BEHIND THE COUNTER WITH PETER BUCK
Sometimes it all comes down to that girl in the record store. If you happened to be a preteen guy in the mid-’60s, the record store was an exciting enough place to start—all those colors, all those LPs, all that exotic music, the possibility that your fave band might have released something since you last visited. If you also happen to have a crush on the girl behind the counter, you can get hooked for life. Peter Buck is living proof.
“I think her name was Susan,” recalls the lanky guitarist, now well-known as one-third of R.E.M. “It was at a little proto-mall in California, a little square of shops with a record store in it. She was the older woman that I had a crush on, though she was probably all of twenty years old. She had go-go
boots, the whole nine yards. And she’s always telling me, ‘You don’t want to buy that Tom Jones record. You want to buy something cooler, like this Rolling Stones record, or this Eric Burdon & the Animals record.’ It was very influential to me that you tied these two things together—that kind of inchoate sexual urge, and buying records. I believe Freud says that there’s a sexual component to collecting—but not having read Freud, I’m either totally naive or I’m just a huge pervert.”
That girl in the store figures in many a collector’s history, and she usually serves to sexualize an obsession that was already brewing. That was definitely the case with Buck. “I was already obsessed. Everyone else was more into baseball, which I liked okay. But my dad had a homebuilt Heathkit stereo, and I could not keep my hands off it. My dad happened to like Ray Charles, that was nice. My mom liked Burl Ives, and I think I’m scarred for life because of that. They finally had to buy me a little close-and-play turntable because I couldn’t leave theirs alone, and that was just in time for the Beatles. I still have the first record I bought—‘A Hard Day’s Night’ in the original picture sleeve, which I cut in half and tacked to the wall everywhere I’ve lived. I can afford to buy a pristine mint copy now, but I want the worn-to-shit single in the plastic bag. That’s where I come from.”
Susan’s whereabouts are lost to history, but record stores remain Buck’s first love. There’s a reason he gets along so well with rock critics and other music-heads, they recognize him as part of the same breed. It’s a popular part of R.E.M. mythology that Buck was working at a record store—Wuxtry
Records in Athens, Georgia, still one of the town’s hotspots for imports and indie-rock releases—when the band was formed. (Stuffed with used vinyl and lined with gig flyers, Wuxtry still looks like a collector’s living room after a tornado hit, and that’s a good thing.) After R.E.M. had their first taste of nationwide success, at the point when most rock stars think of buying a house in the Bahamas, Buck wound up working at Wuxtry again. “I think it was 1986, which was the first year we didn’t tour 350 days a year. My old boss said to me, ‘Don’t you ever miss working?’ and he was right. I missed that whole process of checking in, doing the count and having the records there. So I worked there every Monday for maybe four months. I didn’t take any money because I didn’t want to deal with that, but we added it up and I had enough credit to get the import Muddy Waters box. So I was happy, except that the liner notes were in Japanese.”
Like many collectors, Buck never shook his childhood memories of the record store as a magical place. “I had the quintessentially great record store experience,” he recalls. “I was living in Montrose, California, just north of Glendale. There was one hip record store out there where everyone had hair down to their shoulders, the guys had beards, the chicks looked like chicks look now. I was thirteen, I walked in there and said ‘I’d do anything to work here.’ Finally they said, ‘Okay, you can sweep up once or twice a week, and we’ll give you discounts on records.’ Which, knowing what I know about retail now, means that they had me working for free for a whole year. I figured they were probably cheating me a little bit, but I got treated like an adult by these older
people, these guys with huge beards. They’d tell me things like, ‘You’ve gotta get out of here because I’m going to smoke some pot.’ And I’m like, ‘Wow, man! I heard about that! Can I smoke some pot, too?’ And they said, ‘No, you’ve got to go out back.’ So I went back and swept the floor while they smoked the herb.”
So the young Buck struck out on the sex and drugs, but at least he got the rock ’n’ roll. “Yeah, I got great records. That first James Taylor record [Sweet Baby James] that wasn’t on Apple? Got it the day it came out. The first Black Sabbath album? Got it the day it came out. Then I moved to Georgia and fell in with the guy who ran the record store there—he was 280 pounds, with a beard and hair down to his waist. Totally stoned all the time. But he liked me, and I was fourteen. He’d call me up and say something like [in conspiratorial whisper] ‘Hey, that new Stones album, Exile on Main Street, it’s coming out tonight.’ He’d call my house and I’d have to hitchhike fifteen miles to get to the store. And hitchhiking in Georgia, if it’s 1972 and you have hair down to your shoulders? Totally fucked. A bad, bad experience. You were either getting beat up, or having things thrown at you, or getting propositioned by people you didn’t want to get propositioned by. But I’d hitchhike in, get the record and then hitchhike back out.”
There’s a number of reference points Buck shares with anyone who became a vinyl junkie in the ’70s. Even something as commonplace as the Velvet Underground’s first album—which you can now get in at least three different CD formats—was officially out of print in the late ’70s, just when a host of
punk bands were insisting that you go out and find yourself one. “That’s why I started collecting, because I come from an era where everything was out of print. You couldn’t get any John Coltrane. Miles Davis’s On the Corner went out of print the year after it came out. Even Pet Sounds [the Beach Boys album that’s both a legit masterpiece and a critical sacred cow] was hard to find. Today you can sit down on Amazon and get everything delivered to your house. But my collecting impulse came from knowing that the airwaves were full of England Dan & John Ford Coley, things I didn’t want to hear. And what were the record stores floating? Bullshit. There was good music out there, but you found a lot of it used or remaindered. I found the Skip Spence album Oar for 29 cents in a bargain bin in Roswell, Georgia. It’s beat to shit, but I still have the same copy.”
