(upbeat rock music) - You're just about to go to that city by the banks of the River Charles.

Some call it Beantown.

We're talking about Boston, home of '70s icon artists, such as The J. Geils Band, such as Boston, such as Aerosmith, as well as the '90s phenomena known as the Pixies.

They've also got some veteran stores that have been around, as well as a couple of new ones.

Time to go to Boston, y'all.

(upbeat rock music) Far more than a neighborhood store, a landmark to the Boston area, and one that has survived the ups and downs of the music industry, a longtime doorway for young and old, to winner Stereo Jack's.

Well, as a '60s band, The Standells said, "I love that dirty water.

Boston, you are my home."

And we are here in Boston, Massachusetts.

It is a town with a deep, deep music history, some of the best record shops I've ever seen.

We're at Stereo Jack's Record Store.

I am here with the proprietor, Mr.

Wayne Rogers.

Sir, how's it going?

- How are you doing?

- I am doing musically.

- Excellent.

- And want to thank you for having us in on this morning.

What was your background before you became the proprietor?

- I started doing record conventions while I was still in high school with a local record dealer, sort of came up through the ranks that way.

So I've been doing this since I was about 17 professionally.

But even then, you know, Stereo Jack's was known as the place for jazz and blues.

And I shopped there all the time.

Everybody shopped there all the time.

It was a legendary spot owned by a gentleman named Jack Walker.

CD era when I had that shop and we did a lot of business and new releases.

And as that collapsed and the CD market collapsed, I found myself looking for a job and I started at Stereo Jack's a couple months after I closed there, I started in 2010.

And yeah, Jack retired in 2022, and a fellow named Chris had it for a bit, and passed it along to me.

- What would you say about Boston, as far as being a music city?

- It's always been a great music city.

Being so close to New York, there's always, you know, there's sort of a twin city thing happening, where you always have people coming in, you know, going back and forth.

And it's always, you know, it's been strong for rock and roll.

There's a lot of jazz people came from here.

Cecil Taylor came from here.

A lot of people, Ken McIntyre.

There's still a strong jazz scene here.

So yeah, it's always been a strong music town and close to possibly the strongest music town in the north, so.

- I can't disagree.

In fact, I want to say the reason I'm wearing this shirt is that I am in the town where the mayor of Boston personally spoke to James Brown right after the fact that Martin Luther King had been assassinated and the mayor asked James Brown to not cancel the show, to do the show because he said, "Right now, my city is in flames."

And James did.

And how to put it, he chilled the waters of the city that night.

So how would you talk about your clientele, as far as their ages, taste in music, et cetera?

- Run range from pre-teens all the way up to old timers, 80 and beyond.

We had one customer who has been a regular for years and years and years.

His claim to fame is he saw Charlie Parker twice.

(laughs) And that's I think about as good as you can get right there.

- So these days, what's your top sellers?

- Top sellers.

As far as used and new, it's just jazz in general.

We carry all the used we can get.

We definitely make a point of having all the new reissues, whether it be the Blue Note ones or the new prestige versions, but also new releases as well, ranging from archival things, Horace Tapscott, things like that.

And I always make a point that we have contemporary players as well.

We always have Mary Halvorson and Jeff Parker and people who are kind of bringing the tradition forward.

- Well, that's one thing independent record stores do, although they definitely honor the departed, they don't bury the living artists.

I'm looking on your wall too.

You also have a very authoritative lineup of indie rock groups, mainstream rock groups, everything from Patty Smith to Johnny Blue Skies and The Dark Clouds, which is a best seller these days in- - Yes, indeed.

- The United States.

- I definitely always wanted it to be a community spot, where anyone can come in and find what they're looking for.

We carry Olivia Dean, we carry Taylor Swift, we carry Sun Ra.

(laughs) Whatever you're looking for, there's a good chance we have it.

- I want to thank you for your time and may we continue to give our patrons musical days and memories.

- Sounds good to me.

Thank you so much.

- Cool.

Who would've thought we'd find the epicenter in Boston of punk, heavy metal, alternative sounds, dwelling in the respectable, academic setting of Ivy League, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

We found the downstairs treasure trove called Armageddon.

Some people say we're living in Armageddon times.

- They might be right.

- So right here with the owner, Mr.

Ben Barnett.

