Terry Currier - Music Retail

Terry: 0:00

Hi, this is Terry Greer and you're listening to One Hour to Doors.

Jon: 0:11

This is One Hour to Doors, a podcast about the business and soul of the festivals and events industry. I am your host, Jonn Stone. Every episode of One Hour to Doors explores the people, issues, insights and trends impacting the enterprise of bringing people and communities together in common cause. Our guest today is Terry Currier. Terry is the owner of the iconic Music Millennium Record Store in Portland, Oregon. He co-founded National Record Store Day in 2008 and coined the now globally recognized phrase Keep Portland Weird, earning him the title of the father of Portland's Weird Movement.

Jon: 0:54

Throughout his career in music retail, Terry has provided on-site music retail services for concerts and festivals throughout the region. I'm looking forward to hearing about his unique perspective on this niche corner of our industry. Welcome to the show, terry. Terry, you truly have led a career and a life in music. You are credited with so many accomplishments founding the Coalition of Independent Music Stores, the whole Garth Brooks battle thing, your founding of the Oregon Music Hall of Fame. But from my perspective, the most unique and important point is that so many of your accomplishments have been not for yourself but for and on behalf of the music community as a whole. You've never chosen, from what I can tell, the easy path in your career. What's kept you motivated all this time?

Terry: 1:47

The music and the people. It's a great joy to come to work every day. There's new music coming all the time. There's local artists bringing in their albums on consignment that I get to listen to. There's the new releases that come out every week. You know it's being around people that are very passionate about music. It's really exciting. Right now is one of the most exciting times in my life because there's so many people under the age of 20 right now that are excited about the music and excited about physical goods. You know vinyl and CDs. They're keeping the independent stores alive. 20 years ago we couldn't get any kids in our store.

Jon: 2:29

Really. I mean, I've acted surprised, but I'm thinking about myself. Yeah, at some point I stopped going into music stores for a while, as well.

Terry: 2:38

Well, when Napster came along, everything changed. The younger generation in particular goes oh, we don't have to pay for music, we can use that money for other things in our life. You know, we can buy, we can go down to the mall, we can see movies, video games. So it really changed the whole landscape. We weren't getting any new customers and our old customers were either downsizing or passing away.

Jon: 3:06

You know that very same phenomena was playing out now that I think about it probably at exactly the same time frame that you're talking about with a number of major music festivals. One in particular that I was involved with was the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle In the 90s, the late 90s. The festival had been around for 30 years and it had operated in more or less the same format all along in terms of being multi-genre and which genres those were and which stages featured which genre, based on the popularity and audience size and whatnot. By the time you get into the early 2000s, the audience was changing faster and more severely than it ever had since the early 70s. All of a sudden, what had always worked wasn't working quite as well anymore.

Terry: 4:00

When downloading music happened, computers and phones became a big part of people's life and I really noticed in the young people. They were staying in their house, they weren't going anyplace. They were texting their friends and sending messages and talking, but they weren't going anywhere. And what I see right now is a lot of these kids that are coming in to buy vinyl. They're stopping to smell the roses. They want real things. They want to go experience. You know, walking over to their friend's house I'll see four 15-year-old girls in the store, each buy a record and go to one of their houses and they'll all sit in front of the turntable and take turns playing their records and they'll all listen to that. That wasn't going on in the 2000s.

Jon: 4:50

Yeah, I'm actually. I'm very pleasantly surprised to hear you make those observations. You're talking about a younger generation kind of getting back to I'm using air quotes right now the way things were. I'm wondering if, from their perspective, are they getting back to what's important, or are they moving forward and they're just discovering the joy of music for themselves?

Terry: 5:12

A lot of people say things jump a generation and I'm seeing this generation. It's been a generation gap builder. I've seen parents in the store with their kids shopping. I've seen grandparents in the store with their kids shopping. I've seen grandparents in the store with their kids shopping. I've seen grandparents and parents all of a sudden become cool to their kids because they have a turntable in the basement or they have some records in the basement. Oh, can we listen to those? And what's amazing right now which didn't happen 20 years ago when kids just went to listen to downloaded music is this generation. They're coming in and buying contemporary things, but they're also buying a lot of music from 40 or 50 years ago.

Terry: 6:03

And to put that in perspective, in the 1972, when I started working in a record store, that would have been like me buying records from the 20s and 30s and I bought a couple things from that era because I was wanting to find out about everything, but none of my friends were listening to music from their parents' generation or their grandparents' generations.

Jon: 6:28

What was the first album that you ever bought with your own money?

Terry: 6:33

Well, I didn't grow up listening to the radio and I didn't buy records. When I was a kid, my first two records I bought at a White Front store in Burien. That was we're Only In It For The Money and Cruising With Ruben and the Jets by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Wow, I played music and I was going to go to college on music scholarship so I played all the time. But a friend of mine says you got to hear this record. My older brother has. He played Frank Zappa and I'm just like my eyes are bulging out. I go, you can do this with music, because all the music I was playing at school was pretty straightforward Playing standards or jazz or contemporary music in a very straightforward manner.

Jon: 7:24

Yeah, that's a heck of a first album, the first album I ever bought with my own money. I was like probably 10 or 11 years old and I don't think we even had a record player at the time. But the next door neighbor was having a yard sale and in the yard sale there was a couple of crates of vinyl and I had some change that I don't even think I had an allowance back then. I just found some change over the first eight or 10 years of my life, you know, and for 15 cents I bought an album just on the cover alone. Like the cover with art was so striking, I was like, oh, I want to have this. It's just like I was buying art, basically, and it was Cream Wheels of Fire.

Terry: 8:04

Oh, great album cover, by the way, Great album too.

Jon: 8:08

Totally Didn't even realize what I had until probably five, six, seven years later when I started playing guitar. That's when I realized like, oh wow, this is, this is an important piece right here in more ways than one. You said, Burien, are you, where are you from originally? You said, Burien, where are you from originally?

