For Denver’s neighbors of DJs, audiophiles and music nerds of all ilk, Friday night must have been eerie. The din from upstairs that dependably strikes up come nightfall was silenced at an unusually early hour, as if stereoheads city-wide had finally blown their speakers out.
Such is the calm before the storm that is , where for once, Saturday morning takes precedence over Friday night. To get a good spot in line, Denver’s music faithful rose at ungodly hours to ensure a chance at grabbing exclusive albums and other swag their local independent record stores stocked that day.
In recent years, the event has evolved from a sidewalk curiosity into a full-blown phenomenon. In Denver, this is most apparent at Twist And Shout, who had a 150-person line snaking into the store’s parking garage by 7:30 a.m.
By 9 a.m., that number had doubled.
“Early on, you could get here an hour or so before it opened and be somewhere in the front,” says Jason Mueller, who’s attended every Record Store Day to date, usually at Twist And Shout. “Obviously now that’s not the case,” he laughs, number 150 this year despite showing up two and a half hours early.
When did you have to show up at Twist And Shout to nab the number one spot?
“I got here at 2 p.m. yesterday,” says Sam Knights, this year’s line champion. “Last year, the first guy got here at noon, but I figured in the cold weather we had .” However Knights did the math, he couldn’t have timed his arrival much better to get the coveted pole position. “The guy behind me got here 20 minutes later.”
For avid collectors, these sort of desperate measures are a necessary precaution. Even though Twist and Shout saw an estimated 25 percent increase in stock this year, an overnight stake-out is the only way to guarantee a shot at the store’s highly sought and/or limited edition items, like Phish’s “New Year’s Eve Live ’95” vinyl boxset or the Red House Painters 4AD boxset, a limited run of just 1500.
As the event has exploded, critics of Record Store Day have decried the event for promoting rarity fetishizing over the music itself. Sure enough, eBay is with RSD items routinely marked for twice their in-store price. This is hardly the fault of the record stores, who have no control over what happens to the items after they leave the stores. And for purists like Knights, it’s hardly a concern.
“It’s more about experience than material possessions,” he says. Waiting in line, meeting like-minded folks is as much apart of Record Store Day than getting actual records, he tells me, “which is experiential also–I only buy things I play.”
For independent record stores like Twist and Shout, the event has become an unequivocal boon. Saturday marked the single best day of sales in Twist and Shout history, says owner Paul Epstein.
“It was the equivalent of probably 12 days to two weeks of business,” Epstein says, estimating a 30 percent increase over last year.
With numbers like that, an eighth Record Store Day — with undoubtedly an even longer line — is all-but an assurance, even if it’s out of store owner hands.
“Whether there’ll be another isn’t up to us, but I can guarantee that next week, labels will start thinking about next year’s Record Store Day,” Epstein says. “So will we.”
