AUSTIN HISTORY CENTER - johnschooley.net Don Davis Don Lamb.pdf · AUSTIN HISTORY CENTER Oral History Transcript Interviewee: Davis, Don and Lamb, Don Interviewer: Schooley, John

AUSTIN HISTORY CENTER Oral History Transcript

Interviewee: Davis, Don and Lamb, Don Interviewer: Schooley, John Date of Interview: 02/04/2010 Length of Interview: 79:34 Interview Number: 3107 Subject Headings: Music Trade, Record Stores M9385(75); SXSW F1000 (1); Music - Bands, Orchestras, Choirs, etc. M9300; Radio R0300 Key Names: Davis, Don; Lamb, Don; Kunz, John; Tower Records; Waterloo Records; Sound Exchange Records; South by Southwest; Abstract: Don Davis and Don Lamb, two long-time employees of Waterloo Records and Video, discuss the origin and evolution of the store and the changes in the retail landscape, as well as other record stores in Austin. JOHN SCHOOLEY: My name is John Schooley, it is February 4th, 2010, and I am interviewing Don Lamb and Don Davis about Waterloo Records, and the record store scene, in Austin. So, why don’t you introduce yourselves? DON DAVIS: I’m Don Davis. DON LAMB: And I’m Don Lamb. JS: Okay, well I guess we can start with, when did both of you first start working at Waterloo? DON DAVIS: This is Don Davis, and I started there when we opened in 1982. And it was not in its current location, it was down the street. JS: It was on South Lamar? DON DAVIS: Yeah, South Lamar, and I can’t remember the address. JS: Where Soccer World is now? DON DAVIS: No, Soccer World is no longer there, I’m afraid. You missed Soccer World. It’s the Coffee Bean. But anyway, it was on South Lamar at that point. DON LAMB: And I started in 1985, as best as I remember. I came on to help them get some returns out of the back room, and I never left. DON DAVIS: He’s still doing returns.

3107 - Don Davis and Don Lamb – 04, February, 2010

Austin History Center 2

DON LAMB: Still doing returns. JS: So you started before CDs had even been introduced. Just before. DON DAVIS: Yeah. DON LAMB: Well, me too. We were both there for the beginning of CDs. DON DAVIS: That was the first I remember - that was ’85, right? DON LAMB: Yeah. We used to keep them in a little glass covered counter at the front, because we only had, maybe, 50? - at the time. DON DAVIS: And they were expensive. They were like jewels. DON LAMB: Well, most of them came from Japan. And the players came from Japan at the time. That was the only way you could get them. So the players were eight or nine hundred bucks, and the CDs were 25 or 30 dollars, which even at that time was a lot of money. DON DAVIS: We had cassettes, we had LPs. 8-tracks had gone away. But I think the store was essentially started with the record collection of Louis Karp, who started the shop. We brought in some things to supplement that collection, but he had a huge collection that was sort of the basis for the store. DON LAMB: When did the store open, originally? DON DAVIS: April 1st of ’82. JS: Okay, so it had only been open for about a year when you started there. DON DAVIS: Actually, I was there at the beginning, and slightly before. I had worked with Louis at two different stores before that, a Sound Warehouse that was at 49th and Burnet Road, and I was there for about a year and then Louis and I and a couple of other people opened up a Sound Warehouse down south, at Manchaca and Ben White. And then we both left there at the same time and worked for a very small record shop called Recycled Records on Guadalupe Street. I believe it’s where the Amy’s Ice Cream is now; it must be at like 31st or something like that.1 DON LAMB: 29th, I think. 29th and Guadalupe. DON DAVIS: 29th. With a guy named Steve Carter, who was in a local reggae band2 at the time. There were four of us there, I can’t remember the other guy. And we were there for a short time, and then left. I was in school, I went back to school. Louis left for a short time, and then he

1 Recycled Records was located at 3405 Guadalupe, according to the 1981 Cole’s Directory. 2 The band was named “Pressure”



called me and said hey, I’m starting this store. And I said, that sounds cool. And I offered to just work basically for free, just to get it going, because I thought it was a great idea. Louis started, we got everything in the building, I believe there were four of us there at the onset. Yeah, it was pretty small time. But it was pretty fun. The store kind of concentrated its focus on things like prog rock. Because one of the guys there was really into prog, actually a couple of them were. Prog, and folk, and at that time sort of new wave music was starting to happen and we had some of that. And within a year, a new age fever had swept the country… DON LAMB: Windham Hill. DON DAVIS: Windham Hill records was it, man. DON LAMB: I was already there by that time. I started actually before the store opened, too, because I was going out with Louis’s sister at the time. So before the store opened, I helped Louis bag up used records. We’d go into the store at night and bag up used records and all. So I was starting doing that, and I already knew Louis anyway. I was working at Hastings, on Guadalupe, which is now where the book co-op is. I opened that store, and at some point got transferred up to the Hastings up north to run that store, and then met up with John3 and Louis somewhere and they asked me to help them out with returns, and I did. But when I came on, they’d already been open for a few years and I think I was about the eighth employee, eighth or ninth employee, at that point. And mostly what the store was selling, at the time that I started was a whole lot of imports. Import seven inches were a really big deal. And that was most of the clientele, people who were coming in to find the stuff they couldn’t get anywhere else. So we were really big into getting with import distributors. There was a place called Dutch East India that was huge. We had all the stuff nobody else had. The reputation from that kind of grew, that you could come in and find cool stuff. Plus, we had stuff that was cool before anyone else in town did. You know, Flock of Seagulls was a big deal. DON DAVIS: It was a big deal! DON LAMB: And we were the first people in town that had it. Actually the very first Waterloo radio ad ever, the background music for the ad was Flock of Seagulls, “I Ran.” Which, looking back now… a little embarrassing. DON DAVIS: No, none of us had the haircut. But we had the records. DON LAMB: But at the time, it was cool. JS: Well, and you were in a band. Were you in Doctor’s Mob while you were working at Waterloo?

3 John Kunz, owner of the store since he took it over from Louis Karp.



DON LAMB: Yeah, I was already in the band. And the great thing about the store was, because it was laid back, schedules weren’t a big deal. Everybody who worked there kind of came and went as they wanted to, around their general schedule. But I was able to leave and go on tour, and come back and go back to work. Actually, the same way it is today for most employees at Waterloo. JS: I don’t really think of prog when I think of Waterloo now. When did it start to get more tied into the singer-songwriter genre? DON DAVIS: Well, I think you can trace that back to Anne Gaines, who worked at the store at the time and, Anne listened to a bunch of different kinds of music, but for the most part she was a folkie. It was straight Shawn Phillips, Joni Mitchell, and she loved all that kind of stuff. As long as she was there, we had that influence in the store. In fact, a lot of what was played there was that sort of stuff. She was really, really, into it. I guess as far as the sort of…Texas singer-songwriter influence, that came later. DON LAMB: I was trying to think, did it come with KGSR? Or, was it before that, and they kind of melded together? DON DAVIS: There were obviously… the Flatlanders records were out, Jimmie Dale Gilmour, Butch Hancock, Joe Ely, all of those guys had records. But I don’t think that whole thing hit until around the time of KGSR. Because, in those early years, I know Jody Denberg pretty much started up KGSR. He was working at KLBJ radio, and he - DON LAMB: He had a weekend show. He was only on for, what? Four hours on Sunday night or Saturday night… DON DAVIS: Yeah. And we were feeding him records, and it was all Flock of Seagulls, and crazy weird stuff that we liked at the time. It wasn’t really singer-songwriter stuff. So that must have come around the time of KGSR, I’m guessing. DON LAMB: Well, KUT was already playing that stuff. And KUT, early on, had a big influence. The whole Windam Hill thing came because of people at KUT playing stuff. So we were already selling some stuff like that, but it wasn’t until KGSR came along and started playing it as heavily as they did, that they two things kind of started to seem like one. JS: Windham Hill, and the singer-songwriter stuff? DON DAVIS: Yeah. DON LAMB: Even to employees who were not necessarily happy about that, but that is kind of when it all started to become just one big, we are KGSR, KGSR is us, kind of thing. DON DAVIS: Well, and that’s true. A lot of that music did start to flow together. There were… all those guitar players who recorded for Windam Hill. They were just folk guitar players, basically, who were on that label. JS: And they were also a big label at the beginning of CDs, when they first came out…