Terry: 8:24

I grew up in Seattle and when I was 16, my dad took a job down. He was a manufacturer's rep for a sporting goods company. He had to do Washington, Oregon and Northern Cal. So we moved into Vancouver Washington area. So he'd be close to an airport so he could fly to these other places but he could also be centrally located for driving.

Jon: 8:48

Yeah, that makes sense. What was your background prior to Music Millennium?

Terry: 8:53

Oh, my first job. I was 15 years old, got a job at the House of Values in Seattle and the House of Values was a variety store, kind of like a very small Fred Meyers. I mean you could get some food products, you could get appliances, you could get sporting goods, you could get records. And then we moved down this way and Pay Less Drugs had bought House of Values and I went to work for Payless Drugs. I went to apply for this job in this new shopping center that was being built at a record store and at the same time a place called Value Mart wanted me to come over and be their assistant warehouse manager.

Terry: 9:40

And I came home one day and my mom said hey, those people called. I told them you weren't interested in the job. And I go OK, because I told her I wasn't going to go take the Value Mart job. And then I realized the next day I go, who called yesterday? Oh, that record store down in Jansen Beach. And I go oh my. So I got in my car, I drove down there it was like 10 days before they were opening and I knocked on the back door and I just go hey, I know you called yesterday.

Terry: 10:16

I'm interested in the job and I kind of let them know that I didn't grow up around recorded music and I didn't know a lot, but I was very enthusiastic about music. I started talking about my first concert I saw the month before, which was Leon Russell and the Shelter People. The guy goes hey, you want to start on Monday, and that's what happened. So for 52 years now I've been working in record stores 12 years with a company out of Seattle that had the store in Portland called DJ Sound City, and then in 84, I came over to Music Millennium. The original owner of Music Millennium had had it from 69 to 79, and he sold it, and in 84, the middle ownership was going to file bankruptcy and shut it down. He didn't want to see his baby go away, so he assumed like a half a million dollars in debt and I went to work for him and we spent the next three years digging it out.

Jon: 11:23

So 84, like how did he get into so much debt in the first place? Do you have any idea? Conditions for the music store, those were still pretty strong years, weren't they?

Terry: 11:32

They were pretty strong at that time because you know you had things like Michael Jackson mania, Duran Duran mania. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there was a lot of that going on. But a lot of record stores, especially independent record stores, started going away around 1980. It became more of a business In the 70s. You could have a record store and business was going up at such a fast pace. You didn't have to know anything about business and you could still make money.

Terry: 12:03

I see business and you could still make money. There was people that were running the company not owning the company, but running the company. That had substance issues, things like that.

Terry: 12:15

And the guys that bought the company. They knew nothing about the record industry and the original owner, when he sold it to them, told him don't even try to meddle in this. Take this staff, let them run it and you're going to have a good operation. Within the first six months, every single employee was gone because they started meddling with everything. So that changed the dynamics of them having a successful formula going forward.

Jon: 12:45

That's very interesting. There's a saying that I offer up quite often to clients Good cash flow can cover up a lot of operational problems. Great cash flow will cover up virtually all operational problems, and life is great until that second that cash flow starts diminishing. And then all of a sudden you're looking at a whole lot of problems that you didn't even understand were there all along.

Terry: 13:12

Yeah, all the cracks come forward.

Jon: 13:14

How and when did you get started doing music retail at festivals and concerts and such?

Terry: 13:20

When it came to Music Millennium we would sometimes sell at shows for artists. I seven months and our president said, hey, we're going to do a festival. We thought it was going to be the Cascade Blues Association Festival but it turned out it was his own festival and we were just the volunteers to make the festival happen. But we got that first festival going and then the following year we decided to have a booth down there to sell product for the artists that were playing the festival. Our first festival was John Lee Hooker and then a lot of local artists. Our second festival got a little bit bigger and we became the vendor for the festival. And one of the great things about being a vendor at a festival for us is we would get in contact with all the artists and if they had any product they wanted us to sell, we would sell for them and if they didn't, we would bring the product in and we would ask the artists if they would like to come over to our booth and do a signing after their performance. That became a very popular part of the Portland Waterfront Blues Festival. People just automatically would come over to our booth after an artist set Is the artist going to sign and you know we would try to get all the artists to make a stage announcement that they're going to sign, but that didn't always happen, so people just automatically started flocking to our booth to see if they were going to sign or not. And that kind of interaction really is a great fan experience. And that's the kind of philosophy I use in the record store too. I want people to come here. It's not a place you just go buy records and CDs. It's a place that you can have an experience. The PDX Jazz Festival. They're now presenting it as the Portland Jazz Festival. They present it as PDX Jazz Presents the Portland Jazz Festival. But that's been going on for 20 years.

Terry: 15:47

Borders Music was the music vendor for that festival. In the very beginning I kept getting a call from the executive artistic director for the jazz festival to come serve on their board, and at the time I was on multiple boards the Coalition of Independent Music Stores, cascade Blues Association, and I just started the Oregon Music Hall of Fame. I kept saying, no, I don't have time to do this, I don't have time to do this. And he goes well, it's only a couple meetings a year and I go okay, I'll do it. So I got on the board and one of the first things he said is Porter's Music isn't going to be our vendor anymore. You want to be the vendor and I go sure. The festival back then was three or four days.

Terry: 16:39

The festival this year had expanded to 16 days, but it's normally around 10 days, covering two weekends, and there can be as many as 100 acts in various different clubs around the city. It could be in the larger venues like the Schnitzer. We had John Baptiste in the Schnitzer this year. We had a small venue called the Old Church that had John Patitucci. We had artists in a Newmark Theater that holds 900. We had artists in Revolution Hall that hold 900. And we used about four or five other venues. We will pick one venue a night to do a show because there's going to be multiple shows going on in the city at the same time. And again, much like the Blues Festival, we have our product out in the lobby and we try to get the artists to come out to the lobby and sign and talk to the fans. It's another great event.

