Lodged next to Play-it-Again Sports in a plaza in Bradley, Illinois, there was once a lighthouse. A beacon of hope in a sea of grey asphalt awash in road salt. A watchtower among cracked curb and sidewalk. Awkwardly sharing a location with Bed$mart, this pharos to guide bored and weary sailors was known only as The Record Bar.

The greasy, gangly proprietor, Scott was the captain. The dealer of the deck. The ectomorphic foreman of the six-dollar used CD that he’d shuffle with sleight of hand.

The gold standard from the steward in an oversized Nas tee shirt.

Enough of an investment that only marginally needed to be worth it, yet you weren’t wasting too much cash on the gamble of an album you’ve never heard. At the end of the day, you could sell it right back to him no questions asked, only costing you a few dollars in the guise of rent. Or you could, in the form of protest, frisbee it right out the window of your moving vehicle the way I did with my Juliana Theory CD.

Scott never checked the condition of the discs. The only time I ever saw him reject anything was when he had like eight copies of it already on the shelf.

If you had no funds, you could round up a series of albums at home, no longer providing value and perform a barter for the lot. Sometimes he didn’t open the case to make sure the CD was even in there. A card sharp, cutting the deck with your buy in. A burning Winston 100 between his spidery fingers as he check-raised your Shaq Fu and Skee Lo CDs, sliding a crinkled five-spot across the bar.

It didn’t matter. Everyone knew he made his ends pushing VHS porn out of the back room. Rumor had it that if you said the secret code word, a specific porn title, he’d lead you to that back room and sell you weed.

Wooden cases in a fortress of chicken wire to peer through at stacks of CDs with zero discernable organization. A mix mash of genre, year, and artist in non-alphabetical order. Padlocks for which no mortal man held a key.

Through his coke bottle magnifying glass he’d rifle through giant catalogues, each the size of a phone book. Poring over volumes, and pushing his ash tray aside, searching his ink and paper matrix for the Compact Discs I’d order from him. I’d wait in a vacuum of silence. Grey frizzled hair protruding from the skeleton rib cage under a weathered rhinestone button cowboy shirt.

“It’ll be here in two weeks” he’d state after looking up, peering over his newly and mysteriously acquired neck brace.

Passing the Lovers Lamp on my way out the door, with my Living Sacrifice and Supertones CDs, I’d hear the jarringly awkward and entirely too loud –

“ENJOY ALL THE JAMS!”

He would garner all his courage and willingness to speak, combining them all at once the moment the customer was about to leave the store. In a last ditch, and highly inappropriate effort to show some sort of social nuance that he knew you were alive, he’d blurt this out. Scaring me half to death, making me jump, right before I left the establishment, I’d forget every single time it was coming. ⁽¹⁾

On more than one occasion I’d see complete sets of an artist or band’s array of records, fully understanding that someone was in dire need of gas money or funding for taco bell. Sometimes I even knew who the person was who hocked their full collections. I always felt pained to see it.

The Record Bar did have a listening station. Well, to be fair it was just a small boombox where you could pop in a CD for a preview, three feet away from Scott. He’d just stand there staring into space, chain-smoking, clocked out while waiting to clock out.

I remember seeing this kid Loren Wilson at the Record Bar once. He was a few grades older than me in high school. He was always an eccentric fellow, a smart but dark musician who had long black curly hair to contrast to his complexion – skin that had never seen the sunlight. He was way too odd a character for me to approach. He was like Doc Brown or something. I always enjoyed secretly listening to the esoteric things he’d talk about in computer class with this other kid who had blue hair. Admiring him from afar, Loren was a very strange individual who I highly identified with yet was kind of terrified of.

He was listening to this EP from 1999 called They Would Walk into the Picture by Recess Theory, an extremely unknown emo ensemble from Florida. ⁽²⁾ I knew the CD and I actually owned it and I still love that EP. That was my “in” to finally build up the courage to talk Loren Wilson about music.

Loren didn’t buy the Recess Theory CD. But from that day up to this very moment I own two copies of it.

…

One visit out of my countless visits to The Record Bar must’ve been my final visit. An absolute truth I never realized until just now. There is literally nothing on the internet about it, but I pinpoint its closing somewhere around 2009. There’s not a chance in the world that Scott is still alive. The soft embrace of endless night. That guy looked like grim death twenty-five years ago, man.

I moved out of the area in 2006 and I’m sure I went back there at least a few more times while I was in town. Where else would I even go? Granny’s Attic? Paperback Reader?

Anyway, my rainbow shelf of square plastic musical relics is now my only proof of its existence. The Record Bar dwells now in a timeless land beyond the veil in the lingering scent of spent cigarette butts, Pomade, and vintage Brut cologne.

…

1) I once brought a friend to The Record Bar who was wearing a Mountain Dew tee shirt. On our way out of the shop we heard a loud and boisterous “YOO HOO FOR MOUNTAIN DEW!”, scaring the shit out of us and making us jump ten feet in the air.

2) True emo. Mid to late nineties, crying over spilt soymilk emo. Not fake emo with painted fingernail rich boys and eyeshadow garbage.

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Also, I get it – the original Record Bar location was in Kankakee. No I had never been to the original location.