Jan 132011
[Setting: Two young musicians are discussing a possible significant recording equipment purchase with Italian-born owner of long-running music store. Music Store Owner discusses his competition in relation to his quoted price.]
Music Store Owner: You know, everyone’s going to give you this: [makes crude gesture by inserting and removing forefinger on right hand through circle made with forefinger and thumb on left hand]. But I use Vaseline.
What’s the most memorable thing you’ve heard in a music store?
Scene: mid-80’s in mall record store, Scottsdale, Arizona. One early-teen boy to another: “Did you know that Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?”
I may have told this story on RTH Chess years ago, but my all-time fave music store dick exchange took place when a friend of mine took his bass — his first ever bass, bought with precious college-era money — back to the music store where he’d bought it. This guy (anybody remember Warren Warsaw?) wanted to ask the store to set it up again, because he was *sure* it was displaying signs of “fret buzz.”
Anyhow, Warren shows up at the store, explains the problem, takes the bass out to show what he means, and the dickhead employee who sold him the bass in the first place sighs heavily, takes the bass to the store floor, plugs it in, rips off 15 seconds of the most godawful Stanley Clarke turbo-fusion poppin’ and slappin, hands it back and says simply:
“You just gotta be a better bass player, dude.”
Not too long ago I was in a store I don’t go to all the time, so I was taking my time looking and the owner was struggling with his computer. I asked him what was wrong, and he said Word didn’t work anymore so he couldn’t order new records and it was a practically new computer and he didn’t know what to do. I looked at it and it was a trial version of Office, so I downloaded Open Office and showed him how to work it so he could order records again. He cracked me up when he thanked me and said, “I hate computers. Why can’t I order stuff on the phone? I know everyone else can do this, but I’m such a douche.” That cracked me up.