Terry: 17:46

I'm also the chairman of the programming committee for the festival.

Terry: 17:52

After three years being on the board which was the board term I decided I don't want to be on this board, I want to be on just the creative side and I stayed on the programming side. I can remember my first meeting going to a board meeting and there was like 15 people around the table and I was like the last person on the right-hand side of the table and they went down and they asked everybody what function do you want to take care of on the board? And I was scared because there was the financial committee, there was the development committee, there was this committee and then there was the programming committee. I figured by the time it got around the whole table there was going to be so many people on the programming committee they weren't going to let me be on it. But, much to my surprise, these people wanted to be on the finance committee, these people wanted to be on the development committee and I got to be on the programming committee, which is exactly what I love doing.

Jon: 18:58

Nice it was meant to be. I'm a little surprised by that too. I thought you were going to say everybody wanted to be on the programming committee.

Terry: 19:07

I mean that's the best. Yeah, that's the fun stuff.

Jon: 19:13

Talk for a moment, if you would, about the coalition of independent music stores.

Terry: 19:18

In 1993, in January 1993, four of the major distribution companies out of six. They came up with policies that stated if you sold used CDs in your store they weren't going to support you with advertising or marketing money. I typed up a three-page letter this was before computers were being used by everybody and I mailed it to like 125 different major label presidents, vice presidents, distribution presidents, as well as all the trade publications that the music industry had at the time. I stated that it was unfair of them to set policies like this, that it was our record stores and they shouldn't dictate what we do in our record store. And it hit a nerve with the trade publications. They all wrote articles about it. Most of the major label people didn't get back to me. They were like what, what, what are you thinking? But it became a little war between me and the record industry. Over the next six months many other record retailers around the united states, uh, they read these articles in these trade publications and they reached out and goes we like what you are doing there. You took a stance and, uh, anything we can do to help, let us know. And then it got to be June, mark Cope, who worked for the Album Network magazine. He called me up and he goes.

Terry: 20:56

Garth Brooks just had a press conference and he said he didn't want his new album sold in stores that sold used CDs. Now this was just several weeks after Garth Brooks said he had more money than his kids and their kids and their kids and their kids could ever spend in their lifetime. But here he was saying I think if a CD gets sold a second time we should get paid again. So I immediately we had two stores at that time we pulled all our Garth Brooks t-shirts, posters, cds, vhs tapes off the shelf. What we could write up to the record label for return, we did immediately. We all did this in a matter of 10 minutes and that was on a Wednesday.

Terry: 21:48

The next day I go, you know, I'm going to buy an ad in the weekly paper next week and I'm going to invite the public to come down to the store to bring all their Garth Brooks merchandise with them and we'll have a barbecue. And I was going to set up a barbecue in the back parking lot and we were going to grill these things. And I made a press release and sent it out to all the local media Over the next five days, every media in town had either called or came by to find out what are you trying to do here. Then, when we did the actual barbecue in the back parking lot, all the TV stations were there. A lot of the other local media was there on spot. I would grill up like a VHS tape, put it on a hoagie bun with barbecue sauce and take a bite out of it for the camera, and it looked great.

Terry: 22:48

What I had figured out is for six months I'd been going back and forth with the industry and we hadn't made any progress on this issue that if I took it to the public we might have a shot, because the public didn't know anything about this at all. I came up to my office that night. I did a talk show in Seattle and when I got off, one of my employees said you're getting too popular, I'm going to have to be your manager, and I go. No, you're going on the road with me, and he goes. What do you mean? I go, we're going to set up a tour and we're going to go to record stores up and down I-5 from Bellingham, washington all the way to San Diego, and we're going to do these barbecues and we're going to try to create awareness on this whole thing.

Terry: 23:31

We made tour T-shirts that had a burning Garth Brooks CD in the middle of it. We got all the stores all lined up. We had the tour dates on the back of our T-shirt. We got magnetic signs for the van that said barbecue for retail freedom. We were wearing chef hats and we had aprons that said barbecue for retail freedom. Forbes magazine actually sent a photographer to that initial barbecue.

Terry: 24:02

Then we went about writing another press release and sending it out to all the major media in the United States Rolling Stone, the New York Times, the Country Music Network, mtv. We got it to everybody that we were going to do this tour and people started calling and people started writing about this thing and talking about this thing. I remember we were up in Bellingham, cellophane Square, I think it was. You know the Country Music Network called and they go what are you doing? What are you thinking? You know this was blasphemy. You know, just on and on and on, when we were in Berkeley on that tour, we were on the five o'clock news and we went to the San Francisco Giants game that night with our chef hats and our aprons on and there was a whole lot of people in that place that had saw us on the news that night and there was people going hey, it's the barbecue guys. Yay, yay. We saw we were making some headway A few weeks after the tour got done. It was great. The last place we went was Rockaway in LA and Dave Alvin from the Blasters came down to see us. You know we had a lot of support from artists and fans all along the way. We had some great pictures. We went because Garth Brooks was on Capitol Records. We went and took all these photos with all our barbecue gear on and our van in front of the Capitol Records Tower. Wow, it was really great. Through that. The next year I go.

Terry: 25:51

You know, what I discovered from this whole tour is that a lot of record stores have things in common. They have problems, similar problems, and they really have no way to talk to other stores about it, because local stores didn't normally talk to their competitors and share ideas and competitive information. But if we started this group of record stores that were all in non-competitive cities, have a store in Rochester, new York, and a store in Louisville cities, have a store in Rochester, new York, and a store in Louisville, kentucky, and a store in Austin. Maybe people would share ideas to make the store stronger Because, also at that time, the big box retailers were going into all the major cities in the country and they were using music as a lost leader to bring people in to their stores to buy other things and in most cases they were selling under cost. And a lot of independent record stores were going away and I felt that this could be a way to strengthen these stores if we give everybody best practices on how to do this and how to do that, ideas on how do you work with the record companies. Does anybody from the record companies actually come into your store or call you? And there was great record stores like Ear Ecstasy in Louisville, kentucky Never heard from anybody in the record industry at all because at that time they really focused on their top 10 retailers or their top 10 accounts, and at that time it was people like Tower Records, musicland places like that. So the smaller guys really didn't get that much attention because they could cover a lot of ground by just dealing with those top 10 accounts, not do any extra work. And so we put the coalition together. We met in San Francisco to see if we all had common ground to work with and we started it up in 1995.

Terry: 28:06

Out of that, two other coalitions happened In 2007,. The three coalitions got together and talked about putting together a day, kind of like what the comic book stores do there's Comic Book Day called it Record store day. And we went to the major distribution companies and go hey, could you give us some compelling content on vinyl for this special day that we could sell? Could you make these things up? And the first record store day, which was in 2008, there was about 50 titles we hired a national press person who told two stories. One is a hey, there's still 1,800 record stores in America.

Terry: 28:53

Because most of the media had painted the picture that record stores had gone away or were going away. It kind of banged the drum that, yeah, there are record stores out here and guess what? They sell records, actual vinyl records. If you look on a graph. Records and vinyl have just continually grown from that time. It was kind of like the renaissance of vinyl, because vinyl had really gone away in the late 80s. It also gave these independent stores a voice in the industry.

Terry: 29:31

Our coalition, we got pretty aggressive and we went to the record companies and we go hey, we want to work your records, we want to champion your records. Can you give us some marketing money or advertising money and we'll work your records at all these stores? And we would just go to them with particular records that we felt were really, really good records. Some of those early records that we worked were like the second Ben Harper record. You know the record hadn't been on the chart at all on his first record and we started working that second record. The first week it jumped up on the Billboard Top 200. The next week it went a little farther on the chart. The third week it went a little farther and the fourth week I think it got to almost 100. By that point we started doing bands like Southern Culture on the skids.

Terry: 30:29

I can remember calling Verve Records because I'd got a promo in the mail for a John Schofield album with Medesky, martin and Wood. The album was called A Go-Go. This thing just blew me away and I called Verve up and I go hey, this record is amazing. How about if we work this at the coalition? My partner that was helping me run the coalition was based in Alabama and he gets a phone call from Verve and they go hey, this is so great, we're going to get to work this record with you. And it was the first time he had heard because I hadn't talked to him about this record. And he calls me up and goes Currier, what are you thinking? I like John Schofield, I know you like John Schofield, but are our stores all going to be able to sell this jazz record? I go, don, let's get you a copy by tomorrow. You listen to it. He called me up the next day and he goes ah, I see what you're thinking and I talked to like John Schofield a couple of years ago at the Portland Jazz Festival and he says that that record and what we did for that record took his career from playing 200 and 300 seater clubs to playing 1000 to 2000 seat clubs. That was a game changer for him. Same with Southern Culture on the Skids you know they had been, they'd had some independent records and they had a little cult following and stuff. That record became their biggest selling record by far and it took them from playing you know little tiny rooms to be able to play you know 1,000-seat rooms, 2,000-seat rooms. So anyway, I guess we could go back and say Garth Brooks is responsible for the renaissance of vinyl.

Terry: 32:22

In 1989, we put a stage in our store for our 20th anniversary. The goal was to have 20 straight days of live music and at that time I just contacted local artists and I ended up with 40 straight days of live music. I was going to rent a sound system, but in the ultimate end I go why don't we buy a sound system? And it'll always be here, because then we can do this once in a while in the future. Well, I'm a passionate music fan. I started getting on the telephone and calling record labels and management people and since 1989, we've done over four and a half thousand live performances in our store.

Terry: 33:06

Wow, we've had people like Randy Newman, Soundgarden. People like Randy Newman, Soundgarden, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams. It's a pretty amazing thing. It gives the fans an opportunity to come and have an intimate performance with many of these artists and it gives the artists in many cases an opportunity to do something a little bit different than they would do at their show that night. Maybe they got a full band that night, but maybe they come and do a stripped down thing in the store. But it's a really exciting thing.

Jon: 33:40

Excuse my naivete, but was that a relatively new concept back at that time, late 80s, to have a live performance on the record store?

Terry: 33:50

It really was. I was standing on the floor with the then majority owner of Music Millennium, Don McLeod, and we were just thinking about what to do for the 20th anniversary and I go, why don't we do 20 straight days of live music? He goes where are you going to do it? And I pointed up at a mezzanine he goes well, that would make sense. Point it up at a mezzanine, he goes well, that would make sense. And we're kind of known as the pioneers of live music in a record store. It happens on a regular basis at a number of record stores across the United States Easy Street in Seattle, fingerprints in Long Beach, twist and Shout in Denver. I mean there are stores that went to the expense of putting in stages and nice sound systems and made it a really cool experience for their customers and for the artists that come to the store.

Jon: 34:47

I had a band from 92 through 97 that was pretty popular in the Seattle Portland area and we were playing in record stores all the time. So it's fascinating to hear kind of the origin story of where that all came from.

Terry: 35:06

I mean before that we had a few bands play in the aisle and including a Seattle band, young, fresh Fellows, and it was always fun. But when we went to this kind of situation in the beginning, we even put a piano up there on our mezzanine. You know, when Randy Newman's sitting there singing happy birthday to the store on your 20th birthday, you pinch yourself and go. Is this?

Jon: 35:33

real. Oh, that's borderline surreal, something like that. Yeah, you mentioned the Young Fresh Fellows and by association it made me think of Richard Peterson. You remember Richard Peterson? Oh, Richard! I ran into him last fall on the street in Issaquah. It was talk about surreal. I hadn't seen him in like probably 20, 25 years and it was Wow, is he still playing? Yeah, he's still playing, and he actually the last time I'd seen him is he had just lost a gig. He had playing piano in the reception lounge of KOMO Channel 4, downtown and for whatever reason, he had lost that, but he was still coming in and he was upset. He was angry that the gig had stopped. So he was still showing up every day and trying to convince them to start the gig back up and it wasn't looking great and it was just, it wasn't.

Jon: 36:26

You know, maybe I just caught him on a bad day, but that was the last I saw him. But then I bumped into him and you know, like all of us, he's older now but he was just in a jovial mood. He, you know, richard, this won't surprise you, but he recognized me from just a handful of brief interactions over the years.

Jon: 36:45

The first time I saw him he was opening for I think it was Love and Rockets at the Paramount Theater. I think it was Richard opening for the Fellows opening for Love and Rockets, or something like that.

Terry: 36:56

Oh my.

Jon: 36:57

He just captivated me with his act and so I bought an album from him in the lobby after the show and he autographed it. I still have that, but he claims to have remembered even that interaction, which I don't doubt. Wow, yeah, he says he's playing. He doesn't have any paid gigs but he plays every day and of course he would always like to play more, but it was just a good, it just felt good, it was great to see him. So you're talking about the power of getting the artist to autograph after the gig. The greatest example I've ever seen of that is Chris Isaac, and I've had the pleasure of I've worked many, many, many Chris Isaac shows over the years that man knows how to sell merch like no one else.

Jon: 37:53

If there's 4,000 people at the show, which there usually was, at least half of those people would line up after the show to meet and greet and get a photo and get an autograph from Chris, and it would take sometimes the autograph session would take just as long as the show took. I mean, those were always long nights getting out of there, but it was okay because that guy, he would just move the product like no one else in the business.

Terry: 38:14

And it's a great experience for the music fan, for them to have the opportunity to meet an artist that they really care about. It leaves a lasting impression, yeah.

Jon: 38:25

The only other artist I can think of that compares was Dashboard Confessional. When they were first really hitting, I had them in a show at what's now Wamuu Theater. Oh yeah, I think we sold 10,000 tickets, 9,000, 10,000, or something like that. And I remember loading in for that. And a truck driver came up after lunch and he's like, hey, can I get a fork to help? I've got some merch I need to unload from my truck. Yeah, sure. So I jump on a fork and go to the back of his truck and he's got a couple of pallets of T-shirts and records and stuff on the back. It's like, all right, grab these, I'll take them. Want me to take them over to the merch stand? Yeah, that'd be great. He says. And then come back, I've got more. Okay, great.

Jon: 39:11

So I took two full pallets over there and to me that was like that was a ton of merge. Long story short, I kept coming back and he kept unloading pallets. It was an entire 48 footer full of merge. Wow, I kept trying to reason with him. It's like, hey, guy, you know, we don't want to take all night having to load this stuff back up at the end of the night. And he's like, oh no, you don't understand. We're not going to load anything back up. I didn't believe him, but no, I think we put like a pallet and a half back on the truck at the end of the night.

Terry: 39:42

Well, I know in the 70s and 80s there was many artists that were touring around the country and they actually made more money off their merch than they did actually getting paid for their shows, made more money off their merch than they did actually getting paid for their shows and it was a way of supporting the band. So it's a really important feature.

Jon: 39:59

Yeah, yeah.

Terry: 39:59

How has the digital age impacted on-site sales at festivals and concerts and such Well, when people started getting into downloading music and they accepted that as their format of choice, physical goods at the booth would drop some. However, there was also this sense of ownership. Many people that weren't playing CDs or weren't playing vinyl would still buy something to get was important to the artist. And that's what I see with the younger generation that's getting into physical goods. Now they use streaming to. I mean, streaming is almost like their radio station of today. They'll listen to streaming and if they like something well enough, they'll come by the physical piece, but streaming is still part of their listening experience. But they want ownership in the band that they do care about Going forward. Right now it looks good for physical goods. I mean, physical goods are only 10% of the business in the industry because streaming is really 90% of the revenue.

Jon: 41:18

That's the current ratio.

Terry: 41:19

Yeah, but for independent stores, vinyl has been a big survivor for them. In 2008, the first record store day happened. If you look on a graph. I mean at that time vinyl sales nationally on new vinyl was less than you know, 25% of 1%. It was very, very negligible. But if you look on a graph, this thing has grown and grown and grown and the interest just keeps going up. We'll find customers in the store that got rid of their record collection years ago, that are now rebuying their record collection. And then there's the kids who are building their record collection for the first time and a lot of people say CDs are going away. But I'm also seeing a certain amount of younger people buying CDs now too. Cds are much cheaper than vinyl. But a lot of 16-7 hero kids are getting their cars for the first time and they're getting a used car. Oh sure, it has a CD player in it. We got to go get some things to put in this thing, some accessories. Yeah, they're thinking these things are pretty cool.

Jon: 42:37

In terms of your sales of physical goods. What's the mix look like currently? What percentage is vinyl albums? What percentage is CDs, so on and so forth?

Terry: 42:49

Piece wise. In our store we're still selling. About 40% of the pieces that we sell are CD and 60% are vinyl. Dollar-wise it's a little different because vinyl costs a lot more. On the unfortunate side, there could be as many as 2,500 record stores in America today where in 2007, there was only 1,800, that will sell some kind of new product in their store, but most of those record stores are not selling CDs. There's probably only like 500 record stores in America that are buying and selling new CDs. There's a lot more that are probably selling used CDs.

