough scratch to purchase his first, long-playing record.

“Again, I hate to say this out loud, but it was Dedication, by the Bay City Rollers,” he says, referring to the fourth release by the Scottish popsters, nicknamed the “tartaned teen sensations” owing to their distinctive, calf-length, patterned trousers and matching scarves. What made the transaction particularly memorable was how the person behind the counter reacted, when Wiens reached into his wallet to pay.

“He could barely suppress his sarcasm, such a jerk,” he says, calling to mind a scene from the film High Fidelity, when Jack Black’s record-shop clerk character remarks, “Do we look like the kind of store that sells I Just Called to Say I Love You?” when a customer asks whether they carry the sugarcoated, Stevie Wonder smash.

Wiens’s taste in music evolved over time — “for the better,” he says, speaking directly into a reporter’s recording device — but the exchange stayed with him. So much so, that when he opened Vinyl Experience at its original location in 2015, and again last year when he moved into his current, double-the-size digs at 276 Main St., he vowed to never pass judgment on what a customer held in their hands.

“Like most people, there’s stuff I’m not a fan of, but it’s definitely not my place to question what somebody spends their hard-earned money on,” he says, munching on a bowl of Cap’n Crunch cereal. “If somebody asks whether I think a certain record is good or not, I’ll happily tell them. But I would never try to make a person feel badly about liking a certain act, even though my Bay City Rollers days are long gone.”

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While Vinyl Experience was officially established in February 2015, the seeds for the shop were sewn 50 years ago. That was when Wiens’s mother gifted the then-12-year-old a transistor radio, with explicit instructions to keep it locked on CHSM 1250, an AM station that was “all talk and hymns and stuff.”

“Sure thing,” he told her, but describing himself as a bit of a rebel, he admits to mainly listening to Winnipeg top-40 stations KY58 and CFRW, citing the Brownsville Station hit, Smokin’ in the Boys Room, as a childhood fave. “Most of my friends were Mennonite,” he goes on, “and I remember one buddy who was really into Judas Priest, whose mother wouldn’t even allow him to bring their second album (Sad Wings of Destiny) into the house, because there was a picture of a fallen angel on the cover.”

By the time he was 16, Wiens was paying near-weekly, Saturday visits to Winnipeg, and its plethora of downtown record stores. He didn’t have access to a car yet, so he would walk three kilometres from his home to Highway 12, where he’d hop on a Grey Goose bus bound for the city. After spending hours combing through bins at Kelly’s, Mother’s and Pepper Records, he’d head back to the bus depot, to board a 6 p.m. ride out of town, before trudging another three kilometres home, carrying his latest treasures.

He worked a number of jobs following high school before settling into a 20-plus year career as a truck driver. His love of music never waned. At one point he had close to 30,000 songs on his iPod, the majority of which had been transferred from his albums and CDs.

A father of two, he and his first wife divorced in 2014, a set of circumstances that caused him to reevaluate what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

Often when he was guiding his 18-wheeler, singing along to this or that, he fantasized about owning a record store. Fifteen years ago, in fact, he reached out to Greg Tonn, owner of Winnipeg’s Into the Music, to ask if there were any part-time openings at the Exchange District music mecca. Tonn wouldn’t even have to pay him, he wrote; he’d happily work for vinyl.

“To make a long story short, it had been a while since Steinbach had a record store of its own so, at the end of my marriage, I decided why not give it a shot, and open a place of my own?”

OK, it wasn’t quite that simple. First of all, there were six parties interested in the 300-square-foot property he had his eye on, at the corner of Brandt and Main, next to a popular restaurant, Rocco’s Pizzeria.

Secondly, he needed stock. Sure, he had about 1,500 records populating the shelves at home, but it wasn’t as if he wanted to part with all of them, just yet. As luck would have it, a person in his 70s living in the Morden/Winkler area had placed a blurb on Kijiji, advertising a collection numbering in the thousands. Wiens hopped in his van, made the trip south and, after agreeing on a price, scooped up every last title.

There weren’t too many gems, he allows, maybe a Neil Young or two, nor were the contents in stellar shape. What the acquisition enabled him to do, however, was return to the landlord, show him he had a “(crap)load” of records at his disposal, and announce he was ready for business.

“I guess it looked like I knew what I was doing, because the next day he handed me the keys, saying the place was all mine.”

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Wiens’s first day of business was Valentine’s Day 2015. He didn’t have a clue what to expect.

After all, he grew up in the area and had a fairly good idea why Manitoba’s third largest city wasn’t singled out by Huey Lewis, in his ‘80s hit, The Heart of Rock & Roll (“DC, San Antone and the Liberty Town, Boston and, uh, Baton Rouge…”).

That said, Steinbach’s population had grown to a tick over 15,000 by then and, as he phrases it, wasn’t just a religious community that eschewed dancing and such, any longer. While the majority of his customers are in their 40s and 50s, he also welcomes a fair number of high schoolers who are just starting to get into vinyl.

“The kids are mostly looking for Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish — or is it pronounced EE-lish, I don’t have a clue — but things like the Beatles, the Stones and AC/DC will never go out of style… they buy as much of that as they do Kendrick Lamar,” he says.

What has proven interesting, he continues, is the large number of Winnipeggers who regularly make the drive — primarily people living on the east side of the city who inform him it’s faster to get to his locale, than, say, Polo Park’s Sunrise Records. To spare them showing up and being disappointed that a record he posted on Facebook — he does so daily, a habit he picked up during the pandemic, when people weren’t always allowed through the doors — is now gone, he keeps three boxes of reserved copies with customers’ names attached behind the counter, so long as they reach out to him ahead of time.

“I also ship regularly to buyers from as far away as Saskatchewan and Alberta, people who will probably never show up in person,” he says, letting his wife Sharon know she should probably unlock the front door, as it’s approaching 11 a.m., opening time on Saturdays. (Isn’t it romantic? The couple will toast their fifth anniversary Nov. 26, one day after the final Record Store Day of the year.)

Certainly, he’s had his share of quiet days over the last seven years (OK, it’s never really “quiet” when you operate a music store, he agrees, reaching over to cue up a copy of David Bowie’s The Buddha of Suburbia), which is why he added accessories such as turntables, record-cleaning supplies and plastic album sleeves to the mix a while back. All in all, though, he remains confident he made the right decision to park his rig in favour of records, seven years ago.

That said, he would like to pass along a message to the first person to ever set foot in Vinyl Experience, way back when.

“We’d only been open for about five minutes when this guy walked in, took a look around and said, ‘Oh, wow, Steinbach has its very own record store.’ Then he turned around and left and, to my knowledge, has never been back. So, if he’s reading this, I’d like him to know we’re still here.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca