by John Demont
Dayna—tall, blond bangs, looking kind of corporate in her pea coat, scarf and boots—is already inside tidying up around the cash. She remembers her first record too: Elton John’s “The Bitch Is Back”—a single in a cover showing the future Sir Elton in a big white boa—purchased in some long-forgotten mall chain store near her South Saskatoon home. “Every time we got our allowance we’d go there and buy a 45,” she says. “We’d be some of the few girls in the store. Then we’d go back to my house—which was one of those places where the kids would congregate; anytime somebody had some troubles they’d stay there—and trade them around.”
She’s animated, effusive—the Type A yin to Stu’s mellow yang. While her husband, humming, goes about his start-of-business duties, she tells me how her older sister turned her on to Cat Stevens, Jethro Tull, Lighthouse and all the other seventies stuff. How by high school she was big into Cheap Trick and, in the eternal question of Beatles versus Rolling Stones, always came down more on the side of the Fab Four than the World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band.
The information tumbles from her as she sits atop the shop’s glass display counter, kicking her long legs like a kid as she talks, raising her voice a bit to be heard over the sprightly Diana Ross floating from the sound system. Dayna freely admits that she is restless by nature: the kind of girl about whom teachers used to say with a sigh of exasperation, “If only she applied herself.” Instead, she just wanted out of school, out of what then seemed like a provincial Prairie town. At fifteen she dreamed of moving to Los Angeles. Four years later she settled for following a sister to Toronto.
Now, back where she started, Dayna is fidgety for a reason. She’s killed most of the morning picking up a total stranger—me—at the airport. The woman has places to be. Revenues at the Vinyl Diner have climbed every year except one since the place opened in 1996. Don’t mistake this for the meteoric arc of a company in a growth industry. Along with putting in her hours at the shop, Dayna works for Canada Disc, an outfit that produces CDs and DVDs for companies and NGOs, and she’s due there any minute. She likes the work and is good at it. It also has a decent benefits package.
That allows Stu to arrive at work in this blissful state. To run a business where his first daily task is to pay a single bill. He does so as a reminder: even though the worst shift at the record shop is better than the best day as an ad company exec—which is what he did for the first fifteen years of his working life—this is still a commercial enterprise. The lights have to stay on. Inventory has to be purchased. Merchandise must be moved.
Stu pulls out a yellow file folder that contains scraps of paper covered with the scribbled names of albums and CDs and the people who desire them. He shifts his old-school invoice pad on the display case next to the pink-and-white calculator he uses to figure out the 10 percent provincial and federal sales taxes that apply in the province of Saskatchewan. Working one-handed, he puts out a box of vintage soul 45s. Then he slaps some old Nick Lowe—one of Dayna’s favourites—into the sound system and cranks the music a little. He takes a sip of chai from his blue Motown Museum mug. He works his neck around a couple of times like an athlete loosening up. “Good morning. The Vinyl Diner,” he says when the phone rings. It is about 11:20. A happy man smiles a patient smile.
THE first record I bought, if memory serves, was a Booker T. and the MG’s 45. I can’t remember the B side, just the band’s signature tune, “Time Is Tight,” driven by Booker T. Jones’s Hammond organ line. That I can summon up this fact forty-some years later, when I have long forgotten, for instance, the name of the first girl I kissed, says something about vinyl and me. Because it’s a complicated relationship. There’s a long gap in my listening memory bank until the Queen Elizabeth High basketball locker room and Kool and the Gang, The O’Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and Edwin Starr. Even then, I don’t remember buying any records at all in the seventies when the hard-core music nuts my age were getting hooked on vinyl. Somehow, somewhere, cassettes started appearing in cars and crappy tape decks. During one memorable summer a couple of buddies and I drove around in a blue Pinto listening to an R and B mixed tape, imagining that we lived in South Philly instead of South End Halifax. But I recall not a single album being in the house that year, or the disco years to come.
