GROOVIN' WITH THE THOUGHT POLICE

Listening Booth was definitely the cooler of the 2 mall record stores.  Long gone now, yes, and probably absorbed by some huge, faceless bomb and pharmaceutical-manufacturing conglomerate, but they rocked back in the day.  Lots of obscure and indie-label music and a whole section dedicated to  punk/post-punk/new wave imports of all shapes and sizes.

The powers-that-be who decided the pricing had a fairly radical attitude in that they seemed to think all imports should be CHEAPER than domestically made vinyl.  Very cool.  Possibly because the sleeves were made with much thinner cardboard, or the shrink wrap was always loose and ill-fitting?  Who knows.

They also had sweet deals on alternative new releases.  I picked up my very first copy of MURMER here for $4.69.  Hot damn!

The catch at this store was that one of the clerks (and the only one who was ever there when I purchased something) was this humorless music nazi who already had a fully-formed opinion on anything I ever bought, and felt compelled to let me know the moral/social/political/ethical shortcomings of whatever artist i was championing on that particular day.  He got very pissy if you shrugged off what he said.

He was a young guy, and I always assumed he was attending the local college but, thinking back, he was ALWAYS at that damn store, so when did he actually go to classes?  Maybe he was just some local chucklehead.  In any case, he was fun to taunt, as humorless zealots usually are….