DD: They were. DON LAMB: And sound quality was a big thing for them as a label, which translated to their audience, who were heavily into quality sound. So, it was one of those meldings of just everything coming together at the right time for that label, for them to just sell tons… I mean, we weren’t the only people in the country selling their records, they were selling records everywhere. Their artists were touring and selling out the Paramount, and the equivalent all over the country. DON DAVIS: People today don’t have any idea how big that was, in a sort of subculture kind of way. Man, we sold so many new age records for a while. It was incredible. DON LAMB: We would. Like a George Winston record, or a William Ackerman record, we would sell sixty, ninety copies of. Which, at the time, for that store, it was huge. DON DAVIS: It was big. A big deal. DON LAMB: And it was a big enough thing that even then, Waterloo, as small as it was, was already getting attention from distributors and labels for the amount of stuff we were able to move of their product, when everything was right. So the whole relationship Waterloo has now, even today, with labels, and the respect that they have from labels, started way back then when we were able to show them that we can sell your records. Just give them to us and let us do our thing. And, it’s still going on today. JS: When did the store move to the current location [on the corner of Lamar and 6th Street]? DD: ’89 or 90? DON LAMB: That sounds about right. The thing is, if you’ve been there long enough, it really kind of all goes away. I really had to think hard to try to remember when I started, even, because I couldn’t. And I had to actually trace it back through the band, and go, okay, well I know I was in the band when I was working there, so, you know… DON DAVIS: I think that’s right. JS: That’s also around when KGSR started broadcasting. DON LAMB: They started a little bit after we moved. JS: And that’s also when CDs really overtook vinyl, and they were the number one format. DON DAVIS: Definitely. DON LAMB: That’s part of why we had to move, was because CDs were doing really well. The store was doing well enough anyway, we needed more space. More space for vinyl, more space for CDs. Which is still the case today, even after sitting there for twenty years. The fact that all of a sudden you had a new format, you had to have room to have all these things out. That other place was just too small. And it had already expanded twice, I think, because it had started out



just the front part of the building, and then they tore down some walls and expanded into, I think a hair shop was behind that? And then finally took the whole thing over, and that still wasn’t enough. JS: And even at the smaller location, were there always no genre categories? It was just alphabetical? DON LAMB: It’s always been that way. DON DAVIS: One alphabet. Yeah, because there was no classical section then, there was no world music section. Yeah, it was just one alphabet then. JS: What were some of the other record stores in town? Aside from the singer-songwriter thing, which was kind of Waterloo’s bag, Waterloo was kind of the all-things-to-all-people store, they tried to carry pretty much everything. They weren’t a specialty, punk rock store, like Sound Exchange… DON LAMB: Well, yeah, there was Sound Exchange. There was Treasured Tracs. DON DAVIS: Sound Exchange was actually Record Exchange. DON LAMB: Yeah, it was Record Exchange before Mark changed the name of it. But there was Treasured Tracks, up on North Loop, which was where Martin4 worked. DON DAVIS: Yesterdays5 was where he worked. Treasured Tracs was on Congress, I think just before Academy. Where Home Slice Pizza is today, it was in that little center. The store of the stars. That’s where musicians would go, and they could find… it was primarily blues and R&B. Pretty obscure roots music, that was the focus of that store. It was actually a pretty fun store, I really liked that place… [Thinking of more stores]Yesterdays… DON LAMB: Inner Sanctum. That was actually a pretty big deal at that time. They actually sold concert tickets, so that was one-stop shopping for all the music fans. I don’t know if that’s why Waterloo got into wanting to sell tickets, or if the ticket promoters came to Waterloo, but Inner Sanctum selling tickets was, for a lot of us, the reason we went in almost every week. Because at that time, I used to go out all the time. You had to go in and buy your tickets, and as long as you were there, well, there was their stuff. Which a lot of the time was covered with posters, laying flat over the top, so you had to dig through stuff. A lot of times they didn’t want to sell you something - even if you’d pull it out, and they’d decide that they wanted to keep it. DON DAVIS: That was the later days.

4 Martin Coulter, longtime Waterloo staff member. 5 Yesterday’s address was 5300 N. Lamar



DON LAMB: Yeah, that was the end of it, that was the Jack days. DON DAVIS: Inner Sanctum, when I came to town in early ’79, was THE great underground record store. It was one of those sort of classic, old school places where you could get your punk rock records, you could get Willis Alan Ramsey records, you could get… They carried a ton of stuff in a really really small space. I still have no idea how they did it. But they always had whatever the hot singles were, the import singles - they had that stuff. Cool punk stuff - they had that. And then at some point, I don’t know when, they sold the place to somebody and it went downhill pretty fast. DON LAMB: They sold it to a guy who used to manage the Sound Warehouse up north, Jack Kruger, and at that point the focus of the profit from the store didn’t come from records anymore, I don’t think. I think it came from other things. And the music was just kind of there to have a reason to have the store there. DON DAVIS: It turned into a really weird place. It went from being, kind of an excellent, “High Fidelity” kind of snooty, record nerd - DON LAMB: It was totally like that. DD: - kind of place. But they had everything, just about everything you’d ever want, and everything that was happening… to being pretty sad in a pretty short period of time. But that was sometime in the ‘80’s. I don’t know when that happened. JS: Now, SXSW started in ’87. Did you have in-stores at the old location, or did that not really start until you moved to the new location? DON DAVIS: We did, we had bands play there quite often. DON LAMB: It wasn’t the same, it wasn’t all done the way it’s done today with all the official, we vote ‘em in, and all that kind of stuff. It was a lot looser. It might have just been one or two in-stores over the whole thing, instead of five a day, like we do now. Four a day, whatever it is. I can’t imagine that we didn’t do something, but to be honest I don’t remember. JS: Well, what kind of effect did SXSW have on the record store in general, and the music scene in Austin? DON LAMB: I think at first, it was massively popular. First, it actually was there to bring all these unsigned bands together in one place, to showcase them, to get all the labels and distributors and A&R people to come down, and say, here’s your one-stop shopping. Here’s all these bands, three days, or four days, whatever it was at the time. Come see them. The main focus wasn’t free shows at Fiesta [Gardens], or Auditorium Shores, or whatever, and it wasn’t huge artists coming to do their special, little showcase shows. It was all about a lot of small, really cool bands, trying to get signed. That went on for about three or four years, and then it started to become spring break for the music industry. Everyone started to realize, hey, I can go down there for a week, and get paid for it, and hang out and watch these bands. And as long as I’m going, if we can get our bands to



