Exile on Main Street
By David Cotner 08/16/2007
The best record store in Ventura quietly closed its doors recently. No one noticed.
Built on the spot where La Petite Theatre sat in the early part of the last century, the Main Street Record Room was, for many years throughout the ’80s and ’90s, a treasure trove of phonographic cast-offs and odd ends. Piles of 45s and 78s and LPs mobbed the walls and slithered across the floor seemingly at every footfall and shiver from the rain-rotted roof, traveling down through the pegboard walls. The Room was to time what Genghis Khan was to the continent of Asia.
The proprietor was named Craig. For as many years as I ever went in there, I didn’t know his last name, or his hours, or whether the place would still be open, or for how long, or why. As with most good record stores — the ones that claim hours of one’s life yet ironically short slivers of one’s bank account — he was always calm and polite, almost aggressively so. Occasionally he would appear, but mostly he was absent. People spoke of him in quietly puzzled tones. Was he a trust-funder or an eccentric millionaire on a 10-speed? How did he stay in business?
“Can I fix your shop sign?” he was once asked by a young ska fan with attractively crooked front teeth and an eternally dusty fanny from her hours of digging. He politely declined, no reasons given. He was always affable, if slightly withdrawn, and opened the door of the shop with a shrug and a stoop. At length, he installed a listening station: an orange child’s record player with a built-in speaker that played just fine and possibly never had to change phonograph needles because so few people knew it was there, or available, or OK to touch. His nextdoor neighbor, still there, is an aesthetician. The contrast between their respective businesses could not have been more glaring and quintessentially suburban. This is also what has given downtown Ventura — and many small “Main Streets” around small-town America — its distinctive pulse.
As for the records, they were an insanely eclectic bunch that almost verged on the insanely cheap in terms of how much Craig wanted for them. Found throughout the shop’s tenure: the first Elvis Costello 7”s on Stiff Records; Peter Michael Hamel’s soothing and mystical LPs on Kuckuck and later Celestial Harmonies; a bootleg 7” of violent Japanese hardcore band GISM (a la MDC and SPK, they were sometimes known as God In the Schizoid Mind and General Imperialism Social Murder); an import cassette box of the Durutti Column. They may have even had the legendarily lost Nick Lowe The Abominable Showman 8-track buried in there somewhere. The piles are gone now, and their origins were also always a mystery. A few lone LPs dotted the walls the last time anything could be seen through the wooden blinds that hide almost everything there now.
Even if you walked by, you’d never know what was ever there. n
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