Terry: 43:32

It's been a problem for the format because a lot of the major record companies they're looking at CD sales are on the decline and when they run out of a title do they make it again. So we're seeing titles that go away. But on a positive note, there are certain CDs in our store, like Fiona Apple. This last year on CD Some of her titles sold, you know, 50 to 75 copies each. Wow. We looked at Jeff Buckley's Grace album. We sold 102 copies in the last 12 months on CD. Granted, it's a cheaper price CD you can get it for $8 or $9, so it makes it something that people can really afford. I mean you're looking at the vinyl pricing these days of being somewhere between $25, $30 a piece, you can find three budget CDs for that. So some people are looking at buying their music. They can get more music if they go the CD route.

Jon: 44:37

Absolutely Just out of curiosity. What was the pandemic like for the store?

Terry: 44:44

It was scary. It was really awful in the beginning. I remember we were going to have a meeting on the 16th of March to talk about adjusting our staff because our business didn't seem to be as strong as it had been the previous year. That meeting became, we looked at each other and goes what are we going to do about this COVID thing thing? And when we walked out of the meeting an hour later, we had decided that the next day was going to be our last day to be open to the public. We were going to have to furlough a bunch of our employees and we were going to go to short hours and do mail, order and customer pickup only order and customer pickup only. On that Wednesday, the 18th, I called most of all my suppliers and I go I don't know what the future beholds, I don't know if I'm going to be able to pay you on time. I don't know what kind of revenue is going to be coming through the door, because we're going to be closed, basically. And I just want all you guys to work with us because we don't know how long this thing is going to last and we want to be around when it's over. And luckily, a lot of those companies did work with us. We were able to do 30, 33 percent of the business without the store being open and we had a very short staff. There was a lot of work for employees, you know, because they were taking telephone calls all day and then going out and shopping for customers or they were filling online orders. We did that for about three months and then we opened up the store to a limit of 10 people in the store at a time and we have a 6,000 square foot store, so that's not very many people in there, but everybody could be well spaced from each other. The next thing you know, because the you know the rain, snow and sleet that happens in the Northwest, we put in awnings out front because there was always a line out front waiting to get into the store. We even had some private shopping experiences. We were open from like 10 to 6, but we would have some private shopping experiences for people to come in at 9 o'clock in the morning or at 6 o'clock at night and just privately shop in the store on their own. Everybody was afraid of COVID. Nobody knew exactly how bad it was going to be. We were seeing people dying on the news so nobody wanted to get it for sure. When it came to November of that year we started opening till nine again.

Terry: 47:36

And then in December I looked around Portland. There wasn't well. Downtown Portland was a ghost town because most of the businesses the office buildings and stuff they all vacated so they quit coming to work in those buildings. So all the little businesses were going out of business because they didn't have anybody to support them and we had a lot of protests going on in our city because of the Rodney King thing. Nobody wanted to go downtown. There wasn't anything open past six o'clock downtown.

Terry: 48:10

So I decided the only places people are going to buy holiday gifts would be CVS, walgreens and Fred Meyers. And so I decided to stay open from 9 am in the morning until 11 o'clock at night, still not thinking that we would even come close to doing the business we had done in the past. And we ended up surpassing the previous December because once people got in with their little Christmas list, like I'm going to get this for my brother and I'm going to get this for my dad, they got in the store and goes well, and I'm going to get this for my sister and my mom too, because here I'm in a shopping space and I might as well get it all done. Yeah, yeah, yeah, don't know when you're going to get the next opportunity. Yeah, a time when families bonded again and that's where we saw a lot of that younger generation get into vinyl, and we saw a lot of families come down during COVID and shop together. That was pretty exciting.

Jon: 49:26

As time goes on and COVID slowly starts fading into the rearview mirror. One of the more fascinating things to me about that era, from a business perspective, was just the totality of the unknowns that we had to address. You were speaking about trying this and like, okay, that's not doing it, trying that experimentation, and I experienced the same. I think everybody experienced the same. We don't understand what we're up against. We don't know how long it's going to last, and the only thing that we do know is that everything that has come before doesn't work anymore at the moment. So what do we do?

Terry: 50:06

Yeah, I mean I was doing daily deals of the day and posting them on Facebook and other social medias. Daily deals of the day and posting them on Facebook and other social medias we were coming up with fun things that would get customers involved Trivia questions, different things that people would come to our Facebook site and see fun things to do. We even made a Music Millennium mask. I got little bottles of hand cleaner. You got an order to go. We're going to throw some sanitizer in there with your order. Different things that just got people's attention that hey, we're here.

Terry: 50:44

And one of the great things that I saw happen is I went to the customer base and I go you know, think about buying a Music Millennium gift certificate right now, send it to a friend. We could use the money now. I saw a lot of people buy gift certificates and do just that, just to support the store. Oh yeah, we had customers in the area. In the area we had a couple of customers that bought $500 gift certificates just because they wanted to make sure that we were going to be there and we weren't going to go out of business while COVID was going on.

Jon: 51:21

Now not to get into the weeds, but in Washington state the law says that you have to carry unused gift card balances on your balance sheet for X amount of time, gift card balances on your balance sheet for X amount of time and then after that, if it's still unused, you have to send that money to the state.

Terry: 51:39

Well, we didn't used to know that, but when we found out that we now send money to the state so it's similar in Oregon then yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they have a thing called personal property too, and even uncashed checks that we would send to an artist that had product on consignment and you can't track them down to find out. Hey, you know, you still have that check. Can we send you another check? If you can't contact them, you have to give that money to the state and it just goes on public record.

Jon: 52:13

This sounds awkward saying this, but if there is a silver lining to that whole era, it was a time of enormous creativity.

Terry: 52:21

Oh, there definitely was, and you know that's something else we did in the store a few times. We had some artists come down and we did some streaming. Curtis Algato had a brand new record coming out on Alligator Records. Since you couldn't have anybody down the store, I brought him down and I did an interview with him on Street Date and in fact that day the whole city was snowed in and his manager calls and goes I can't go get him. I don't think we're going to be able to do this. Well, I called him up and I go, curtis, I've got studded snow tires on. I'm coming to pick you up. You're coming to the store and I'll take you home.

