My interest in this story goes deep. It affects me as a small business owner, a friend and former coworker of the writer and subject, a music lover and a former employee of Wherehouse records. Check it out...Chris Faulkner!
Beloved local music store heads to rock 'n' roll heaven
Written by LAWRENCE COSENTINO
Tuesday, 06 June 2006
Chris Faulkner is doing a little more thinking, a little more herb gardening, and a lot more painting this spring than he has done in 27 years.
The May 6 closing of JAM Records at 3928 W. Saginaw Highway in Lansing not only angered and disappointed many loyal customers, it also ended Faulkners epic run as greater Lansings most esteemed long-playing music-store guru.
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For over a quarter century, Faulkner turned people on to the glories of John Coltrane, exhibiting the patience of the other J.C. whenever they reached for Kenny G instead. Now hes getting up early, painting while the creative juices flow, and taking time to ponder his next move.
I dont know yet what Ill do next, he says. The stones appear as you start stepping. He says he doesnt see himself working for a chain music store.
Places like Borders or Barnes & Noble seem regimented, he says. I dont color inside the lines very well.
A triple juggernaut of Internet downloads, CD burning and price-gouging chain stores has rolled over hundreds of independent music stores in the past decade. JAM held out against these market forces longer than most.
It was like blowing air in a raft, hoping it would float, Faulkner says. In its final five years, the store shrank from eight employees to two: Faulkner and Jeff Morse, who co-owned the store with his wife, Arleen.
Any CD store, Faulkner says, lives or dies by its new release sales, which pays for the slower-moving back catalogue. When that goes, so does everything else.
With the advent of file sharing and burning of CDs, our new release sales plummeted from, say, 120 in the first week to 30 a huge drop, Faulkner says. As it got harder to restock the store, inventory dried up. Despite this downward spiral, Faulkner says many customers stayed loyal by special-ordering what they wanted, putting the store on artificial life support for the last several months.
Toward the end, we were special-ordering 150-200 pieces a week, Faulkner says. They really stepped up to the plate to support us when they could have gone somewhere else. Two weeks before the store closed, Faulkner and Morse compiled a two-and-a-half-page list of regular customers and called them all.
I didnt want them coming here and seeing brown paper on the window, Faulkner says. They really thought of that store as their store as well.
I told the story dozens and dozens of times, Faulkner says. I got to the point where I sort of got OK with it, but then a person would come in and be totally wigged out and emotional and I would feel it again.
JAM Records opened in 1998 as a Western branch of Michigan WhereHouse Records, a mid-Michigan music chain that preceded JAM into rock n roll heaven, store by store, over the past decade (the flagship East Lansing store closed in 2001). WhereHouse itself began in 1976, with a few dozen cardboard boxes of LPs piled in a hippie shoe store (Roots, of course) in a now-demolished warren on MAC Avenue called the University Mall. At its height, the chain had eight stores stretching from Mount Pleasant to Big Rapids.
Faulkner joined WhereHouse in 1979 and ended up following the chains expansions and implosions for nearly three decades. When WhereHouses ownership split in 1999, co-owners Jeff and Arleen Morse took over the West Saginaw store, renaming it JAM after themselves.
The store immediately did well, in part because west-side customers werent as wired to the Internet as college students further east. JAM kept going for five more years after the East Lansing WhereHouse folded, much like the Eastern Roman Empire hung on after Rome itself fell to the barbarians. The personal touch of Faulkner and crew helped JAM weather the invasion of three chain stores (Best Buy, Barnes & Noble and Circuit City) into the area.
People would meet and talk all the time, Faulkner says. It was like a barber shop. Although the store relied heavily on rap and R&B customers, Morse and Faulkner rolled with the flow.
They probably looked at us as old guys, but cool old guys, because we made an attempt to listen and understand their music, Faulkner says.
For the last few days, it amused Faulkner that customers would simply stand in the aisles, staring at him or saying Where are you gonna go?
Im not going anywhere, he says. Its not the end of the world, and Im not dead I think. The last day was emotional, as might be expected.
One regular customer didnt go to work because he had anxiety attacks over this, Faulkner recalls. Jeff couldnt be there the last day to close the store and lock it. So I called this person and asked him to come in and help me close.
I didnt know whether he was gonna do it, but he showed up an hour and a half before, and he made the last purchase. He has that receipt. Its like an icon for him. And what was the last item purchased?
Id love to tell you it was Miles Davis Kind of Blue, Faulkner grins, but it was I think it was a Judas Priest DVD.
http://lansingcitypulse.com/content/view/215/31/
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