The Record Store Years 39) Every Rock Musician Worked in A Record Store Once

A memoir of 25 years (1975-2000) spent working in the world of records & music in Seattle, with occasional side trips into writings on Led Zeppelin and other adventures from my musical life.

As with most record stores, Cellophane Square had many employees who were musicians and played in bands regularly. The most notable of these [as discussed in TRSY chapter 35] was Scott McCaughey, who founded the Young Fresh Fellows while working at the U-District store, and later went on to form The Minus Five and achieve gainful employment with R.E.M. among other things.

In the early ‘80s Scott’s [now ex-] wife Christy McWilson was joined by ST as a founding member of Seattle’s americana pioneers The Picketts. At the time ST was managing the Seattle store and and as the band grew in popularity he found it difficult to maintain musician’s hours and a fulltime job, and eventually passed the bass chair on to Walt Singleman who still plays with Christy and in the occasional Picketts reunion in the 2020s.

Dave Crider, who had a memorable stretch as store manager in Bellingham, not only helmed garage-rock outfit The Mono Men but is also responsible for creating Estrus Records and the scene that surrounded it, which will be discussed in more depth in an upcoming chapter. Ditto on Josh Rosenfeld’s label Barsuk, which found success in the mid-’90s with Death Cab For Cutie. In addition, a most entertaining chapter will be forthcoming featuring Dave C’s punk band Pretentious Flamedogs, who “saved Seattle” with their self-produced single bearing the message, “Vote White, Vote Fascist, Vote Jewett.” Wait for it!

Sean Nelson, whose band Harvey Danger had some significant success with their radio hit “Flagpole Sitta” in the late ‘90s, worked at The Ave store for a few months before the band became a fulltime occupation for him. He went on to other musical endeavors including The Long Winters and solo work and has also become a respected critic and journalist writing for The Stranger and other publications. The band This Busy Monster boasted two Cellophane employees in Josh Rosenfeld and drummer extraordinaire Barrett Wilke, who later joined Kinski, which also included Cellophane alumni Matthew Reid Schwarz. Kim Warnick of The Fastbacks and later Visqueen had a brief but visible tenure at the Seattle Ave location in the late ‘90s, and members of The Murder City Devils, Modest Mouse, and many other lesser-known entities all put in stints of employment at one or more of the Cellophane stores.

At one point in the late 80’s Stone Gossard applied for a job at the U-District store. He’s a very personable music guy, and we had a great interview and I seriously considered adding him to the staff. Since hiring and especially training new employees was a fairly arduous process, we were always looking for people that could see themselves committing to the job for a decent length of time. I recall talking to Stone about his music during the interview (he was already in Green River, I believe), and asking him if he would drop everything at a moment’s notice to pursue a musical opportunity. To his credit he was honest with me and said yes. I didn’t hire him, and a few years later he was touring the world as a member of Pearl Jam.

In the early ‘90s when Seattle became the center of the musical universe, anybody and everybody with a plaid shirt and distortion pedal was getting signed to a major label, and naturally this brought some rock ‘n’ roll carpetbaggers to town. One of the earlier transplants was The Best Kissers In The World, who weren’t really ‘carpetbaggers’ as they migrated from Phoenix, AZ to the Northwest in 1988 before things really took off. Shortly after arriving in Seattle, their front man and songwriter Gerald Collier applied for a job at the U-District Cellophane and came on board. Gerald was a talented songwriter and one of those guys you could spot as a rock musician a block away – he had an acerbic wit and a practiced world-weariness that combined into a charismatic whole, which was very attractive to the opposite sex.

Gerald wasn’t the most motivated employee we ever had, but he was fun to work with and everyone liked him. He didn’t stick around Cellophane long, instead moving to a gig around the corner pulling espresso at our favorite coffee shop Café Allegro. He stuck with that for quite a while as I’m sure it gave him more schedule flexibility for playing music, and I would see him almost every morning when I went in for coffee – and he’d always pull me an extra-strong one!

The Best Kissers In The World did end up getting signed, first to Sub Pop and later to MCA Records, for whom they made two albums. They broke up in 1996 and Gerald went on to release some excellent solo material and play and work around the Seattle music scene with various other musicians. Other members of The Best Kissers also went on to contribute to the scene, including Danny Bland who played in The Dwarves and was involved in other music-related endeavors, and Brian Kenney, who was a principal in the great ‘90s band Lazy Susan and today runs Hi Voltage Records in Tacoma, one of the best record stores in the Northwest.

There were many, many musicians who were serious about playing and saw their employment at Cellophane Square as a good day job, but merely a stop on their path to playing professionally. Some of these folks were pretty damn good, forming original material bands, playing regular gigs at the local bars and small venues around town, and releasing self-financed albums or demos on cassette.

In the pre-digital era, cassettes were the best DIY option for releasing music – they were inexpensive, had some possibilities for graphics, and pretty much everyone had a cassette player, at least in their car. It was also much cheaper to have a batch of cassettes professionally duplicated than to press vinyl, and there were a few place in town like Pip McCaslin’s Real Time Recording that did a great job for local artists on a tight budget. And if one was really broke, you could always borrow a 2^nd cassette deck and copy tapes one at a time in the comfort of your own home!

