For many years I worked at a little shop in Denver called Wax Trax. The place is the very Platonic ideal of the grubby independent record store as seen in High Fidelity. In fact, when the film came out in 2000, a day didn't pass in which at least half a dozen customers would ask, "Hey, have you seen that movie High Fidelity yet? It's about a store just like Wax Trax!" In response, of course, my coworkers and I simply gazed down from on high in aloof indifference.
Before you judge my hipster jerkiness too harshly, please know that I was just a link in a long, vicious chain of abuse. Years earlier, I personally had been a victim of such record-store snobbery. Granted, the clerks who preceded me at Wax Trax were invaluable when I was in high school and taking the bus downtown from the suburbs every week to buy such snob-approved bands as Buzzcocks and The Velvet Underground (even though I was buying most of them on, cough, cassette). "The MC5?" they'd say, ringing me up. "You gotta check out this guy Billy Childish." By the time I was 20, though, my tastes were branching out like crazy–and I found myself oddly falling in love with corny old show tunes, pop standards, and big-band anthems.
KEZW 1430–a radio station that specializes in such geriatric fare, and one I just so happen to be listening to as I write this–was my teacher. I was already a big fan of rock 'n' roll oldies, but something about all those Herb Alpert and Dean Martin tunes reminded me of, I dunno, watching Lawrence Welk with my grandparents or something. It was still a couple years before all that Swingers-induced, "Cocktail Nation" nonsense, so no one was going around saying "baby" and pretending to be junior Rat Packers. But retro was definitely cool in the early '90s, and I got caught up in the perverse thrill of going to Wax Trax and–rather than heading straight to the rock or punk section–digging through all the cheap, old records by the likes of June Christy, Sergio Mendes, Bobby Vinton, and one of my favorites: Jimmie Rodgers.
Jimmie Rodgers is a cheesy doofus about a half step above Ricky Nelson, the type of whitebread, Brylcreemed geek The Rolling Stones were created to destroy. But I loved him exactly because of that. KEZW played (and still plays) Rodgers' three biggest singles: "Honeycomb," the similarly syrupy "Oh-Oh, I'm Falling In Love Again," and the far moodier and even morbid "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine." I found a Best Of Jimmie Rodgers LP in the bin at Wax Trax one day and ecstatically brought it up to the counter (keep in mind, this was about a year before I started working there). The clerk picked it up, sniffed, and said, "You know, this guy isn't the real Jimmie Rodgers. Are you maybe looking for The Singing Brakeman instead?"
What this snooty motherfucker was trying to tell me was, there are two Jimmie Rodgerses: the pop dork from the '50s and the country legend from the '20s and '30s. My knowledge of vintage country music was limited at the time to Hank Williams and Marty Robbins–that is to say, the two country singers they played on KEZW. Turns out, not only was the original Jimmie Rodgers nicknamed The Singing Brakeman–which came from his years of working on the railroads–he had been quite modestly dubbed The Father Of Country Music. Well, la-de-dah. Withering under the supercilious stare of my future coworker, I paid for my "bad" Jimmie Rodgers–The Stinking Brakeman, if you will–and left the store in shame.
That incident stuck with me–in fact, I bought the first Singing Brakeman album I could find and wound up loving it. But I never did lose my fondness for the Lawrence Welk-friendly pop chump and his hiccupping croon. And while, in all honesty, I think I was far less of a jerky record-store clerk than some of my colleagues (both fictional and real), I did take the occasional opportunity to steer a young customer forcibly from, say, Blink-182 to Buzzcocks. Did it do any good? Fuck if I know. In this era of dwindling brick-and-mortar music retail, an increasingly inbred and centralized bunch of bloggers and journalists seem to be, if not making taste outright, setting the norms and defaults by which we search for, listen to, and judge music. At the same time, music consumers have more freedom at their fingertips than ever–including the freedom not to worry about being smirked at by some pimply loser from across a counter for buying the wrong Jimmie Rodgers.