The store's been around for a while and as independent record stores often do, you have a focus and a particular specialty that you do.

- Independent music for the most part.

Indie rock, metal, punk, and hardcore with a nod to classic rock.

- Sometimes I feel like I want to encourage my rock listeners, "Listen to something made after 1990."

There's a lot.

There is a lot.

- Yes, there's a hell of a lot.

- The punk and metal music community are the ones that are the most devoted to having their music in the physical form.

It's a music that's often, shall we say, ignored by the mass media or it's kind of shunted to the side, but it doesn't die and it is continuing and it has a listenership and it has brand new bands coming out every day of the week.

- I think that what you see most of the time in mainstream media is the cartoonish aspects of that stuff and you don't really see the community aspect of it.

The diehard dedication that the bands and fans have.

We wanted to open something that had just a focus on independent music.

We're able to exist in small and kind of overlooked spaces pretty well.

- Could you name a couple of records that when they came out, you just thought they were absolute signpost, absolutely prophetic, absolutely this changes the game.

- I'll throw a couple out there.

Slayer's "Reign in Blood," game changer.

Napalm Death, "Scum."

My Bloody Valentine, "Loveless."

I could go off on a large tirade about a million more like that, but top of my head, those three kind of blew minds in my orbit when they were happening.

- There's an enormous amount of heavy metal music that comes out of Europe.

And what I've noticed is so much of it comes out of the Nordic countries and it's just some of the darkest and starkest of metal music I've heard.

- We actually did a book signing for, I think, Necrobutcher from Mayhem here.

Yeah, I think that that music is kind of a reflection of their environment.

- I just love visiting a store that really specializes in one genre of music, while touching the bases of everything else.

We are in a store called Planet Records that proves you don't have to have an enormous space to have an incredible record store.

Right now, Mr.

John Damroth, is going to be talking to us about what it is like to be in the music business of this city.

The store has been around, what, 40 years?

- 43.

- 43 years.

It is jam packed with music of every genre, both LP and CD.

And we both agree that local record stores are a necessary part of the culture of any great town.

You've got more than a few good record stores here, but.

- It's true.

- Seems to me that none of them are any better than yours.

So how did you very first get the idea that you were going to have a record store or be in the record business, the music business, in some capacity?

- Right.

So when I got out of school, I took a year off and did construction, then I got a job with an advertising agency.

It took me no time to figure out that that was not for me.

Corporate life didn't make sense.

So I was walking around.

I got a job in a used record store because I knew a fair amount about music.

And within a matter of months, I realized that I could do this.

This is not rocket science.

I started out by having yard sales because I would go to flea markets and yard sales, buy the stuff that was cool, and then set it up in my own yard sale, called The Record Seller.

Pretty interesting.

- The Record Seller.

- Interesting, yeah, I know.

We were supposed to be in the basement.

Anyway, so that's how it started.

I feel like that if your motivation to open a record store was to make money, that may not work out for you, but if you love music, then it's a good excuse because you can listen to all of this whenever you want.

- Being a college town the way Boston is, I'm sure that's a nice addition to the customer base for you.

- It is, although not the way it used to be in the '80s when we started.

Now our clientele is a wide range from 14-year-olds to 85-year-olds and all the kinds of music that a person could be into.

So it's changed a lot.

I'm constantly amazed at the quality of their taste, and I don't think that's true everywhere.

- So you have a great, great selection of CDs to go along with the racks of vinyl.

CD sales have come back strong.

Younger people are starting to realize that they might be able to pick up 10 CDs for the cost of that new 2LP set by the artists that they were wanting to look at.

And a whole lot of music will not be on vinyl one way or the other.

- Right.

I've often thought that those years when CDs were really everywhere and the companies were just finding anything that was recorded, they could put on CD, and some of it too obscure to really be successful.

But the fact that all that stuff was out there meant that you could now find obscure music at Tower Records or wherever.

And then after that Tower Records left, it's just us in our little, what I would call an antique store, where now we're filtering through that stuff and presenting it again for customers and they're into it.

Rock in its various forms, that is our bread and butter.

Jazz, probably a close second.

And that's I think true in records and CDs.

It's so much easier to have a great jazz collection on CD than in a record, because at this point, people aren't really giving up those records.

