I wrote this one back in November of 2014, one of the few good periods for me while in MD. I loved working at the ballpark, and I’d just been through a playoff season, pretty exciting stuff! It all started when the O’s hired a guy who had been on Seinfeld. I once got a high five from that guy as he was exiting the field the night they clinched a playoff birth or the division or whatever it was. I have a lot more on all that another time, but these were my thoughts on my musical formative years back then, pretty much the same as now.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to everyone mentioned here and more, anyone I ever played with, Joe Beard especially, etc. Joe may have been the nicest, least messed up guy I’ve ever known. Now that’s how a family is supposed to work! Shutting up now, and letting temporarily happy 2014 me take over….
During my time in the Rochester, NY area, I was lucky enough to be exposed to a whole lot of great music and musicians, furthering an education which had begun with the piles of records and breadth of musical knowledge my parents, my dad especially, had laid on me practically from birth. By the time I moved out on my own I thought I knew a lot. I mean, I had plunged pretty deeply into blues artists of the 1920’s, ragtime, all sorts of fingerstyle guitar including but not limited to Leo Kottke, John Fahey and the like, and had a fair grasp of pop and rock music from around the time of the British invasion on. I had no idea how little I knew! That would change with my meeting and playing with several of the fine musicians I was to soon get to know, but there was a lot more to the story. I’ll attempt here to pay homage to a few of the biggest sources of musical knowledge I’ve ever encountered.
I think I first became aware of the Bop Shop record store through listening to this college radio station, WRUR FM, on Friday nights, before I started playing clubs regularly. There were two programs on this station, which is part of the University of Rochester, hosted by local guy volunteers that I was to learn simply loved the music they played and liked sharing it with an audience. The first was called “Blacks and Blues”, hosted by Doug Curry. He played all blues, but lots of things I had never heard the likes of before, everything from the familiar Chicago/Chess blues to raucous jump blues to the “country” blues with which I was most familiar, and much much more. Two hours each week of incredible stuff! It was like finding a long lost friend, a treasure trove of sounds that excited me and made me want to dig deeper.
Scott Wallace on the right, and a caricature of Doug Curry. (He looks normal).
The show right after that, “Rejuvenation”, hosted by Scott Wallace, was equally great, specializing in R&B and soul, funk, a little jazz, that kind of thing. Scott was and is a huge fan of bands like the Meters and Junior Walker and the All Stars, but played a very diverse range of soul obscurities, Motown hits and deeper tracks, Stax and other Memphis sounds, and basically anything and everything in these genres. Again, an epiphany! Scott’s show especially got me into a whole area with which I was not too familiar, but loved. Incidentally, both of these shows still exist, with the same hosts, to this day!
So how do these shows relate to the title of this piece? I think what happened is that I called in to Scott’s show, maybe asking him about a song or artist. We got to talking and ended up making plans to meet at this record store he mentioned, the Bop Shop. At the time, maybe 1982-3, the store was located upstairs in this hipster/bohemian mall of sorts called the Village Gate, within walking distance of my little apartment. It wasn’t fancy, just a bunch of bins filled with records, with a counter and a stereo always playing something interesting, in any genre one could imagine but often the blues and soul that these shows featured. I was like a kid in a candy store, rifling through bins and wishing I had more cash to spend. At some point I met Scott Wallace, and in one of the more embarrassing faux pas of my life, I remember saying to him “I thought you were white”! He still deigned to talk to me, and we hit it off despite my idiocy. He probably recommended a few purchases, and I left there with an armful of vinyl and having met a really cool and deeply knowledgeable guy. I also met the owner of the shop that day, who would prove to be an even bigger source of inspiration, one Tom Kohn.
Naturally the Bop Shop became a weekly (or more often) stop for me. Somewhere along the line I met Doug Curry as well, careful not to repeat my earlier mistake with Scott, and we got along as well. I was like a sponge at this point. I knew too little about what these guys were playing, and I wanted to know it ALL! I mean, I just fell in love with this stuff, from the Meters to James Carr to OV Wright to lord know what else on “Rejuvenation” (named after a Meters album), to Wynonie Harris, early Ray Charles and Charles Brown, etc., etc., on “Blacks and Blues”. My record collection grew from the hundreds to the thousands very quickly, and I got to know Tom Kohn better and better as I spent hours in his store, which after a little while had expanded and moved to a larger and nicer spot on the lower lever of the Village Gate, right on the courtyard across from a few bars and restaurants and such. I practically lived ate and breathed music during this time, and was trying my best to soak it all in. I wanted to know as much as all three of these guys combined! I’m still trying. It’s an impossible task!