The local indie labels also took advantage of the cassette format, and two notable releases on Tom Dyer’s Green Monkey label had Cellophane Square musicians involved. ‘Contradiction’ was a one-man instrumental avant/noise guitar project by Rich Hinklin, an accomplished guitarist who worked in the Seattle store for a stretch. Michael Cox, who had a much longer tenure working in the Seattle and Bellevue stores, had his own cassette-only release on Green Monkey under the name Glass Penguins. It was a little power-pop gem and involved a handful of local luminaries including Jon Auer, Scott McCaughey, Kurt Bloch, Chuck Carroll, Christy McWilson, Riki Mafune, Tom Dyer himself and. . . Hugh Jones. I borrowed Jimmy Page’s ‘session man’ hat and played the insistent guitar lick and solo on a cover of the Knack’s “Number Or Your Name.” Nailed it in two takes! Well, maybe three.

With the exception of occasional ‘session appearances’ and back porch jams, my own musical efforts in this era were mainly recording-oriented. My kids were young and I didn’t start playing out in bands until the late ‘90s, though in 1988 I too put together a DIY cassette consisting of songs I didn’t write and called it, appropriately enough, Songs I Didn’t Write.

The mighty TEAC 3340 reel to reel tape deck that I used to record the Cheaters in 1978 became the center of my home studio, and I got a used mixer and gradually started accumulating microphones and other equipment – I recall buying a bunch of SM58 microphones and stands from Danny Bland when the Best Kissers broke up. I eventually put together a decent setup for recording a four or five-piece rock band live, and several of the Cellophane employees’ bands came in and made recordings at my place for the purpose of releasing them on cassette.

Above: Kels Koch had a fruitful stint at the Seattle store, and recorded his band The Culvers’ demo at my home studio HJR. They were a great garage/pop outfit with some snappy original tunes penned by Kels.

Below: Madeleine L was a great character on the Bellingham staff in the late ‘80s and played in a band with her friend Kat that exuded a brief flash of pre-Riot Grrrl energy. They recorded some of their tape at Egg Studios with Conrad Uno and released it with one of the more memorable cassette graphics of the era.

I would be remiss in not mentioning Mike Burke and The Smashchords here – a ‘band’ that flew completely under the radar but had a significant Cellophane Square connection. Mike was an outgoing and enthusiastic music lover who we got to know and like as a regular customer in the U-District store. He ran his own floor maintenance business, specializing in commercial spaces where he would work after closing time to avoid disrupting business activity. Cellophane installed a vinyl tile floor in the late ‘70s and Mike became our official maintenance guy – waxing & polishing the floor every six months or so. He’d come in right at closing and was trusted with keys so he could work through the night and lock up when he was done. Mike loved doing our job more than most because he could crank up music as loud as he wanted to be heard over his equipment, and take partial payment in records.

I don’t think any of us knew Mike was a musician until a record came out by The Smashchords on a Rough Trade subsidiary in 1981– and he revealed to us that it was a project he created under the name ‘Jerry Ventura’ with a pal who went by ‘Harlan Mateo.’ The music was all instrumental and proudly DIY, mostly consisting of two distorted guitars, well. . . smashing chords. No drums or bass, no frills or distractions, just crunchy guitars and punk energy – they later put out a couple of cassette only releases, and from the liner notes comes this manifesto:

All Smashchords music is recorded on home cassette decks and this c48 was duplicated in real time on the same equipment. The material here is previously unreleased. Harlan Mateo and Jerry Ventura play cheap copy guitars exclusively.

Somehow it worked, there was a charm and vitality to their bare-bones efforts that made the Smashchords a Cellophane Square favorite. Mike was around for many years and even continued polishing the floors when we put the same VCT flooring in at the big Ave store in 1995. I remember him fondly.

Some of the musicians on the staff had opportunities to play together in informal, semi-regular jams. For quite a few years the owners hosted an annual staff party on the fourth of July, when all the stores were closed and everyone could theoretically make the trip north to their home in Bellingham for the bash. These events were always fun. It was a chance for the employees of the three stores to get to know each other in a social setting, with plenty of beer & barbecue provided by the owners. There was swimming in a nearby lake, pickup basketball games in their driveway, and in most cases a jam session featuring the various musicians on the staff who showed up.

In the early years the jams were mainly acoustic living room or back yard affairs, but in the mid-‘80s the owners would actually procure a room in the community center of their development, and we’d go full-on rock jam with drums and amplifiers. They were always loose and beer-fueled affairs, but I recall some great moments covering Replacements, Black Sabbath and Beatles songs – reflecting the wide variety of music taste possessed by almost everyone on the crew.

Unfortunately in the late ‘80s Bellevue Square decreed that the mall would be open on the fourth of July, and our lease included the clause that when the mall was open, the store had to be open as well. We may have done one or two Cellophane July 4^th get-togethers after this policy went into effect, but since we couldn’t include the entire company’s staff the ‘official’ annual parties ended. The revelry continued however, as the company party evolved into an annual summer bash at my home in north Seattle with everyone from Cellophane Square and pretty much everyone else I knew invited. These events became legendary in their own right, with loud, well-oiled rock jams occurring right next to informal classical chamber music groups provided by my bassoon-playing wife.

Another memorable period of time in the mid-80s was when a great character named Erin B worked at the U-District Cellophane. She lived in a big old house on Roosevelt about three blocks from the store long since torn down, with several roommates including at least one other Cellophane staffer. They threw parties on a regular basis and many of the musicians from the store attended including Josh, Barrett, Jason, Joel, Dave C and me. There were some memorable party jams in their basement featuring tequila, weed and endless guitar solos on Neil Young songs extending into the wee hours of the morning. . .

NEXT: Losing Our Icons

BELOW: Late ‘80s July 4^th six-piece noisefest. Left to right: Dave Crider, ST, Jason A, Dave C, Scott F and Erin B rockin’ out.