play, it’s all paid for. So, then it started to become major labels wanting to get their bands playing, and it started to turn into what it is now, which is basically major label bands and some unsigned bands. The whole feel has changed completely. It went from what it was, to a corporate thing, pretty much. JS: And when it started to get big, that was also when record label people actually had expense accounts. CD sales just kept getting bigger every year. Around the same time that Waterloo moved to that new location, and KGSR was starting up, and SXSW was beginning, you really had the whole 90’s and the beginning of the aughts as the heyday of CD sales. DON DAVIS: I’d say so. DON LAMB: Every year was better than the year before. Our sales were just up and up and up. And no one really had any idea that it would just tank a few years later. And it really has never recovered. And now, it’s… well, you know, it’s gone down for awhile, but for the store anyway, what we’ve managed to do to keep it going is to bring in other things. We all know, and knew all along, that you can’t make any money off music, because the profit margin in the retail music business is not anything close to what it is in the book business or the clothing business. It’s very, very small margins, and you have to sell lots of stuff to make that much money. Because more and more people were turning to other ways to get their music, we had to start finding other things to sell that had higher profit margins. There were a lot of people at the store that weren’t happy about selling some of the stuff that we did, but I think even after a few years, those people realized that if they still wanted to have jobs, they would be okay with it. And now it’s been around so long, everyone’s used to it, there’s not nearly the complaining that there was initially. JS: I kind of wanted to track the decline a little bit. CDs were introduced around the same time that Waterloo opened, and then, say, in the 90’s, those were really your go-go years as far as sales and everything. I wanted to talk a little bit about MAP6. When did big box retailers, Best Buy and that type of store, start to be an issue as far as sales? DON LAMB: You know what? For us, they never were. Big boxes in town, Tower [Records] coming to town… Our sales increased when Tower came to town. DON DAVIS: Which was pretty amazing. DON LAMB: Everyone was thinking, oh god, this is going to be the end of Waterloo now that Tower is moving to town. We actually went up, like, twelve percent the first year that they were here. And that gets into a whole other thing - of multiple music stores actually breeding a scene, and creating a scene, and helping the whole thing. The last thing Waterloo wants to be is the last store standing, because there is no music scene if Waterloo is the only store in town. So, we’ve always done what we can to help out other stores and all.

6 MAP refers to Minimum Advertised Pricing, through which record labels subsidized advertising for retailers who agreed not to sell CDs below a minimum price set by the labels. “Big box” retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy sold CDs below cost as loss-leaders to draw people into stores to purchase more expensive items, making it harder for smaller record stores to compete with their prices.



But, with big boxes, and MAP…MAP made no difference to us whatsoever, other than, at one point we moved some of our used CDs into our vinyl store, because the people at the labels didn’t care that that we were selling promos, they only cared that we weren’t selling them in a certain spot. So we actually took, I think it was EMD or Capitol, CEMA, whatever they were called at the time, their promos and all the Warner and Warner-associated promos, and moved them over to the vinyl store, and we sold them from there, instead. That didn’t even last very long. That was a Garth Brooks thing. Once that was gone, we moved everything back, and it was kind of forgotten about. Nobody even remembered it anymore. JS: Well, after the Windam Hill days, during this period when you were selling so much, what were some of the really huge sellers? I assume that stuff that was a huge seller nationally was big at Waterloo as well, but what were the isolated artists, just at Waterloo, that were big “Waterloo” titles? DON DAVIS: KGSR stuff. Certainly, once they took off, you saw, at least at Waterloo, amazing sales of things like Lyle Lovett, Robert Earl Keen records, Jimmy Lafave records, Nancy Griffith, Patty Griffin, all that stuff just totally took off. Crazy stuff. DON LAMB: But our sales have never coincided with national sales, at all. DON DAVIS: It’s kind of weird. If you were looking to find out, on any given day, what the top ten records were in the country, you could probably ask every Waterloo employee, ourselves included, and we probably couldn’t tell you. And we’d probably only have a handful of sales of a lot of it. DON LAMB: As it is now, where, for example, Taylor Swift is the biggest thing in the country. We might have one or two copies of her record in stock, and maybe sell one a month. Maybe. But it means nothing to our customers. Which is part of the reason we all still like going to work. Because we come to work and sell stuff to people who actually appreciate music, in general. But our biggest selling records are ones that…like, as a chain, Best Buy might sell, three or four thousand Spoon records. We sold that in a week at our store. So it’s completely different. It always has been. And it’s always been hard to get labels to understand that their big records are not our big records. DON DAVIS: The 90’s was cool in the sense that there were all of those KGSR records, and all of those artists that hit. But at the same time, there was that whole underground indie rock scene that was really getting cranked up, and there were tons of - whether it was Sonic Youth, DON LAMB: Echo and the Bunnyman…New Order… all of that stuff… DON DAVIS: All of that stuff was a big deal. And we sold all of it. At that point, people really, of all the record shops, definitely looked to us first to get that stuff. They would make the trip down to come get that stuff, no matter where they lived, they would come and get it there. There was a lot going on in the ‘90’s, when I think back on it. We sold a lot of different stuff.



JS: We talked about in-stores a little bit, but I just wondered if you wanted to throw out any anecdotes, or big names. I know there have been some surprisingly large bands that have done in-stores at Waterloo. DON LAMB: Yeah, both in sales, and in members. I don’t know, everybody wants to talk about the Nirvana in-store that we did. That was right when that record was breaking. Nevermind. Right when Nevermind was exploding. There’s a case of us selling a lot of records that the rest of the country also sold. But that record exploded, they did an in-store….they were about two hours late. This was in the days then our stage, instead of the stage like we have in the front of the store now, the stage was actually what is now our check-in area. It was the check-in area at the time, and we put a piece of wood over it and turned it into a stage. DON DAVIS: Scrap wood. JS: So it was about five feet off the ground? DON LAMB: It was like five feet off the ground. DON DAVIS: A definite health hazard. DON LAMB: And it was about a three by four stage, literally. Those guys climbed up there, and there was some miscommunication along the way about whether we were supposed to provide the PA, or if they were just going to do an acoustic set. And that’s what we thought was going to happen. They thought there was going to be a PA. So they showed up, and they were pissed, and they took about another thirty to forty minutes sitting in the back. Then they came out and played, like, two songs - DON DAVIS: And that was it. DON LAMB: Two songs, two or three songs, which you can find, apparently, bootlegged on the internet, if you look hard enough. There are Waterloo in-stores out there somewhere. DON DAVIS: And I know, the lady called us not long ago, she still has the smashed guitar from that in-store. JS: He smashed his guitar at the in-store? DON LAMB: He was pissed! DON DAVIS: It’s gotta be worth some money. DON LAMB: But looking back, that was one of those in-stores where there were maybe…it was really crowded…there were maybe four, five, six hundred people there. Now, there’s like four thousand people who will tell you that they were at that in-store. And it’s funny, because I’ll hear people say “I was at that in-store” and it’s like, eh, I don’t think so. I don’t think you were there. DON DAVIS: I like the early ones. I have a fondness for the early ones we did at the first store. I mean, none of the bands were really big. We did in-stores with Soul Asylum, Uncle Tupelo…