One day in 1987 my wife and I walked into an audio shop near our Toronto apartment. I emerged an hour later in a state of shock, the owner of my first record player at the age of thirty-one. Life had surely changed. Whenever possible I made a beeline down what was said to be the longest street in the world to hit the gargantuan Sam the Record Man outlet a few minutes from the newspaper where I worked. (Friends liked to drop by our apartment during this period because it was the only place they knew of where the Dylan records wouldn’t be all scratched up.) Millions of people visited that store from its opening in 1961 to its closing in 2007, six years after Sam Sniderman’s chain of record stores went bankrupt. We’d walk in the main entrance on Yonge or slip past the outdoor chess tables on Gould Street. Then, pulse quickening, we’d try to figure out where in the place, which to the eye had no discernible pattern, to start.
Here, out of necessity, I developed the manual dexterity to delicately feather LPs forward with middle and index fingers at the right pace to make a considered decision to pull one out and stack it on top of the next row or simply to move on. Browsing, I discovered, was as much a state of mind as a physical act. Sometimes I actually had a goal in my head. Mostly I wandered around.
Once we all did. We were a nation of browsers and mean-derers. Price was part of it. Real prosperity didn’t come to this country until the post—Second World War years. Our parents, like their parents, didn’t part with a dollar unless they got 101 cents’ worth of value. A commercial purchase in those days signalled the beginning of a long and meaningful relationship between owner and object. Discarded laptop computers, ice cream makers and video game consuls didn’t spill onto the street from the curb on municipal clean-up day. People didn’t just throw stuff away in the limited-choice age before the global economy and big-box stores because what precisely would be the point? Things got patched, repaired and, if need be, completely rebuilt. Only when the inevitable could no longer be avoided would a replacement be purchased.
If your family was comfortable enough that it didn’t have to make a choice between new shoes or keeping the heat on, shopping was a blast. Families donned their best clothes. They piled into their fin-backed cars. They made a night of it back when shopping was still something a person did in person rather than pointing and clicking. They took their time, luxuriating in the experience when department stores in Canadian cities seemed to represent the culmination of all of civilization until that point in time.
Who can blame them for being a little awed by the massive Simpson’s in Toronto at Yonge and Queen, the colossal Woodward’s at the corner of Hastings and Abbott Streets in Vancouver, the headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company in Winnipeg. These weren’t airport-hangar-sized boxes inside of which people in sweats pushed around shopping carts. The six-storey art deco building that Scottish entrepreneur Robert Simpson built was designed by the same architect who did Toronto’s iconic Bloor Viaduct. The massive stores that Hudson’s Bay built in the 1930s in Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria and Winnipeg were fashioned in an “Edwardian classical” style. In 1930 T. Eaton and Company invited French designer Jacques Carlu to design interiors for its stores in Montreal and Toronto.
Those places demanded attention and commanded respect. I found the old floor plan for Simpson’s flagship Toronto store, which in 1929 had expanded to nine floors. The lower level carried power tools, hardware, garden equipment and auto equipment, and had a coffee shop and lunch counter. along with a wig bar, a men’s tailor, a smoke shop and a bakery shop. On the second floor you could get lingerie, luggage and ladies shoes, on the third furs, wigs and ladies hats. The fourth and fifth floors carried furniture and furnishings, the sixth was home to the bridal registr
y, the Elizabeth Arden Salon, and where a person got Wedgwood china, television sets and hearing aids. The seventh floor included an auditorium, the ninth a grill. The Arcadian Court, which occupied most of the eighth floor, is especially worth mentioning. When it opened in 1929—at the dawn of the Great Depression—the court could seat up to a thousand people on its main floor and mezzanine, making it, at the time, the largest department store restaurant in the world. The restaurant was soon said to be serving over a million meals a year. In 1962 the kitchen prided itself of being able to roast “six hundred birds … at one time.”
PLACES like that, of course, were for the big-city slickers. Most of us lived in towns where it was a big deal to walk through the door of a KMart, Woolco, Kresge’s, Zellers or some other discount chain, where instead of the Arcadian Court’s fabled chicken pot pie we grazed on hot hamburger sandwiches washed down with soda fountain Cokes. In 1967, as millionaires inside the Simpson’s at Yonge and Queen bid on British masters in Sotheby’s first auction outside of Great Britain, kids like me were booting it down to the neighbourhood drugstore, where the new Doctor Strange cost a dime as long as you had a pop bottle worth two cents for trade-in.
The rack of comics had a handwritten sign exhorting customers to read after they bought. But management wasn’t serious. We were allowed, maybe even expected, to take our time, because the tempo to life was slower before seven-day workweeks. Time unspooled at a more leisurely pace when a phone call or even a letter—not some device vibrating in your pocket—was the only way for people to get in touch with you. It was, admittedly, kind of boring back in those days before speed dating and spinning classes, when the ferrets and Arctic owls of Hinterland Who’s Who were enough to command a Canadian’s attention on the television. But there was room within the spaces when life was slower. You could think a little. Civility was honoured. Human interaction took place when there was no need to find some out-to-pasture type and station him at the entrance to a vast shopping emporium with the spirit-sapping title of “greeter.”
It was that way in this country for a long time. Even, I recall, twenty-five years ago when I frequented the Sam the Record Man on Yonge Street in Toronto and they still respected your right to loiter. There, a quarter of century ago, it was entirely conceivable that a tall guy with brown hair and glasses could have said “excuse me” so I’d stop clogging an aisle. Being Canadian I would have stepped aside, or at least turned sideways. Then Stu Cousins could have slipped by.
At that point in Stu’s life Sarnia was history. So was Sudbury’s Laurentian University, where he knocked off a sports administration degree (baseball being almost as much of a passion as music). A stint in Ottawa working for—and Dayna still finds this hilarious—the Canadian Amateur Wrestling Association followed. It wasn’t the right fit. “I applied for jobs at fifteen or twenty ad agencies—I don’t know why,” he says. In 1983 Stu moved to Toronto to work as an assistant media buyer, which he says meant “I bought air.”
He bounced around from big-name firm to big-name firm. But his heart wasn’t really in it. In the mid-1980s, as much as today, what he really loved was music. Not playing it, although he had taken a little piano as a kid. Listening to it. Had ever since he’d lain on his back in his room in Sarnia and tuned into Top 40 stuff on CKLW on his transistor radio. To be fair, a little escapism was perhaps recommended if you are the son of chemical factory workers growing up in a city where a job for life with Dow was about all a fella could ask for. Stu paid for his university by working summers in “Chemical Valley.” He still remembers the summers of 1979–81 and the job he had breaking toxic, hardened aluminum chloride off the walls of a chemical facility. Afterward he would jump in his beater and crank Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town up loud. Then he would drive around the southern Ontario back roads vowing to get the hell away from the life he feared awaited.
The adman’s existence in Toronto at least let him scour the independent record stores he came to favour, like Driftwood and Vortex, and the Canadian chains including Sam’s and A&A Records. He’d hit them at pretty much the same time I would, on the weekends and at lunch hour. “When I hated going back to work after lunch was when I realized I should do something about this,” he says. He moved up the ad agency food chain. In 1991—“The Jays made the playoffs that year”—one of Dayna’s co-workers introduced them. She invited Stu to a Smithereens concert. Sometime later they found themselves at a joint on Danforth Avenue. One thing led to another. Eventually they were up on the dance floor listening to a band cover “Alison,” a song neither of them particularly liked, which happened to be written by an artist they both adored. “We talked about how much we loved Elvis Costello” is how Dayna, at the time a marketing and production coordinator with Strategy magazine remembers it, “and what a great thing it would be to own a record store.”
The bond was cemented the first time Stu rode in her car. “I noticed she had cassette tapes of The Replacements’ Tim and Pleased to Meet Me, which were big favourites of mine” is his recollection. Dayna moved in days later. The relationship survived an early musical crisis: Stu went away on a trip during a move and returned home to discover that Dayna had unpacked the record and CD collection that took up most of their new apartment. “I knew ‘but they’re not alphabetical’ weren’t the best first words out of my mouth the moment I said them,” he recalls.