I've still been very surprised over the past 20 years anyway of how many record collections are still coming by.

I thought that would die out in the early aughts and it hasn't at all.

We still get calls pretty much every day.

- Needless to say, Boston is a place that's had some very impressive musicians.

As far as local groups, independent jazz or soul or rock artists, can you recall times when you've had people come in that you knew?

- A few stories come to mind, but one is Gary Bartz was playing down at the Regatta Bar, and our store was a couple blocks away.

And he came in, I recognized him, but I play it cool with famous people.

Don't want to bug him.

But I was at the counter and he walks up to me, he goes, "You know who I am?"

And I was like, "Yeah, Gary Bartz."

He's like, "That's right."

And he went back out and took a look at more stuff, but he just was confirming, you know, his worth to a used record store, I think.

- The artists that I love to see come in, or let me say, the ones that I respect the most are the ones who come in with no entourage.

For example, the Beastie Boys came in and somebody called me up at my desk and said, "Beastie Boys are shopping."

And I come down and they're not in the hip hop section, they're in the jazz selection area.

They're looking at records by Groove Holmes.

And by the time they had finished pulling out all the records that they wanted to buy, I looked at them and I said, "You know, you guys, I can tell you know something about music.

Now look, if this career of yours goes south, you can put in an application."

Is there a piece in your store here that you consider to be the most interesting memorabilia that you have?

- Ooh, I guess it would be that Led Zeppelin poster.

That was for a show at Boston College, and you can see the lineup, The Stooges, Allman Brothers, Amboy Dukes, Led Zeppelin, Lighthouse.

And it was gonna be great, except for that two days before it was supposed to happen, it was canceled.

- Too bad that day didn't go off because, what a lineup.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I did a little research on it and all I could find was an ad in the "Village Voice," you know, in New York City, offering tickets, and they were something like $3 for a ticket, so.

- Those days are gone.

- Yeah, I think so.

- John, I want to thank you for your time.

- Hey, no problem.

- Great store.

- Glad to see you.

- You should be proud.

This store has an off the wall visual signpost parked right in front.

It's an old hippie looking van covered with parking tickets and graffiti.

It reflects the vibe we found.

And does that sound loony to you?

Well, we're here at Looney Tunes.

Independent record stores don't tend to be what I would call cookie cutter operations, but this is a very unique record store, has been in the Boston area, has been voted one of the best stores in the town.

And I'm here with the proprietor, Mr.

Pat McGrath, who I believe probably knows as many, shall we say, controversial stories in the music business as maybe even I do.

- There's nothing like the dirt that you can dig up if you've been around for a long time.

- So you're feeling particularly respectable at this point of your store's history?

- No, but I'm waiting for respectability.

It should be coming on anytime now.

- I can see that although there's certainly order and areas for different types of music, not everything is automatically alphabetized.

- No, well, the stuff that's piled up just hasn't been filed yet.

It's going to be alphabetized, and in broad categories, like jazz, we don't have a hard bop section, and rock, we don't have a psychedelic section or a punk rock section.

It's rock.

So it's broad categories and you can just get out of hand when it comes to micro categories.

You know, someone came in last week looking for a Tiny Desk Concert section.

This to me is, well, I don't know, it's- - Splitting hairs?

- Splitting hairs.

And then you'll get people like, "This isn't really punk.

It's more post-punk."

Oh God.

- To me, that kind of attitude of wanting to find out, as far as minutia goes, is best for baseball cards.

Whereas, you know, here, you've got music and it's something that people can go to when they really need to have a mental break.

- Exactly, it's something that, it's like Thomas Beecham said, "The purpose of music is to free your mind from the tyranny of conscious thought," which is, get you out of your head without killing you, takes you someplace else.

- So you've had more than one location for your- - Yes.

- Place of business.

Where was the first one?

- The first one was on Massachusetts Avenue, and I did not work there.

I just went there.

The second one was on Boylston Street, and I worked there and then bought in about 1982.

And then we had another one in the Orson Welles building in Cambridge for about 25 years, and then we had none.

And then I came here.

- The fact that you've got so many educational institutions here, that must make for a nice part of your clientele.

- It does, and at the same time, it's, you know, transitory, so you get a new batch of people looking for different things.

- There are always going to be those people who want their music, something tangible that they can put in their hand, put it in their CD player, play on their turntable.