DON LAMB: Husker Du, who cooked hot dogs for everybody. DON DAVIS: Some of those were cool, and they were fun because lots of people from the local music scene, musicians, would show up to those things. It was a pretty tight music community back then. DON LAMB: That was something to point out, maybe. Those early in-stores were full of the local music scene, and people that were really followers of the scene, and along the way, it’s turned into… a lot of people that are there for free beer. It’s just become… it just doesn’t have the same feel. It used to really be a gathering of people who are all really into something, and it was like, aw, cool - these guys just played acoustically, we didn’t have a PA… Uncle Tupelo, three guys standing there in our little, tiny, store, playing stuff off of their first album, and it was awesome. Those moments can’t be re-created at all, it doesn’t matter what you do. But the feel… DON DAVIS: It’s ended. DON LAMB: The feel has changed over the years, for those in-stores. JS: Well, I’m not interested so much in the big names that played there, more just stuff that’s good. Because I remember one of the most awesome in-stores I saw there was John Fahey. Who just showed up, and it was an impromptu thing. Not that many people there. DON DAVIS: Yo La Tengo did an in-store there, at the new store, when they came to town for a show, and it was completely unannounced. We had a couple of members of the staff at that point that were really big fans, and just made a series of phone calls to people, who made a series of phone calls to other people. Within a couple of hours, there was an incredible mass of people who had shown up for an in-store that was not advertised at all. DON LAMB: That was pre-Facebook. DON DAVIS: That was pre-Facebook, that’s right! It may have been pre-computer. Pre-internet. It was a long time ago. That was a good one. And yeah… that Fahey one. That was cool. Strange dude, that Fahey. But there’s been so… The Willie Nelson in-store, from, when was that? The one where it was raining and his outside show got canceled? DON LAMB: Oh yeah, he was supposed to play at the Backyard. JS: I did the sound for that one. DON DAVIS: His show got canceled, so he just did the in-store at Waterloo, and oh my god, that was mayhem. But it was fun, because he played forever. He played a long time. That was really fun. Who else? DON LAMB: The Bulgarian women’s choir? I forget what they were called. There were like, thirty of them, and they just got onstage and performed. That, or Polyphonic Spree, where it’s



like, how are we going to pull this off? And it works, in the end it somehow works. You’ve got all these people, and they come in, they do it, and you’ve got this tiny little stage and somehow it worked and everybody has a great time. Those are some of the more interesting ones. A singer-songwriter coming and playing, depending on who it is, for the most part those are old hat. DON DAVIS: That’s easy. DON LAMB: You start to get jaded as an employee, after seeing all those. I’m rarely there for in-stores anymore; I’m gone by the time they happen. It’s kind of like, been there done that is a little cliché, but it’s true. After twenty-something years, eh, if I don’t see them, it’s all right. DON DAVIS: What was that one last week? The Spoon in-store, which wasn’t even in the store, it was out of the store, but was something that for two weeks people dreaded because it was going to be in the parking lot. Its location in the parking lot had changed at least once, no one was really sure if this whole thing was going to work. And apparently, it was pulled off, it was great, and over a thousand people showed up. DON LAMB: It was over two, actually. It was almost two. They stopped counting at eighteen-hundred. But, part of the apprehension going into it was no one was real sure where it was going to be in the parking lot. Nobody was really sure what their job was going to end up being. Everybody was a little terrified of, what was I going to be asked to do? But in the end, it was so taken care of that really nobody had to do much of anything, because, sound was all done by somebody else. The security was all done by somebody else, the fences, so for the most part employees didn’t do anything but stand around and watch. DON DAVIS: Which is what they would do normally on a day-to-day basis, anyway. DON LAMB: So really, their job didn’t change, so they were happy! But the thing is, in retrospect you look back, and all that apprehension led to a whole lot of employees actually having a pretty good time, and not complaining about the amount of work that they had to do going into this, and the amount of problems that it caused and all, because it went off so flawlessly. But if you look back and judge the in-store on whether it was a good one for the store to do or not, you know, our sales that day were pretty much the same. Given all that, you take into account how many people were driving up 6th Street and Lamar, which is the busiest intersection in Austin, and saw some major event happening. How many news stations covered it, the amount of coverage we got in the paper - we were on the front page of the paper the next day, above the fold, which is the important thing. But it was almost a little, mini, Austin version of Let It Be. Because they were playing, and from standing at the store you could look across the street and see people on the balcony of Whole Foods watching it, people on the ground floor of Whole Foods watching it, on the corner, people at the business across the street from us, on their balcony, watching it. All of Lamar was lined with people on the sidewalks watching it. So, just as an impression that it might have made with people, to remind them that there is a music store in town, and that there is still music to see, and music to buy, I think it was a massive success. And, I was one who was not all that thrilled about it happening in the first place. I was more worried about how much are we going to lose, because



of the parking lot being blocked off and all of that. Like I said, in the end it turned out that we pretty much had a regular day, so I was wrong on that part. And the other side of it definitely made up for it. That’s why we do in-stores, anyway, to try to get people to keep coming back into the store, to realize there is still music out there, there are still bands playing, there is still a social aspect to record stores that a lot of younger kids have never even experienced, that we try to get them in to see. Part of the focus of some of the in-store approvals has been, we need to find some bands that are going to bring younger kids in here, because… our customers are dying, and we need to move on. Trying to get younger people to come in, trying to get, sixteen, seventeen year olds kids to come in, and realize that hey, hanging out at a cool record store and seeing all these people that have the same interests as me is kind of fun. So I’m going to keep doing it. In a way, vinyl coming back has done a much better job of that than any of our in-stores have ever done. Vinyl coming back has been a huge lifesaver in getting more people, younger people back in the store again. JS: I wanted to talk about that a little bit, about why younger kids don’t have a history of going to record the record store. Around 1999/2000, did Napster make much of an impression on you at the time? DON LAMB: Small. It did make a small impression. Our business didn’t… like I said, we were always up. It’s just that all of a sudden, we were up less. The store was going along great and all, and then Napster had their problems, too. But, the massive impact that a lot of places suffered, we didn’t, and a lot of that really does go back to what Waterloo is not just as a record store but as a place to come, hang out, to visit, a destination for a lot of out of town people and all. We kind of weathered the whole Napster thing. JS: Well, and you were known for having more obscure releases. That was part of the reason that it didn’t mean anything to me at the time… was that it was all mainstream pop stuff, for the most part, that you could download on Napster. You could go online and download all of the mainstream, big hit pop that you wanted, but that wasn’t necessarily appealing to someone who went to record stores all the time, and who was collecting vinyl and was into more obscure stuff. It didn’t make a big impression at the time, it was kind of off the radar… DON LAMB: Well, and I think that’s why our sales really weren’t effected that much, because for the most part, that was not our customer. They were not the kind of people that listened to top 40 radio, and cared about that. And a lot of the people that are our customers, and the ones who, especially now, are still our customers, because they just have to have the thing… it’s a physical thing, you want to hold it in your hand. I think a lot of people getting “over” wanting to own music was the CDs didn’t give you anything exciting to have. With the artwork on vinyl and the packaging of vinyl dying and going away, the art of music wasn’t an art anymore. It was just a piece of plastic. DON DAVIS: And a small one at that!



