Spinner and a movie

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/11/2013 (4361 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One of our favourite scenes in High Fidelity — a movie set in a Chicago record shop called Championship Vinyl — is when a sardonic sales clerk named Barry is asked if his store has a copy of Stevie Wonder’s I Just Called to Say I Love You.

“Yeah, we have it,” Barry (Jack Black) tells the customer.

“Great, can I buy it?” the fellow responds, explaining he’s hoping to get it for his daughter for her birthday.

“No. No you can’t,” Barry says.

“Why not?” asks the customer.

“Well, it’s sentimental, tacky crap,” Barry replies. “Do we look like the kind of store that sells I Just Called to Say I Love You? Go to the mall.”

Patrons of Music Trader need not fret about having their taste mocked if they approach the sales counter with oh, say, The Best of Bread.

“No, we do everything in our power to avoid that stereotype of the record-store geek,” says Jason Churko, manager of the CD/record store located at 97 Osborne St. “You shouldn’t be embarrassed to bring anything up. As long as you’re happy with your purchase, we’re stoked for you.” (As if to prove his point, Churko yells out, “Hey! I love this song!” when one of his employees drops the needle on the ’80s smash Let’s Hear it for the Boy, from Footloose.)

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In 1999 — a full year before High Fidelity hit theatres — Churko was managing an HMV outlet in Portage Place. One day he heard a rumour that Dave Ringer, the owner of the iconic video store Movie Village, was planning to open a sister locale specializing in used CDs. Churko immediately contacted Ringer to ask about a job.

The next thing Churko knew, he was on a cross-country buying spree, searching for discs to stock the fledgling operation.

“It was like a scavenger hunt; we basically mapped out every city we were in to find out where all of the pawn shops and second-hand stores were,” says Churko, who grew up in East Kildonan and has fond childhood memories of making a bee-line for the record department of his neighborhood Zellers. “We picked out every gem and interesting title we could find and couriered everything back to Winnipeg.

Music Trader opened its doors in July 1999. At the time, Into the Music, long this city’s pre-eminent destination for vinyl-aholics, was situated a block or so down the street. Quickly, Osborne Village became even more of a beacon for music junkies — so much so that Churko was extremely disappointed when Into the Music moved to its current digs in the Exchange District in 2003.

Despite its cozy confines — Music Trader occupied only 450 square feet before it doubled in size in 2001 — Churko began booking bands for in-store concerts almost immediately.

“It’s been a mix,” he says of the artists who’ve graced the aisles of Music Trader through the years. Some, like Hot Hot Heat and Gossip, were there to promote shows elsewhere in the city, later that same day. Others were passing through town and didn’t have a regular gig lined up, already. (Big-name celebs who’ve popped by include Susan Sarandon, Rob Lowe and Luke Wilson. Sarandon and Lowe left empty-handed but Wilson lucked into a pair of Billy Squier albums he’d been hunting for, Churko recalls.)

For the first decade of its existence, Music Trader sold CDs only. That changed about three years ago when Churko began to make room for new and used records. At first, the married father of two was a bit intimidated about the switchover — he really had to do his homework price-wise, he notes — but things had gotten to the point where he couldn’t ignore the vinyl resurgence any longer.

“It’s funny, because records have totally revitalized my joy of coming to work,” says Churko, whose personal taste is all over the map — from black metal to dub reggae to the Style Council.

“I feel like I’m going to school every day when I’m going through boxes (of LPs) people bring in to sell or trade. I’m constantly asking myself, what’s this… what year is it from… what does it sound like?”

Churko also gets a kick out of conversations he overhears, particularly ones involving teenagers who, while sifting through bins looking for chestnuts by the likes of Deep Purple and Steely Dan, comment about how they think their parents own a turntable, or what they refer to as “that thing in the basement with the speakers on the side.”

“A big part of the fun of being here is having discussions with customers about which album by a certain artist is better. Or telling them if you like this record, then you’ll love this one,” Churko says, filing away a copy of the Stones’ Emotional Rescue. “All the scenarios that you’d imagine might go on in a place like this — they happen every day.”

As for that other cliché from flicks like High Fidelity – about how working in a record store means the toughest chore you’ll face all day will be deciding which Bowie record to slap on next (we vote for Low) — well, that’s a myth, too, apparently.

“Not that I’m a slacker by any means, but when I started in this business, I probably did have a faint vision that my days would be like what you see in the movies: sitting at the counter, leafing through Rolling Stone,” says Churko with a laugh.

“But there’s always a ton to do. When it comes to records alone, we have boxes and boxes (downstairs) that we can’t get out on the floor fast enough. They just seem to go out the door as quickly as they come in.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca