The Discount Years
Bosstown to the Rockies slippery slope
The months in Boston remain something of a blur in the overall miasma of my earlier years. I had recently split up from my first wife and moved to Cambridge while I went on the road with rock 'n' roll bands for a while but the opportunity to settle down and begin the climb towards management and respectability within the skeleton of the music biz was quite a temptation. The presence of young college girls in Kenmore Square who were enamoured with English accents didn't hurt either.
By the time the Reet had settled into my life, I had made my scurrilous way through a handful of wide-eyed young (but legal) impressionables... and a couple of older ladies who certainly should have known better. The disparity between my own love life and that craved by my new friend was to continue for the rest of our friendship and does so to this day. He had two dormmates... Ritchie and Paul. Ritchie appeared to be the studious one, Paul the natural bookworm and the Reet was a bad influence on them both. I can recall that he came to work one day claiming that someone had fired gunshots at his dorm window... and looking back on the scenario, I think that the idea of haphazard mortal danger and it's repulsiveness were implanted so firmly within his consciousness by the incident that he spent much of his future ensuring that his circumstances would not place him in such danger.... falling through the ice of the Arctic sea might be acceptable as a means of death but not the stray bullet of some anti-social misfit with a blunted axe to grind.
At some particular point, I had managed to convince Discount Records that I was management material. They sent me to Carbondale, Illinois to manage a store for a month, which was fortunate because there I was forced to listen to Todd Rundgren for the first time.. and met the legendary "Kathy from Carbondale"..
Upon my return, I was offered a position in Denver Colorado, as a store manager. I had spent almost a year demonstrating to Discount that I was a young, hip, street-wise retail manager.. that I could be counted on to relate well with young hip street-wise customers.. the kind that buy rock 'n' roll music before food. I had long hair and a devil-may-care attitude. I played in-store music loud and furious.. ridiculed customers who displayed bad tastes and had a disarming and sarcastic wit. I didn't know anyone who wasn't like me and registered all others as meaningless tools of the establishment. I was, in short, a hippie radical.... as opposed to a radical hippie.
I was sent to the straightest store, with the oldest customer base in the chain. The store sold more classical music than any other store. It was in downtown Denver between a jeweller's and a tuxedo shop.. I must have seemed like twelve kinda aliens to the suit 'n' tie crowd that made up 95% of the customers. I had a secret weapon though. Before I found out what kind of store it was, I offered the Reet the job as my assistant manager. It was heavy responsibility and a long way away from the comparitive safety of Queens and the old stomping grounds, but school wasn't lighting any fires and he'd get paid an actual salary.. we'd share a place to live and drink and smoke and party.
He thought long and hard.. and then he said yes.
and he took a dog with him.
I don't remember where the dog came from.. or how we came to take it to Colorado.. or maybe we found it there. What I do remember is that we had to sneak the untrained animal into the staid, old world Brown Hotel in downtown Denver, which is where Discount had elected to have us stay. And then we had to drink several vicious rusty nails before we could get to sleep. The next morning we went to look at the store.. and hid the dog in the vast cavernous basement beneath the shop. The highly conservative proprietors of the Brown Hotel were pleased to see the back of the messy creature who had destroyed their posh hotel room...
just imagine how pleased they'd have been if they'd known about the dog!!
The store reeked of upperclass.. it had chandeliers - for god's sake Chandeliers. It wasn't a good portend for the future and neither were the smartly dressed secretaries, managers and office workers who came into the store on their lunch-hour browsing through the bins of classical and soft rock.. and looking around at the quiet interior of the tastefully decorated store.
It was around this time that we chose to selectively disavow the hard earned reputation for calm dignity that the store had developed over the time of it's previous staff and management.. they had all been let go, upon our arrival. Our clients looked curiously up as the Reet took over the turntable and I climbed the stairs to my office which overlooked the shop floor.
I believe he started gently... I remember being proud of his new-found retail acumen about the customer being right.. He was being kind.
After all, "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" was a classic by the Allman's and scarcely loud at all in comparison to any amount of other stuff that would soon find it's way onto the turntable.
It was this same day that we first met Rebecca Payne.- tony
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