DON LAMB: And liner notes that you could barely read, and pictures you couldn’t hardly see. I think that had a lot to do with people that were really into collecting and owning, and being part of something like a music scene… they went away. Now all of a sudden, it’s like, eh, whatever. I don’t care whether I have a CD or not, as long as I can download it and have it on my computer, that’s good enough. Which I think is part of vinyl coming back. That has actually reintroduced a lot of people to the art part of music, which…a lot of the early vinyl releases that started coming out were people who were putting a lot of time and energy into their packaging, and actually creating something for you to have and hold in your hand. That’s kind of carried on a little bit. They’re making huge mistakes in the music business right now by making vinyl - right now, it’s overpriced. They’ve actually said, “Hey, there’s a great big group of people who are into vinyl, and want to buy vinyl again - let’s raise the price on them to the point where they don’t want to buy anymore.” That’s what the music business is doing. Fortunately, some of the indie labels, which are the labels that appeal to kids that are coming in, are keeping smart enough to keep their vinyl cheap. It is the major labels, who are stupid enough to do all the things they’ve done over the years anyway, that are overpricing vinyl as it is. It’s not affecting the younger demographic part of that as much. To be honest, the amount of stuff we sell at 25 and 30 dollars on vinyl, because we’re paying a fortune for it, is selling to people that actually have the money… they don’t care, they’ll spend 25 bucks on a record and it’s fine with them. The amazing thing is, they’ll spend 25 bucks on a record that they could walk over to the used bin and find for a dollar. That’s the amazing thing. DON DAVIS: That’s truly incredible. DON LAMB: Boston re-issues for 25 bucks, really? There’s five of these in the bin over there, if you want them! But, it’s not the same thing. They have high quality turntables, and high quality stereos, and they don’t want to put some old, beat up, used record on it and have it ruin their needle. That’s fine, I totally get it. We’ll just have both versions. JS: Yeah, but the audiophiles have always been a tiny fraction of the record buying public. DON DAVIS: Oh, minute. DON LAMB: But for us, we have a bigger portion than most places, especially big box retailers. We have, we could sit here and name four or five people who have always been very, very picky about what they get, and whether it sounds good. And if there’s a pop, it comes back. DON DAVIS: Audiophiles were a big deal in the 60’s and 70’s. That was a phenomenon of that time, where you wanted your stereo system to sound as big and bad as it possibly could. It was a musical arms race, to see if you could have the best sounding gear and stuff. Then it seemed to pretty much peter away in the 80’s. Interestingly, the same time compact discs were coming in. You kind of saw the end of all of that. Then by the 90’s it faded out completely. Again, I would think that from 1992 to ’95 was when compact discs actually started to sound, well, really good. They were actually, you could get them sounding as good as vinyl. Then, post-Napster, and downloads and stuff, that game has changed as well.



I don’t think that, really… I get the impression that the majority of people these days don’t really care what the music sounds like, for whatever reason, that’s just not important to them. It’s more just having it. It’s almost like a transistor radio sort of society now, where, if you’ve got the sound coming out of your computer speakers, that that’s good enough. DON LAMB: That’s probably part of why a lot of people don’t care anymore anyway, is a lot of people are only listening to music in their car, on headphones, or on their computer. You’re not going to get the same sound quality. CDs coming along, when CDs first came out, “Oh, they were amazing! You could put peanut butter on them!”, and all this - but the sound quality was crap. That was the big rip on them, when they first came out, was that they sounded like crap. Then they did figure out how to make them sound a little better, so they re-issued all those records again, re-mastered, now, and tried to get everybody to buy them again. Then, years later, they came up with a better way to make them sound better, and they re-issued everything again. Now you get back to, now the rip is - iTunes, your iPod sounds horrible, and now people are talking about how vinyl sounds so much better. So it’s kind of coming full circle, except for the sales that were there at that other part of the circle, they’re not going to come back, I don’t think, ever. That’s gone for good. DON DAVIS: I can’t see it. It’s nice to have vinyl back, and no one’s more shocked about it than I am, but… it would be interesting to see how it would all go if you could still buy a vinyl LP, on average, for 10 or 11 bucks. I’d be fascinated to know how it would go. But we’ll probably never know the answer to that. DON LAMB: There are albums coming out now where the CD is 8.99, and the vinyl is 23 dollars. And you try to go to a record company and explain to them how vinyl is helping them, and needs to be a bigger part of their plan, and they turn around and say, but well, we’ll sell 1000 CDs to one LP. But look at how they’re priced. The reason that’s happening is, you’re creating your own problem. DON DAVIS: That’s true today. It might not be true in five years. But, that’s trying to speak logically to record company people. Forget it. JS: They haven’t been very good at anticipating what the future might hold. That’s been proven again and again. DON LAMB: They haven’t. But at least they’re consistent. JS: iPods were introduced in 2001, and I remember it was 2004 when Tower [Records] and 33 Degrees [local independent record store on Guadalupe] both closed, in the same year. And like you were saying, it’s not that that was good for Waterloo, just meant that there were fewer people overall buying records. It was just a symptom of a larger problem. DON DAVIS: It may be anecdotal evidence on my part, but 2001, aside from the iPod, seemed to be a pivotal year for us. Because that was… September 11th of that year, I remember as being that day, that was the first day I could remember coming into work - needless to say, what had happened had happened - and it was just dead. And it never seemed to really recover from that.



DON LAMB: That is the way I remember it, too. Literally, up until that day, everything was great, we could do no wrong, everyone was going to get great big raises, we were all going to get bonuses, at the end of the year… And from that day, that morning, when everyone stood there and watched the TV’s… and KGSR was broadcasting live from the store! It was a Tuesday, it was “new release Tuesday” and KGSR was there, broadcasting as it was going on, and it was DEAD. And it stayed that way, and it never, ever, even came close to recovering after that. DON DAVIS: And obviously, post-Napster… Napster was the tip of the iceberg, and as more and more file sharing took place, it became part of the public fiber, that, why would you buy this if you could just steal it. Why, if you could just take it for free. There are still some people who have a pretty strong relationship with record shops, that like going into the record store and looking for stuff you don’t have, and getting turned on to stuff. But more and more, there’s a group of people who have no relationship to that. They grew up where you could just go to yours, or mom and dad’s computer, and just steal a song. You didn’t have to pay for it. Who pays for music? JS: And even that aside, if they weren’t from Austin, they were from some little town in Texas that maybe had a Hastings or whatever at one point, and now doesn’t have anything, and Wal-Mart was the only place where you could buy music. They never had any kind of history of a record shop being a cool place to hang out, and talk about music to people. DON DAVIS: Absolutely. JS: So you lost the social network, where people could talk to other music lovers, rather than just being isolated on your computer and downloading it. DON DAVIS: Exactly. And 2001 was the year when things seemed to change and went in that direction. I may be wrong, give or take a year, but it seemed like that was the year. And September 11th was definitely the day I remember. And here we are. Will it recover? I have no idea what they’ll do to - DON LAMB: Well, that day, it changed the world obviously, but that day has had a major impact on us as a store, to where, since that day, we have changed as a store from what we were before that. We had to, to stay in business. Which gets back to the whole carrying lifestyle things, and all the different things that we’ve tried to do just to stay in business. We’ve managed to do well, we still have a healthy business, and we employ a lot of people, still. In the meantime, we’ve watched other places come and go - Tower, and 33 Degrees, indie stores pop up and go away all the time here, and like I said, nobody really wants that because if it dies off, that means there’s not enough people in this town supporting music to support more than one store. And that’s not good for anybody in this town, that’s a music person… DON DAVIS: Agreed. DON LAMB: What we’ve had to do, because of the sales drop since that day, has not only changed the amount of employees we have and all, but it has even changed the way the store is perceived, I think by people. Because we had to bring in things that we didn’t normally sell, and