Cut to Vancouver, 1993: Dayna has snagged a magazine job. Stu is working fourteen-hour days as an ad agency supervisor. Their plan to open a vinyl and CD store is evolving, just not quickly enough for a couple growing weary of the West Coast’s mould. They thought about giving Calgary a shot. At some point Dayna said, what about her hometown? It made a kind of sense. Her parents were getting up there. What’s more, in Saskatoon a nice house went for sixty thousand dollars, a pittance compared with the overheated British Columbia market. At the same time Saskatoon’s indigenous music scene was lively, yet competition in the vinyl business scant.
Stu flew in one weekend alone so that Dayna’s opinion wouldn’t sway him. He walked around. He got the lay of the land. He liked what he saw. Six months later they had a house. A year after that they had rented a smallish space previously leased to an art gallery on a street just off Broadway. In the spring of 1996 the first customer walked into the Vinyl Diner. Neither Stu nor Dayna can remember the person and what was purchased. They just knew that at long last they were in business.
THE current incarnation of the Vinyl Diner is L-shaped and about thirty yards end to end. From any angle in the room you see greyish carpeting, a black ceiling festooned with rows of track lighting, and walls that are egg yolk yellow on the sides and a flat green on the ends. There’s a small book section: mostly music bios, with some graphic novels and other stuff thrown in, and a stack of old music mags for fifty cents a pop. Mostly you see music—CDs and LPs, on the floor, on top of counters and chairs, in stacks and racks and bins and crates. It’s a nice space: kind of drafty and a tad battered, yet with a clean smell that’s devoid of the scent of burned coffee and sweat that you encounter in places that hipsters normally gather. A door leads into a storage room with a mini-fridge and microwave. Windows face Broadway. There’s a leather sofa where customers sometimes chill, it being good business to let people sit down comfortably while they decide what, of whatever you are selling, they want to buy.
The shop’s walls are papered with quotes: “I love the smell of records” (Neko Case); “Record stores are watering holes for dreamers” (Regina Spektor); “Hey, buddy, wanna buy a record”(Tom Waits). Plus more prosaic stuff: “Note: if you leave used records to sell and don’t come back to settle up within 2 months, we consider them to be abandoned.” The eye lands on a Funkadelic poster featuring a motorcycle and a bodacious Pam Grier aspirant in a leopard-skin dress. It skims across forlorn Lucinda Williams cover art; then, moving left, passes over a rectangular Hunter S. Thompson poster to settle on an advertisement for New Scotland Records, which makes the grandiose claim
of being “untainted by scandal since 2008.”
The building’s musical lineage, by the shallow-rooted standards of Saskatoon, is long. Built in the 1920s, it was originally a jewellery store. In time a musical instrument shop moved in downstairs, which is now home to the independent outdoor equipment outlet that owns the building. By 1999, when Stu and Dayna moved in, the upstairs was occupied by an independent recording studio that later moved to a larger space. Being on the second floor wasn’t ideal. On the flip side, Stu and Dayna needed some more space and a Broadway location raised the amount of walk-in traffic.
The footsteps seem to be coming from a long way off as the day’s first customers trickle in: a portly fiftyish guy who announces that he is in search of old Black Sabbath, a youngster with a porkpie hat and soul patch who asks the proprietors about some band I’ve never heard of. The last strains of somebody doing a credible “Stand by Your Man” fade away. Between tunes the sounds of a place of business go on around us: the scrape of shoes on carpet, the hum of motor somewhere in the building, the grind of city traffic. Then some hip-hoppers called Gang Starr fill the air, urging us all to prepare to meet our moment of truth, which strikes me as sound advice.
Stu, by now, has been out to pick up the day’s shipment of product, in this case forty records and eight CDs, from the usual distributor in Montreal, which he carried in under his right arm. He’s done this and that. Now, in a short-sleeved checked shirt over a Vinyl Diner T-shirt, he starts punching in some numbers on the store’s handset.