- It's true.

I'm astonished that people can be convinced to pay for something that they can't have, which is, it's quite a little trick.

But, you know, if you have a thing, then that's a real thing.

God, that's so obvious.

"I have this."

And, you know, they have control of it.

It's like, once you have a fixed thing, like a record or a book or a movie on a DVD or videotape or audio tape, you know, no one can really manipulate it.

It's yours and outside forces can't come and get it, whereas anything on the internet can be edited, shifted, moved around.

It's no longer a fixed thing.

And that's why I think, like, individual archives are gonna be really important in the future.

Hardcore, nerdly record store owners are, you know, where you're gonna find somebody that is a repository of musical history.

- Boston has a hell of a reputation for being a music town, a lot of jazz history, a lot of rock history, for that matter, a lot of folk music history.

So given the fact that there's been quite a few notable musicians and bands that have come through and come out of this area of the country, who are your customers, if you might want to mention some of them.

- Let's see.

Well, we were talking about, Peter Wolf comes down with a certain regularity, had found him a Black Label copy of "The Best of Muddy Waters," and he was thrilled with that.

And he's a delightful man.

Fred Schneider used to come down from B-52's quite a lot.

I haven't seen him in a while.

Damon Albarn from Blur and the Gorillaz has bought a lot of records and spoken well of us in the press.

One time there was a guy looking at Blues records and he was dressed so stupidly.

He was wearing a jumpsuit and he looked just like Robert Plant.

And I thought, "Well who, besides a rockstar, would wear a jumpsuit?"

I was like, "If he has an English accent, he's gotta be Robert Plant."

So I said, "Can I help you?"

He goes, "No, I'm all right."

And I was like, "Robert Plant?"

He goes, "That's right."

And he was lovely, he hung out for like an hour and wanted to buy some local records and he was just a fine character.

- What do you think is your most notable piece of music memorabilia?

- Some things, like that Bluebird Records banner, I took out of a store called Jason's in Quincy, which was I think at one point the oldest, not just record store, but the oldest continuous retail shop in Massachusetts.

The thing I would focus on is that red record up there.

You see it?

With Godzilla biting it on the head.

That is Columbia 4,001.

That's the first LP.

It came out in 1948 and I have it up there.

It's like our founder.

And so I've got all sorts of like, you know, voodoo candles and stuff in front of it.

It's sort of a shrine.

The first LP, the first 12-inch LP.

The first 10-inch LP was The Voice, Frank Sinatra, 6,001.

So those are the two first LPs.

So, you know, between those two, it set me on this road to having a dingy basement full of records in Allston.

- I salute your dingy basement full of records.

(upbeat music) We enjoyed our blitzkrieg visit to Boston.

It was a musical blast and a pleasure to visit long-lasting community shops, such as Stereo Jack's, Planet Records, that vinyl labyrinth, Looney Tunes, as well as a stone metal punk connection in the heart of Cambridge and in the shadow of Harvard University, Armageddon Records.

First record?

What was your first record?

What was your first record?

But what was your first record?

- My first single was "Venus" by The Shocking Blue, which I bought when I was just old enough to reach the counter.

And then a couple of years after that, my first album was The Beatles, "Revolver."

I still have both.

- MC Hammer back in 1989.

- What was your very first record?

- I was buying heavy metal cassettes and stuff in the early '80s, so I'm gonna guess it was probably some metal record, you know?

It was like an Iron Maiden or something like that.

But I remember the first record I was given was James Taylor, "Sweet Baby James."

That's a little different.

- Britney Spears, "In The Zone."

- Fat Boys, "Fat Boys Are Back."

- What was your first record?

- That tune, which I'm not terribly proud of, but "Summertime, Summertime," The Jamies.

In 1962 or something like that.

And I was like, "Daddy, daddy, please buy this for me."

And he did.

The first record I bought for myself was The Stones, "Get Off My Cloud," which I thought was rock and roll.

- Black Light Burns, "The Moment You Realize You're Going to Fall."

- "The White Album."

- "Born to Die" by Lana Del Rey.

- What was Pat's first record?

- The first record I bought with my own money was The Beatles, "Yesterday and Today."

So that would have been 1966.

I was probably like eight or nine years old.

I was saving up my lunch money to get it.