now we’ve kind of, you have to worry about that whole “Are they a CD store, or are they a Spencer’s gifts?” thing. JS: Well, you mentioned “lifestyle items”, that’s kind of the euphemism, but for people who don’t know what that means, can you describe… I mean, it’s basically toys, novelty items… DON DAVIS: Games, cards… DON LAMB: …Jewelry…and the thing is, we at first thought, okay, let’s expand into this, and you know, maybe we bring in some band t-shirts, and let’s bring in some stuff - and we wanted it all to be music related. Because that makes sense, we are a music store, so if there’s some really cool music items out there, or music-related items out there, that make sense. Like if there’s a Beatles coffee mug or something, that somebody might actually like to have, and it’s music related, it makes sense. We kind of tried to start with that, but there weren’t enough of those kinds of things out there. The things that we had were selling okay, but it wasn’t enough, so we started to bring in more, and then it got to be… now we’re carrying… the joke at the store was - fart spray. You know, this attitude that if it’ll sell, let’s sell it. DON DAVIS: Like, Hey, we could do well with that! DON LAMB: Yeah. It not only bothered employees, but I know there were customers that were not real happy that they now had to look at this stuff. For me personally, for the friends I had that used to shop at Waterloo, that really don’t that much anymore… I had to convince them that, look, we haven’t stopped carrying any of the music we carried before, we’ve just taken empty space and filled it up with some other stuff that allows us to stay in business so that you can keep buying all that music that you wanted. If I had to convince my friends of that, then how many customers out there thought that, but never said anything to anybody at the store? How many just didn’t come back anymore? So we’ve had to go through that whole thing. The learning curve of what things can we carry, and still be respectable, and which things we can carry that are going to make us look like a Spencer’s gifts. That’s been a big part of what we’ve had to go through the last couple of years, even, and we’re still learning. All the time. JS: Well I remember before Waterloo started carrying that kind of stuff, it was very clean on the inside. For a record store. Because someplace like Sound Exchange was all posters and flyers and just random crap stuck up on the walls, very busy and trashy looking. While Waterloo was always framed pictures, very clean lines… DON DAVIS: Very tidy. JS: Yeah, kinda tidy. Which is not an adjective that you would normally associate - DON DAVIS: - with a record shop! Well, back in the old days there were no posters or anything on the counters, it was all very clean. And tidy. Yeah, it started that way. DON LAMB: And where you’re going with this is, it’s not that way anymore, right? That gets back to what I was saying about how it’s become about what space we can fill up, and I would totally agree with you that it’s more than filled up. It’s gone beyond filled up, into where now, you cannot walk into that store and not be bombarded with visual images of stuff everywhere you



look. You cannot walk in there and see across the store, even across part of the store, because there are shelves now above the CD bins with lifestyle items on them. It’s not a comfortable shopping experience anymore, like it maybe used to be. DON DAVIS: I don’t know. Older customers, and myself included, when I grew in the 60’s and 70’s going into record shops, many of them were filled with, especially in the late 60’s and through the 70’s, they were like head shops. There was head shops, there was all kinds of weird paraphernalia and they had posters, and they had… all kinds of stuff that you would associate with a head shop, as well as the music. Or, like some of my favorite record stores growing up, they were so packed with music, and books, and sheet music, and just stuff, and just claustrophobic, but it was all full of music. And of course, that’s not what we got now. DON LAMB: Yeah. A lot of people used to really not mind the clutter so much when it was just music. It was that idea that you walk in here… DON DAVIS: It’s music stuff. DON LAMB: …and everywhere you look is music. That’s a different sentence than - everywhere you look is just stuff. DD: - stuff. DON LAMB: And that’s the difference between the two. We used to be full of music, now we’re full of stuff. DON DAVIS: I wish people would just buy music again so we could get rid of all that junk and fill it up with music. It’s just not happening. That’s not the reality. JS: That was one of the things I was kind of thinking about was, what could Waterloo have done differently? I mean, maybe trying to appeal to some younger people instead of the KGSR singer-songwriter demographic, which was older. But still, you are constrained by what the labels are choosing to do, as a retailer. You didn’t have a whole lot of choice when the entire business is changing. DON LAMB: I don’t think we could have really concentrated on going after younger kids and had enough success at that to be able to keep going. The reality is that the KGSR stuff is what was keeping us going, because we were able to sell 1000 copies of something that was a KGSR artist. We never would have been able to do that with whoever the band de jour was for those kids. DON DAVIS: And it was an older crowd, too. DON LAMB: I’m not saying it wasn’t something we never should have done anyway, because it wasn’t worth it. I think that is a good point. We talk about it, too. We joke about it. KGSR as our mainstay, well, those people, literally, are dying off now. We’ve known this for a long time. It goes back to the in-store thing, trying to find a way to appeal to younger kids. I’m not really sure what we could have done to actually bring those kids in, any more than what we were anyway, other than more in-stores by, I don’t know, whatever high school band won some band



contest or whatever. Trying to get them to come in just to see that we were there, not necessarily trying to sell stuff to them, but just to get them to start coming in. I’m not really sure. I think part of the major thing that we were a little late on, and kind of blew it on, was being able to sell stuff online. Instead of waiting 3, 4, 5 years into everyone else already having established themselves online. We jumped into it a little late. We’re doing okay with it, but I think we could have made up for a lot of lost sales in the store by creating a lot of online sales. And I think that’s a bigger thing than even going after young kids, is creating an image around the world, or being able to sell around the world versus just in Austin. DON DAVIS: I think in the last decade, obviously between who we hired, and just the atmosphere in the store, we really tried to go after a younger crowd, to appeal to that group of people. Unfortunately, they were the very people who don’t have any relationship to record stores, and were the easiest to get involved in downloading stuff, taking it off the internet, and having no interest in going to a record store at all. I think these days, some of those kids are the people who are getting into vinyl, and are buying vinyl, which is great. Where those kids are scraping up 25 dollars to buy the new Beachhouse LP or whatever, is anyone’s guess. JS: Or reissues. It’s the same thing as when they never lowered the price of CDs, and got people who already had an album on vinyl to buy the expensive CD. Now they’re trying to sell those people the vinyl again. DON LAMB: For twice what a CD costs. DON DAVIS: It’s true. There are some cases where the reissue system on records really works well, especially for collectable things. It’s definitely advantageous for somebody to come into the record store and buy a 30 dollar reissue of a very collectable record, that if you were going to find one, an original copy, you might pay 100, 200 dollars for it. Well okay, the 25 or 30 dollar record sounds good. But again, we go back to selling Boston records for 25 dollars that you can walk over to the other side of the aisle, and find for two dollars, that is beyond me, but, you know, they’re doing it. I am more encouraged by bands of all sizes today, and all record labels, putting their records out on vinyl. Albeit in limited quantities, they’re putting them out on vinyl again, which is really nice. And in the last, I don’t know, I ran some numbers a couple of weeks ago, and I think last year alone we sold… I want to say it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 to 300 turntables out of our store. We’re a record store, not really a turntable store, but that’s a lot of turntables for a year. To find that many people buying turntables was encouraging. Some of them are buying them just so they download records onto a CD, but quite often they are using them to actually listen to records on. Which is really great. JS: That reminds me of one thing that I think was unique about Waterloo, is that it never had collector-priced vinyl. Even Sound Exchange, you would go in and they might have some



