I’ve been down south this past weekend, visiting my family in the land of deadeye (OK, actually no. I was further south where they have Dolly Parton and The Grand Ole Opry instead of Slint and Terrastock. And actually, they don’t even have Dolly where I was, but rather a lot of dead civil war soldiers so if you see that flag anywhere its historical, ok?).
Anyway, when I first started coming to Murfreesboro to visit the family I wasn’t super excited about it because I’m childish and it isn’t ‘home’ and that was totally inconvenient. You know, for me. But over the years I’ve been finding little things here and there to look forward to. This year I noticed that Foot Village was making a stop here and thats how I found out about a place called House House. There weren’t any shows there this weekend, but its nice to know there’s something local to check out when I’m in town.
Another of the things I look forward to is visiting Grimey’s New & Preloved Music. I usually find a few fun used records here, stuff that doesn’t pop up here too often, or at least, doesn’t make it past one of the innumerable record store employees it has to go past. The staff is friendly and really excited about music. I don’t think I’ve ever been in the store without trading a story or two about whatever I’m purchasing, be it The DBs or Anti Pop Consortium. The store also hosts quite a few in store performaces.
I’ve always griped that the stores here in SF could be a bit friendlier — to the customer mind you, not to the muscians. I’ve found the stores here to be incredibly supportive of the local music scene. But as a customer, I’m just going to say that I’ve had a more than a few absurd “we’re cooler than you” experiences. I bring this up becuase this last visit to Grimey’s was absurdly great. First of all, for whatever reason, they tipped me off on these two crates full of crazy good records that they’d just bought but hadn’t put out yet. Score for me (and it was all reasonably priced)! That was nice. BUT, while I was digging through these two crates of used records that bordered on too good to be true somebody in the store walked over and said “Its beer-thirty, do you want a beer?”. I’m not sure why this was a question: Yes!
They explained to me that they decided to start running the store like they would run their lives. If it was a Saturday afternoon and they weren’t at work they’d be having a beer so thats what they were going to do. So, bay area, take note. Saturday afternoons at Grimey’s are beer-thirty where they offer you a beer and invite you to browse through their records, recommend things, and tell you about fun shows they’ve been to. They don’t complain to the customers about how expensive rent is and how the record industry is tanking. Maybe thats unfair, because the bay is retard-o expensive and Nashville is el-cheapo, but them’s the breaks. All I know is I had more fun at beer-thirty!