At some point I became such a fixture at the Bop Shop that I started “working” there, though I was never paid. Not in money anyway. I’d show up on Sunday afternoons and help Tom out, learn a lot, and carry home arm loads of LP’s. My appetite was so voracious that I think I usually still ended up paying him, just because I wanted so many things to come home with me, exceeding the day’s “pay”. I became immersed in a world of records and blues and R&B, to the point that I was even asked at various points to fill in for either Scott or Doug doing their shows. I was playing music myself more by now, and just trying to keep up with the never ending deluge of new to me things I was hearing at the Bop Shop. Tom turned me on to everything from rockabilly obscurities to English and Celtic folk artists to more modern jazz to semi-current things like the Cramps (didn’t like them much). My horizons were expanding, but I was mainly ingesting huge quantities of soul and R&B. I began to learn about the world of record collecting, reading publications like Goldmine, which had pages and pages of ads in tiny print, folks selling LP’s and related things between the articles on artists of the past. I never did delve too deeply into this side of things, but I did place a few typed up ads in there at the time, with little success. Biggest sale was to a guy in Japan that paid $25 (plus shipping) for a James Carr album. Maybe I did more than I thought… I do recall big piles of record boxes I’d reuse to ship orders with. I must have bought much more than I sold.
I got busier and busier doing music things as opposed to record things, and eventually scaled back my time at the shop, but I never stopped reading and learning, the flame having been lit by Tom Kohn, Scott Wallace and Doug Curry. Tom especially was such a great guy to take a young socially awkward kid like me and take the time to show me the ropes a bit. We’d go to people’s houses or other record stores and rifle through LP collections, lowballing the owners and walking away with new stock. Come to think of it, I was a serious record addict, visiting every last store within driving distance like clockwork and always finding something I could use. Even the world famous House of Guitars, where records were organized like a dumptruck had simply backed up to the place and hit the unload button, was a frequent source of those cheapo Kent label BB King or other Modern/RPM label reissues. If it was blues or R&B or soul, I had to have it. All of it. Some jazz too, though my appreciation for that wouldn’t ever be what it was and still is for the rawer stuff, not that I didn’t have hundreds of jazz LP’s too. Oh, and bluegrass. And country from long ago. Reggae. Ska. English and Irish music. Etc. The gaps in my knowledge of rock and pop from various eras were filled in as well. Voracious doesn’t even begin to describe my appetite for music all through this period.
Tom Kohn, on the left, doing his thing
Eventually I sorta lost touch with the Bop Shop and the radio show guys as I was playing myself more and more and expanding my horizons musically. But I was still spending several hours each day intently listening, still do, to a lesser extent. I’d have piles and piles of unsleeved records laying around, sometimes a stack of 2-3 on the turntable alone.
I didn’t even own a TV for much of this time, and when I did get one foisted on me it was a tiny black and white deal, used only for sports viewing. To this day I’m still a much more active music listener than TV watcher, though I’ll admit that I don’t seek out new music as much as I could. Too much old stuff that continues to fuel my enthusiasm for life. I’ll forever be thankful for having been lucky enough to live in a town where I was able to encounter people like Tom and Scott and Doug. My musical life wouldn’t have been the same without ‘em!
So there you have it. The reason I’m so annoyingly knowledgeable about a field of interest distinctly free of monetary return on investment of time. As I’ve mentioned before though, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I may be virtually unemployable in today’s economic climate, and will probably never be able to retire like a normal person, but I’ve been richly rewarded in other ways. As long as I still have senses, the gratification of ’em will be enough to get me through anything life throws at me. Adieu!
“There’s a whole dead cat in every bar of Dead Cat Soap!” – Firesign Theatre
Back to current me again. Hope you found this this self-indulgence tolerable. I wanted to once more mention that all three of these fine human beings is continuing even now to do what they did way back in the early 80s, which I find a lot of comfort in. Nobody’s getting rich, but I bet they’re enjoying themselves. Can’t wait to see them all again and tell them in person how big an impact they had on me, one that continues even now. I still sometimes think when hearing something new that’s in their particular wheelhouse genres, “hmm… I bet Doug/Tom/Scott would love/hate/be indifferent to this…”
So buy some records or whatever from Tom, and listen to WRUR on a Friday night. You ain’t even gotta pay for that, and they ain’t gettin’ paid either. I wonder if Scott”s still with USPS. I could use his advice, but by then the mean post office lady and her package mislabeling ways will be a distant yet costly ($600!!!) memory.
Music and more with claudecat17 (aka Chris Davlin)! 
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