hundred-dollar record on the wall. And Antone’s has always catered to the collector, the rare vinyl customer. But Waterloo never did that. DON DAVIS: We sort of charged in accordance to what we paid for a record. If somebody brought in a 25 dollar collectable record, and we paid them two dollars for it, we’d probably price it at 7.99. We still made a really good markup on that record. Yeah, in retrospect we probably should have paid the person who brought the record in more, and charged more for it. But, no, we were just never that kind of collector store. And by and large, we still aren’t. We do try to sell collectable stuff now because we just have to, but for the most part you can still walk in and find a record that on ebay would probably go for 20 bucks, and you can find it for 10 or 12 in the store. It’s never been that kind of store. DON LAMB: And I’m actually kind of happy about that because, you know, I’ve been buying records since I was 14 years old. Actually, probably before that, even. And I used to sell at the record conventions, too, so I know which records are worth money and which ones aren’t. And even going into stores, there was always something weird to me about going into a store with records on the wall with high prices. Even if I knew that was a fair price, it always made me feel like the store was doing what they could to rip me off. I don’t know why that is, but that was my personal thing. If you’re charging 30 dollars for that record, my first guess is that you probably only paid somebody a buck or two for it… DON DAVIS: I was thinking the same thing. DON LAMB: So already I don’t like the fact that you paid them a buck or two and you’re selling it for 30. There are other versions of the same album, but not the same version, that aren’t worth as much… there was just always something used-car-sales-y about it. It was kinda like, what don’t I know that you’re doing? Yes, I see what you have, and I see the price, but what do you know that I don’t know? And it just made me feel weird. So I was always happy that Waterloo was always very up front with people, and still are, about how we don’t pay collector’s prices for records, and we don’t sell collector’s stuff like that. Part of the online stuff that we’ve done is we do sell a lot of stuff on ebay now. We do pay a little bit more for those things, but when we put them on ebay, they are usually auction things, and they start out really cheap. And if people want to outbid each other for it, that’s up to them. Let them do it. We don’t sit there and say, we paid ten dollars for this record, it probably will go for 80 or 90 bucks on ebay so let’s start it at 70. Usually it starts at 20 bucks, which is double what we paid. Kind of how we’ve always done it. And at the end, if it sells for 21.99, that person got a great deal, we made double our money, everybody’s happy. If it ends up going up to one hundred and whatever dollars, to some guy in Europe because the Euro is worth more than the dollar and they want to pay the 15 dollars to ship if over there, great. I don’t feel at that point like we’ve tried to rip anybody off. The price was driven by other people, not by us. All we’re doing is taking the money and shipping it. That may be just a weird way for me to get around [laughs] what’s going on! But it makes me sleep at night. DON DAVIS: Pretty much the bulk of our used vinyl business is records that are under 10 dollars. I would say 95 percent of the used records in the store are under ten bucks. Maybe more.



Maybe 98 percent. And then yeah, we sell a few things on the internet, but by and large the stuff in the store is just cheap, cheap, cheap. I’d rather just sell people records, and try to get people back into buying vinyl. That seems like a better deal for us all the way around. It’s certainly how I’d like to see it for all record stores. DON LAMB: The other side of that is, along with getting them back in to buy vinyl, is getting them back in to buy CDs again. One thing record companies have done over the last four or five years is realized they were overcharging for CDs, and CD prices have dropped drastically in the last couple of years. Labels have gone through and decided, all of this catalog, the most we should be selling it for is seven dollars. And so, they’ve lowered their costs down to us, and it’s actually, believe it or not, in lowering the price, they’ve lowered the cost even more so our profit margin on those things is actually bigger. Now, we maybe have to sell a few more of them to make up for it, but with them being so much cheaper, it’s actually easier to sell more of them. So that’s kind of been a blessing. There are a lot of CDs out there that people now realize that there is only about a dollar difference between buying new or used, so, hey, I’ll buy the new one. A lot of times, we even make more money on that, depending on what we paid for it used. They’ve actually realized that they were killing themselves by trying to think that everything was 18.98, everything was worth a lot of money, superstars deserved more money on their albums. So, new releases have come way down. A new release now, from major labels, even, are 13.98, instead of 18.98. And catalog stuff is anywhere from 5.98 to 7.98 to 9. Hopefully that, people realizing that CDs aren’t 20 bucks like they used to be, will help bring people back to buying CDs, too. I mean, it’s the same price to buy it on iTunes as it is to buy it in the store. And if you buy it in the store you’ve got a physical disc as a backup in case something happens to your computer, you still have it. And you also have the artwork and everything else that goes along with it. DON DAVIS: They’ve done a really good job with a lot of that stuff, too. CDs actually, for the most part, sound really good now. They do. JS: It kind of seems like they’ve waited so long to do that, though, that they already lost. I mean, it’s already been a decade, at this point, since the dropoff you mentioned earlier, since 2001. DON DAVIS: Absolutely. JS: I mean, is it too late, at this point? I’m talking to two guys who have spent their entire adult lives working at a record store. What do you see in the next decade? Is it just continuing to decline, as it has been? Is vinyl going to sell enough to… DON DAVIS: I don’t think so. I think it’ll be, whether or not young people decide that they actually want to support the artists that they buy music from. From what I hear, the black and white of all of this is that, of all the stuff that’s downloaded now, I’d be cool with it if 90% of it, 70% of it was purchased, and that’s not the case. What’s happening is, the reverse is true. 70% of it is just flat-out stolen.



There’s a perception that the artist gets nothing from having a record contract with anyone, they get nothing out of the deal. And in some cases, I’m sure that’s true. In most cases, I’d say, they don’t get what they deserve. But they get something. Do we ever get to the point where people say, I want to support the person that I’m actually buying the music from. I don’t care whether it’s giving them the money to buy an album, a compact disc, a digital download, it doesn’t really matter. Will they ever go to that point? Can you ever put that genie back in the bottle? I get it for free now, do I really want to pay for it tomorrow? I have no idea, personally I have no idea where it’s going to go. I would hope that people’s consciouses would make them purchase things, in some format, but… I don’t know. I don’t know if that will happen. What do you think? DON LAMB: I don’t think that we’ll be close to having the percentage of sales in our store that are music now, be what they are ten years from now. I think, if anything, I’m just going to throw out a number, but I think it’s probably 70% music, 30% other things. I would be surprised if in five years, it’s 50/50, or hasn’t gone even more the other way. A lot of that has more to do with iTunes. I don’t know how much of the music out there is free to everybody, because I don’t go online and look around and download stuff, so I would be the last person to talk to about that. I think people still like to buy music, I think people still like to own things; I just don’t think that there’s enough there to keep the store supported just selling music like it is now. So it’ll be interesting to see, five years from now. I have no doubt in my mind that the store, as a store, will be around 5, 10, 15 years from now. But what it will be selling, and what it will be doing, I have no idea. There was a point 10 years ago where we all thought we wouldn’t even be around this long. And we’ve kind of managed to find ways to stay around, and other businesses have come up with ways to help us stay in business, so who knows what the next five years will bring. But I don’t think it’ll be… well, it’ll still be a music driven business, but I don’t know that it will be a CD, or whatever the new equivalent that comes out. That’s the thing, the labels tried to do that, it was like, they came out with a new format, and that was the boom. Everybody’s buying everything all over again. And they, unfortunately, are still trying to figure out how to do that again. I think people fell for it once, I don’t think people are going to fall for it again. You used to have all these people who owned music, wanting to re-purchase it in every format, well now, a lot of people out there don’t own it anymore, it’s just on their computer, so you can do whatever you want, they don’t care. You’re not gonna get sales from that, so I don’t know. They spin their wheels a lot trying to re-create the boom days, and it’s not gonna happen. So hopefully we won’t spin our wheels trying to re-create it, too, we’ll actually move along to whatever’s going to keep us around. JS: Well, it’s interesting you say that, because it used to be Waterloo Records and Video, there used to be a video store, and now the video store is gone. DON LAMB: See, that’s had a bigger impact. The changing scene of video, and video rental, has had a way bigger impact on what happens to us in the store than Napster and downloading music had, musically, on the store. The fact that people could, with the emergence of Netflix, where they could have lists of movies waiting to come to them whenever they finished watching



