If you’re a true record enthusiast, you may feel the same way about Record Store Day as true alcoholics feel about New Year’s Eve: It’s amateur hour. There’s probably a demographical correlation between those two designations, come to think of it.
Or if you’re like me, you try to hide under the covers for a good portion of it, because the thought of paying about twenty dollars for a new, limited-edition 45 RPM single is perhaps not conducive to paying the gas bill on time. So instead, I engaged in brief swoops; I would walk into Good Records, pick up an album, write down the title, and then go home and listen to it on YouTube. Gone are the days of the corporate listening stations of Blockbuster Music. But this prevented me from having to drop tons of cash on what can often be shrewdly-promoted marketing gimmicks, in the case of RSD-specific releases. The new Section 25 single is good, but it’s not twenty dollars good.
Photographer Andi Harman was not so lucky. When we attempted to lay out a strategy for covering the multi-city, multi-business ode to archaic commerce, I told her it would be really impressive to cover Denton, Fort Worth, and Dallas all in the same day. That’s hard for us. We don’t have an army of mediocre photographers on endless “internships” violating all manner of Federal law. Andi “only” ended up at the previously mentioned Dead Wax in Carrollton, CD Source on Upper Greenville, and spent a respectable chunk of time at the intelligently booked Good Records event, which ran from morning until late in the evening. Local artist and poster vendor Nevada Hill said he arrived in the parking lot at La Vista and Greenville at 8 a.m. — an ungodly time for someone with such an absurd hairstyle.
Track Meet did a commendable job of actually seeming engaged and inspired by providing dance tracks outside, often with Latin American Music rhythms, and they passed the Shazam Test I always quietly run on DJs: I kept coming up with “We Couldn’t Find a Match,” results, meaning that they aren’t just throwing together a list of unmixed MP3s while standing back. They’re working.
Cutter again proved that they are on the tiniest island of newer Dallas bands that are as capable of being as utterly compelling and inventive as any from the overly rich Denton crowd. It’s pretty much them against the world, but of course, there’s a certain romance in that. They should be proud that they stand out as much as they do.
Harman was able to catch a wide variety of performers and shoppers both over the course of ten hours, and these photographs serve as a nice reminder that though it may be as fictional and commercial as any other holiday, it’s hard not to have a good time on Record Store Day.
All photos by Andi Harman.