In his years behind record-store counters, he had no qualms about pushing the right records on people. In fact, there’s probably more than a few Georgians who had their tastes warped for life when they went down to buy some current hit, and Buck sent them out with a Velvet Underground album instead. “I was the best retail salesman you’ve seen in your entire life. I couldn’t sell cars or tin huts or anything, but as far as records go, I was always excited. They always did more business during my shifts, because I was so excited about the records. I wound up working at Doo Dah Records in Atlanta—a pretty straight little store, but me and one of the other guys who worked there ordered all these English imports.”
Launching into his record-store rap, Buck shows a bravado
that he sometimes softens in R.E.M. interviews, where he maintains a degree of modesty. “I still think that if I ran retail, it would be my world. I’d have no trouble getting into it. Back in 1977, we had all these thirteen-year-olds coming into the store. They’d ask me for a Judas Priest record and I’d say, ‘Man, if you like Judas Priest, I’ll tell you what you’ll really like: The Ramones. They’re really cool, and I think they’re better for someone your age. I think you should buy the second Ramones record, as opposed to the eighth Judas Priest record.’ Or they’d ask for Black Sabbath and I’d say, ‘You like them? Okay, they’re really great. But you know what—they broke up last year [or at least, they’d just lost Ozzy Osbourne]. So that’s an old record. Why don’t you buy a new one, like Cheap Trick’s In Color?’ There’s a whole generation of kids in Atlanta that grew up with me forcing them to buy records. And I still run into those kids, except that they’re 39 now.”
In other words, he wound up doing for those Atlanta kids what Susan did for him, steering them away from the unhip items. “Yeah, but I doubt that any of those young kids wanted to have sex with me.”
Despite his status as a musician, Buck is still very much a collector—and one sure giveaway is his faint protests to the contrary. “It’s way bigger than my house can hold, unfortunately. Probably ten thousand vinyl albums, eight to ten thousand singles, and the CDs, I don’t even want to talk about.
Okay, I have a huge collection of records. But at least they’re things I play, I don’t buy them to look at them.” You mean you have time to play all twenty-odd thousand? “Okay, there’s a little sickness in there. I don’t think my wife understood the depth of my obsession until we got a house together. I’ve got books, too, maybe ten to fifteen thousand of those, and she said we couldn’t possibly bring those along. But you know what? To me it’s not a house unless I can have my books and records in it. So we decided we didn’t really eat in that much, so the dining room became the record room—and then the toy room, when our two kids were born. A toy room with fourteen feet of records in it. We wound up building a dining room on the other end of the house, and now that’s become the second book and record room instead.”
In other words, he reached critical mass long ago. “Considering that I still buy them every day, definitely. If I allotted a forty-hour week, eight hours a day, and played records the whole time, I could never finish them all. But I really tried one time. I’d pull out things I hadn’t played for twenty years, put ‘em on and play at least one side, then make sure they were filed back correctly. And I barely made a dent. It’s not often that people come over to my house. But when they do I wind up saying, ‘You gotta hear this.’ It’s usually something like the Louie & the Lovers record—have you heard that one?” I admit being stumped. “Now that’s a motherfucker record. Produced by [Texas rock legend] Doug Sahm. It sounds like a Chicano Creedence from 1967. I read about it
in Rolling Stone and bought it for 19 cents, and I still pull it out and play it. And I hope it’s still under ‘L’ when I look for it.”
What about people who obsessively collect R.E.M. records? “Hey, they made a pretty good choice. I see those people all the time and it blows my mind, because I’m usually so anal about that kind of thing—I know every Elvis Costello B-side, but I don’t know anything about my own. I don’t remember which singles came from which record, and I can’t necessarily remember what songs are on what albums. They come to have me sign things and I’m like, ‘What the hell is this? I don’t even remember making this record.’ And I think that’s great. When you make a record there’s no way you can appreciate it anyway, other than appreciating its faults. So for me, I listen to R.E.M. and I’m thinking, it could have been so much better—and it really could have been. But I accept the fact that it’s also finished, it’s gone. Otherwise we’d still be working on Murmur [their full-length debut from two decades earlier].”
Being a well-known rocker does have its drawbacks, however. It makes it harder to tastefully unload the records you don’t want—especially when a band you didn’t like in the ’70s comes back to haunt you. “I have boxes in the basement that I can’t even look at. I get a lot in the mail now, which is something you think is ideal when you’re younger. But you wouldn’t believe how much you just don’t want to hear, and I can’t sell it because that would look really cheesy. So let me know if there’s anyone that wants the first four Judas
Priest albums with bonus tracks—because I can’t sell them, and I don’t want them in my house.”
Soon after our interview, Buck is selling records again. He’s on a package tour with his instrumental band Tuatara, and this tour is so democratic that whoever’s not onstage takes a turn selling merchandise. I spot him putting in his shift, at a booth to the side of the stage where he’s arranged the sale CDs—by the musicians playing that night in various combinations—along the top of a cocktail table. He presses a CD into my hands. “Here’s a Minus Five album you haven’t heard,” he notes, indicating a rarities disc by another of his non-R.E.M. bands. “Its pretty rare, you can’t buy it in stores. And you know what? Since it’s so hard to find, it’s perfect for someone who’s writing a book about record collectors. I’ll let you have it for ten bucks.”
Damn, the guy really is good. I tuck the disc in my pocket and make a mental note to hunt down Louie & the Lovers next time around.