whatever they had, and there were no late fees. And it was the equivalent of renting about 3 to 4 movies a month, but you actually got to watch 8 or 10. The movies on demand, to where, why get up and go to a store when you can sit there and punch a thing on your TV and all of a sudden, it’s on there, and charging you three dollars, and you’re done. You don’t have to go do anything; you don’t have to take it back to the store. There’s been a bigger footprint into the video business of the ability for internet and downloading than there has been even in music, I think. I was one of the people who talked to John for a long time about whether it was worth keeping the video store open. And as time went along, it became more and more obvious, there were more and more things happening that were just making it obvious, there’s no reason for people to come to a store anymore, at all. The video store had its own little social thing going on, too, but it wasn’t as big as what the record store was, and then once McDonald’s started having dollar DVD rentals, and HEB started having dollar DVD rentals, on new releases and all, even - how do you compete with that? You can’t. There was no way. At that point, you have to look at how much money are you spending per square foot on rent, and how you’re paying employees. You start putting all those business decisions together and it was like, there is no way to compete with what’s going on, and what’s obviously going to happen in the future. Now with Netflix going into Playstation, and working all those deals with the internet, if you’ve got a Netflix account, you don’t have to wait for the DVDs to come, you can go online and watch over 12,000 movies anytime you want, for free. How do you… you can’t compete with that. Why have a video store? That really doesn’t make any sense at all. DON DAVIS: Exactly. And if the same happens with music, to where nobody’s essentially paying for it anymore, or bothering to go out to buy it from anyplace, you can’t compete with free. DON LAMB: Which is where it gets to you. You have to start to think, what else can we do to keep people coming here? We’ve all been business people long enough to know how to keep a business going. That’s why I say I’m not worried about the store still being there. The configuration of the store, and what the store is doing may be totally different, but I know there’s a core group of people at that store that, ten years from now, will all still be working there. We may be selling… god knows. I don’t even want to think about it. DON DAVIS: It could be a bar and grill. DON LAMB: Because we don’t know how to do anything else! But yeah, we’ve even talked about it, let’s open a bar. Let’s do something. DON DAVIS: There isn’t one on that corner. You’ve gotta walk blocks to get to the first bar. DON LAMB: And with all those condos downtown, right across the street from us, those people would love to walk over there and drink, so… DON DAVIS: We might even be able to sell them a few CDs. Put a few beers on there.



JS: Alright, so, if there aren’t any record stores in another couple of decades or whatever, and if someone is listening to this in the future and wonders, what was the deal with record stores? What was good about them? One thing I didn’t get when you introduced yourselves at the beginning was just what your job was at Waterloo. I just want you to talk a little about the day-to-day things, what do you do working at a record store, and what are your best anecdotes, your fond memories of working there? What are these kids who’ve never gone to a record store, and only downloaded stuff online, what are they missing? DON DAVIS: For me, the reason I had wanted to work in a record store when I was a kid was because I loved going into them. If you have a passion, whether it’s books or music, something of that sort, there was nothing like going into the store where all that stuff was, just laid out in front of you. And some of it you knew, the vast majority you didn’t know. Whether you knew what you were looking for, or whether you were looking for something new, there was all of that stuff there. And you could pick it up, you could check it out. You could tell by looking at a cover, generally speaking, what a record was about. And you can still do that with CDs. I always loved that, and that’s why I wanted to get involved with it, was to get turned on to new stuff. To go into an atmosphere that was fun, it was friendly, and it had everything that I was passionate about in it. And that’s honestly what record stores were all about, and still are to me. Day to day, on any given day I’m there, on the floor, working the cash register, ringing people up, buying and selling used LPs, used CDs… it’s still fun. It’s sad seeing what seems to be people selling as much stuff as they are buying these days. But it’s still fun watching people buy stuff and be genuinely excited about getting whatever it is that they’re into. That still makes it fun. As cynical as the atmosphere may be there now, it is still fun seeing somebody who’s genuinely happy about getting something, and enjoying what they’ve just bought. And that’s it for me. DON LAMB: Well, my day is usually spent… I’m the head buyer, so I do most of the new release orders, I do a lot of the catalog orders, and that is actually why I love my job, still. It really kind of gets back to why I started going to record stores in the first place, it wasn’t so much for the store and the atmosphere. I love music, and I just wanted to hear more and more and more. So I ended up at a record store. Along the way, I kind of found out, hey, record stores are cool places, and there are all these other people there that like music, too. You start to find out that they like the same stuff I do, and then they turn you onto something else, and then the next thing you know, your been exposed to all this other stuff. As a kid, for me, that was it. I just wanted to grab everything I could listen to. I listened to some of the crappiest music ever, and thought it was great at the time. Looking back now, it’s embarrassing as hell, but at the time, it was all I was exposed to. One of the major things that I learned, working in a record store, was that the radio is the worst way find out about music. Because what I thought was good, because I grew up listening to the radio - from the time I was 4 or 5 years old, I would sit with the radio on, and listen, and listen, and listen. To, you know, all the 45s by all the Tommy James’, and the Eagles, and it just went



on, until I could afford to buy stuff. But I thought, that was it. And I really thought that was it. This is all the music that’s out there. And then I found out - no, there’s this store, where they have thousands of other records that you’ve never heard of. And then I got in there, and started listening to that, and realized that there’s so much more out there than what’s on the radio. Buying today, being a buyer, I still get so much stuff in advance, I get to listen to so many new releases that I would be exposed to if I was just working on the floor. I get way more advance copies than most people on the floor ever hear. And because of that, I still have that little bit every day where it’s like, let’s see what this sounds like, and being excited by the fact that, this is really good, this is like my favorite new record. So I do the buying, I take care of all the computer stuff, I do a lot of the office ordering… I play dad [for the younger employees] a lot, DD: [Laughing] Yes you do. DON LAMB: …which is the part of the job I don’t like. DON DAVIS: That’s your most important job, though. DON LAMB: Yeah, it’s like the saying, I love my job, I don’t love every day of my job, but I love my job. That’s kind of how it is. Because there are days there that suck. But overall, I wouldn’t want to work anywhere else. I can’t imagine working anywhere else. Um… I don’t know. That really is it. I can’t think of… if you’re looking for anecdotes of funny things, like I said before, things just are so blurry…(laughter) And not in a bad way. It’s just that after, you know… I figured out the number of hours that I’ve worked at the store - DON DAVIS: How many? DON LAMB: - was like, it’s probably about 50,000 hours I’ve put in at that store, in the time that I’ve been there. So yeah, I don’t remember stuff right off hand (laughter). But if you were to bring up a story, I would probably remember it, and be able to go from there. But to just sit here and go, okay, what was funny, that doesn’t work for me. I can’t think of anything. DON DAVIS: Yeah, it does become a bit of a blur. In record shops, and I’m sure in books shops and similar shops, you get all sorts of characters and freaks. They come in, and some of them are absolutely the most annoying people you would ever hope to run into. Some of them are absolutely hilarious. JS: That goes for the employees, too. DON LAMB: This is true! DON DAVIS: It absolutely goes for the employees. That is so true. But by and large, most of our customers at least at that store, are and have always been pretty normal, pleasant people to be



around. They still make it a pleasure to show up and go to work. It’s not drudgery. It’s not like working at, you know, a car fix-it shop or something, where people are constantly bitching at you about this, that, or the other thing. Any number of other jobs where it’s a chore to go in and deal with it every single day. Working in music is, by and large, pretty cushy. It’s not a bad deal at all. The pay’s not so great, but it’s still a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun for the money, such as it is. JS: Alright, well, is there anything else you would like to add? DON DAVIS: No… You know, at some point we should so something on some of the old record stores that were around, that are pretty much going to be lost or forgotten. And there were a lot of them in Austin, going back just the 30-something years that I’ve been here. There’s a lot of really, really good record shops that were around, and people who maintained an independent store when it just couldn’t have been that profitable for them to do so, but they did it just because they loved it. And I shopped at pretty much every single one of them, so my hat’s off to all of those people. They deserve their own show. [Laughs] But that’s it, that’s all I’ve got. JS: Okay, thank you. (Interview ends)

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AUSTIN HISTORY CENTER - johnschooley.net Don Davis Don Lamb.pdf · AUSTIN HISTORY CENTER Oral History Transcript Interviewee: Davis, Don and Lamb, Don Interviewer: Schooley, John