Each week, Behind the Counter speaks to an independent record store to ask about its recent favorites, best sellers, and noteworthy trends.
Weirdo Records in Cambridge, Massachusetts lives up to its name. Rather than try to compete with the various stores selling indie rock and big-name artists, it’s found a niche in the esoteric and obscure — “records where people are literally just banging on their kitchen pots and pans and yelling,” according to store owner Angela Sawyer. We spoke with Sawyer and found out what makes Cambridge a haven for music (and book) geeks.
What was your motivation for starting a music store? / What is your background in music?
This year is my 20th year working in a record store. So I’d wanted to start one for a long time, but really couldn’t figure out how — mostly because I was always working in a record store, which meant living below the poverty level, and I couldn’t put together enough money to buy a car or a vacation, much less start a business.
When the Internet came into its own, I started using all my spare time to try and figure out how to build a website. I started with about 10 titles, and these days there are several thousand. I moved into a proper storefront at the beginning of 2009, and a few folks (mostly journalists) were surprised that I was opening a shop. Simply and frankly, I’ve been surrounded by and motivated by records my entire adult life. So I felt like, what was I gonna do — take up taxidermy?
What is the musical community like in Cambridge?
Flat-out amazing. Boston is home to more colleges and universities than any spot on Earth, so it’s the college town’s college town. All those students mean that it’s a real haven for book and music geeks. Right now, there are three different handmade paper pamphlets around town that are solely dedicated to listing different underground house shows (and they don’t overlap in what they cover). There’s a vibrant, world-class improvised music scene, and lots of crossover between noise, jazz, hardcore, avant classical, etc. There are also several unique regular DJ nights where people play all 45s or LPs, each focusing on something a little bit different (three different soul ones, several ’60s-only, one for international music, one for rootsy country, and so on).
New England is known far and wide for its adventurous and voracious record collectors, and the prices in town are cheap, and the selection is plentiful — especially for genres that are abstract or difficult. The record-collecting community here has been very good to me, and the shop is really theirs. I feel extremely lucky just to get to hang out in it all day, and I think that it just wouldn’t fly anyplace else.