Terry: 53:05

But people like those kind of things. The fruit bats did that. It was really fun and I saw a lot of artists out there the poor artists. They couldn't play in venues. They hadn't. You know. They lost their source of revenue and many artists went to doing online shows from their living room and people would make donations to their PayPal account. People would make donations to their PayPal account. Some of them were really, really creative, but it also gave these artists the opportunity because they didn't have anything else on their plate to create music in their house, write record. And you know, after COVID a lot of these projects came out.

Jon: 53:52

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I read in an interview that you once did you were talking about physical albums versus digital downloads and streaming and all that, and you made a comment that stuck with me. You said that you'd considered the vinyl album to be perfect for listening to because it had a limit of about 20 minutes per side, and you were comparing that with the average attention span of a human being and I thought that's a really important observation. That's a really important connection that I'd never thought about before, and I've spent my entire career in music and it just never really dawned on me that way.

Terry: 54:32

When we went to the CD format, you know you could do up to about 75 minutes of music and people started making longer albums.

Terry: 54:41

A lot of those tracks that ended up on the cutting floor, that never made it to vinyl, were now making it on the album, which diluted the listening experience because some of them weren't worthy enough to be on a great record. What happens when people listen to CDs being 75 minutes long if they're sitting in their living room, you know, when it gets into that 20, 25 minute point I'm going to go to the kitchen get a beverage, or I've got to go to the restroom All these different distractions come up. So they lose that one-on-one connection with just sitting there and just immersing themselves in listening to that music. With vinyl, each side was anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes and you could listen to that much and not be distracted. And then when you got up, you could either go to the restroom, go to the kitchen, come back and then play the other side or pick another side of a record from another record in your collection.

Jon: 55:48

In that same interview you made the assertion that the resurgence and the popularity of vinyl is somewhat analogous to the rediscovery of music as an art form rather than just a commodified entertainment piece.

Terry: 56:01

Well, there's a lot of great benefit to a 12 by 12 album cover. I can remember immersing myself into record stores the first year I worked in a record store because I wanted to make up for lost time and find out about all the music I didn't know. And I shopped other record stores too. I shopped Music Millennium on a regular basis. Our store, dj Sound City, closed at nine o'clock. I could get to Millennium by 9.15 and they stayed open to 10. And I would go in and read album covers back to back. I can't tell you how many records I bought because I saw this great album cover on the wall and it spoke to me and I would grab the cover down and you'd look at it. You'd look at the back. Sometimes you'd go, oh, look at that guest artist. Joe Walsh is on that. I know him from the James Gang. I think I'm going to try that out. Or this person had produced this thing and you read all those things.

Terry: 57:05

When you sat down and listened to the record, you held that album cover in your lap and it was kind of a whole experience. And I looked at the vinyl album more of an art piece when it went to the 5x5 CD. The artwork was so small that it didn't have the impact that it did. When you saw a 12x12 jacket on the wall it was. Also the CD was encased in plastic, which kind of took away that feel.

Terry: 57:39

When you're sitting there with a great album cover, you take the record out of the sleeve and you go to your turntable and you got to be real careful with it. You got to treat it well if you want it to play good again in the future. You know you're taking great care with this. This is all in a part of the experience With a CD. You know I saw people put their CDs on and throw the case in the back seat of their car. They just didn't treat it in the same fashion and I would sit down with like a good CD reissue that had a good 12-page booklet inside and start reading it. And the typeset was so small that you know by page three or four you're rubbing your eyes and you're sitting it down because I'm not going to read the rest of this right now. But with a 12-by-12 album and anything that was included in that, you did immerse yourself in that.

Jon: 58:37

What kind of advice would you offer to young musicians who are, you know, just getting started in their career, or maybe not so young musicians that are trying to refresh their career In terms of the value or not of getting their music physical music placed in the physical brick-and-mortar stores, is it worth the effort and then what's the best path to go about doing that?

Terry: 59:04

It is worth the effort and most good independent stores will take product in on consignment so they don't have to outlay any money in the beginning. But then that product's in the store, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to sell A good young artist. They've got to put work into what they do. They may be able to do some of that themselves. They may be able to surround themselves with friends that can help them out. They need to enhance their career. They can help them out. They need to enhance their career. They need to promote themselves. They need to get their music in front of the local press.

Terry: 59:43

Now a lot of record stores do have live performances in the store. We do a lot of local artists in our store. In fact we've hosted record release parties for artists because they wanted to do it at the store or they weren't big enough yet to where they could get their foot in the door. In a club. A good local band with a good team of friends around them can make things happen.

Terry: 1:00:09

You know, from putting posters up, flyers out, getting the word out the term was brought up like 20, 30 years ago Street team is really actually having your own little street team to help you do everything you need. Sometimes artists are just artists. They're not promotional minded, they don't know what to do with these things, but within their community there's usually some people that can do those things, and when an artist gets to a certain level, well, they may change those people. They may need more services because they're getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and they may go out and hire people that do that kind of stuff on a regular basis to help get their music out to as many people as they possibly can.

Jon: 1:01:01

I get asked a lot by artists who are just starting out how to get more gigs and I've developed this patented response that I tell them artist or entertainer, choose one, and of course it's got to be a mix of that. Neither are mutually exclusive, but the point is you have to understand at all times who's paying for what and the reality of it, no matter what we like to think as artists, the reality of it is that 99% of the people, 99% of the time when they are purchasing an album or a concert ticket, that money is coming out of their entertainment budget. You know, if the club is hiring you for that Thursday night gig, the cold hard truth is they're hiring you in an attempt to sell more beer.

Terry: 1:01:56

That's it.

