“When it comes to vinyl, any nostalgia derived from memories of nosing around my family’s record collection or conning my grandma into taking me to Bernstein-Applebee isn’t nearly as meaningful as the hours and hours I spent flipping through albums in the bins at an indie record store in Kansas City during my 20s.”
“I’ve had some great mentors in my musical life. Alejandro Escovedo taught me rock-n-roll. Charat Chandra taught me how to develop characters. But it was Anne Winter who – through vinyl – taught me (and many others) the human coalescence of music. Anne and her husband, Kurt Von Schlemmer, owned Recycled Sounds (or, as we called it, “Dirt Cheap Records”). For musicians and music fans in Kansas City during the ‘90s, Recycled Sounds was where we discovered music.”
You couldn’t walk into her shop without Anne giving you the low-down on the next band coming through KC, handing you a used record that she’d held for you, or playing you a new record that was in your wheelhouse. Anne and her crew did what chain stores never could; they got to know their customers, befriended them, respected their tastes, and fed them a steady diet of records that would become the most important possessions they owned.
Recycled Sounds closed in 2006. At the time, it was easy to chalk it up as yet another blow to the music community due to both the impersonal nature of the digital era as well as the stupidity of the corporate-music system. A few years later, Anne died. There was nothing easy about that. Her death was a huge loss for the collective music soul of not only Kansas City but for cities like Austin, Chicago, Minneapolis, and New York as well. Any road an out-of-town musician took to play a venue in KC would eventually lead to Recycled Sounds.
On the October morning when I learned Anne died, I went to my old record player – untouched in months – and found sitting on the platter the first record she recommended to me, Only Life by The Feelies. I played that record and tried to make sense of what had happened in her passing; it felt like nothing short of a death blow to our music community.
Looking back now, that period between losing the store and losing Anne looks more like a “spiral” – the spiral is the section on a record where one song ends and another one is about to begin. The spiral is the one place left on earth where you can see silence—reflecting on what you just experienced while simultaneously anticipating what’s coming next.
When it came time this year to release my first solo record, there was only one thing I knew for sure—it had to come out on vinyl. This meant I finally had to get a turntable worthy of hearing my own first test pressing. So I bought a Thorens TD160, rehabbed it, and began to clean my records.
I’d forgotten how many of those records were marked with Anne’s sticker: “Dirt Cheap VG.” Hundreds of records, all with a story of how they came to be mine. These albums are connected to people in the same way each song on a side is connected in one, continuous sine wave. That’s what records and record stores mean to me. They are about people. From the people who made them to the people who gave them to me, all of them motivated by nothing but a sincere love of this art form. All they asked for in return was a dirt cheap price.
Richard Powers wrote, “Surely if two people love the same thing, they must love each other a little.” I think that explains how records and record stores bring people together. The greatest bonds I have with people are made of the c(h)ords of music. And, inevitably, in every relationship, there comes a spiral – the moment of visible silence where we all simultaneously reflect on what we’ve just experienced and anticipate what’s about to come. But, when we come together to experience what we love, we bind ourselves together like songs on a side and, maybe, love each other just a little.”
—John Velghe
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