Jon: 1:01:57

That's the reality. That's the way that it works. It's not about your music, and there's no offense, there's no nothing negative meant about that, it's just it's. Entertainment is a business, art is a practice. If somebody would have just told me those simple words when I was 19, I probably would have been a lot more effective in my live music career.

Terry: 1:02:21

Yeah, and it's changed a lot, say, from the 70s to now, with clubs. I used to see local bands that could play four nights a week in the same club and the club would be happening every single night. Liquor laws changed and you know how much alcohol could be in your body changed and a lot of people said, well, I'm not going out all the time. Now there's a lot of clubs that don't want a band to play at their club if they've played in the marketplace in the last two months, because they want to have the largest crowd they possibly can in that club. And it goes back to what you're talking about selling concessions.

Jon: 1:03:06

Yeah, yeah, just understanding what your actual role is in the economy of music is, I think, one of the most important things that young artists can do. I'm going to hit you up with a few seemingly random questions. What is your favorite sound?

Terry: 1:03:26

My favorite sound? Yeah Boy, that's an odd question, because I like so many different kinds of sound, just like I like so many different kinds of music. I'm not fixated with listening to rock or soul or hip-hop or whatever. I like stuff from all genres of music. If it's good, I like it. If it's good, I like it. The first year I started buying records, which was when I worked in a record store, in 72, I bought 665 albums. I got out of school at noon. I could work a 40-hour a week job. All my money went to music. I was buying Waylon Jennings records. I bought an African witchcraft record. I was buying hard rock, soft rock, you name it. If I heard it and it was good, I bought it.

Jon: 1:04:25

Did I hear you correctly, you said you bought 600 plus albums in 72?

Terry: 1:04:32

Yeah, from September 72 to about September of 73. Wow, I mean, I was a kid in a candy store. I mean I bought records every single day. It's when you make those wrong decisions in your life it goes well. I'm skipping buying lunch today because I can get a record tonight. I'm not going to date anymore because that costs me money.

Jon: 1:05:04

I'm not going to take a date to a show, because that's going to cost me money. I can get more records. Priorities, man.

Terry: 1:05:08

Priorities.

Jon: 1:05:09

There is Just out of curiosity do you have like a large record collection at home or do you just use the store as your record collection?

Terry: 1:05:19

No, I have a large record collection at home. It's kind of unwieldy. I don't have enough time to take care of it and I've never downsized it. So everything I've ever bought is at home and there's not enough room for it, is at home and there's not enough room for it. So you know, I have a 20 by 20 foot record room with three and a half walls of vinyl from floor to ceiling on it, and then in the middle of that room is a bunch of U-Haul boxes that say A, b, c, that have another five or 6,000 records, right Sitting in the middle of the room. I probably have around over 25,000 records and probably equally as many CDs.

Jon: 1:06:07

Congratulations.

Terry: 1:06:10

Oh no, I would like to downsize, but that's a tough thing in itself. I always said I'm not going to get rid of anything because maybe I'll get hit by a Mack truck one day and I'll be laid up for a while and I'll be able to listen to everything I have, yeah, and. But now that I'm getting older I'm going. You know, I'm not going to make it through all these records, and maybe some of these records need new homes.

Jon: 1:06:36

Yeah, you're going to have to start listening here pretty soon. Do you have a—I almost hesitate to ask this for fear that it might freak you out but do you have a Desert Island disc? If you could only have one album?

Terry: 1:06:49

Oh, I actually do Really, In my favorite list of albums of all time. There are no greatest hits albums in there, but my Desert Island disc is a greatest hits album and it's Sly and the Family Stones' greatest hits and I just find the energy and the messages and everything about that record just speaks to me in a good way. We used to have a second location and we closed it down in 2007 because the record industry at that point was at its bottom and we needed to sign a new lease agreement and the rent in the area we went just kept going up and up and up and I go no, I can't sign a long-term lease because it could drag down the whole company in the ultimate end, and this was before the vinyl renaissance, so it didn't look good. And the last record we played in the store was Dance to the Music by Sly and the Family Stone.

Jon: 1:08:01

Wow, that's a great story. You walk into an ice cream store and you're going to get an ice cream cone with two scoops. What are your two flavors?

Terry: 1:08:11

Well, as you know, I wear black and I wear black all the time, so there would have to be a scoop of licorice, and I'm a sucker for cookie dough, cookie dough, ice cream. Whoever came up with that concept came up with a great concept, that's just. I remember growing up and my mom making cookies in the kitchen and always going in there to hey, can I have some of that cookie dough?

Jon: 1:08:40

So a scoop of licorice, a scoop of cookie dough, which one goes on top.

Terry: 1:08:45

Oh, that's a tough one. It's important though, I think the cookie dough goes on top, and I think the black licorice ice cream is the last thing that goes in your body.

Jon: 1:08:56

I'll support you in that decision. You're the second person this is a question I ask everybody on the show and you're only the second person to bring up licorice ice cream.

Terry: 1:09:07

Well, it's the same color as vinyl, so maybe there's something in common there.

Jon: 1:09:12

You could be the first person to call out licorice was actually on my very first episode, producer of the Issaquah Salmon Days Festival and licorice and she's originally from Canada. She said that licorice in Canada is a very popular ice cream flavor, whereas down here I find it's really polarizing. Few people love it and then everybody else shuns it for the most part.

Terry: 1:09:38

No, you don't find licorice ice cream on the shelf at the grocery stores down here. You know you got to go to those unique little ice cream stands to get that.

Jon: 1:09:48

Robin said that in Canada licorice is commonly swirled with like an orange sherbet and it's called tiger tail.

Terry: 1:09:56

You know, I got to try that out. I do like orange sherbet too, so maybe that's a new combination.

Jon: 1:10:03

Apparently, that's what's going on up north. Terry, I want to thank you for making the time to sit down and have a conversation this morning.

Terry: 1:10:14

Good talking to you, Jon All call, One Hour To Doors.