Time to face the music and say goodbye to Spin Street

Friday, I faced the music and said goodbye to my favorite record store. Spin Street doesn’t close until January, but something about the place being packed with deal-seekers already takes away from the leisurely shopping experience I’ve known for about a decade.

When the world was crazy, you could walk into this shop on the corner of Highland and Poplar and escape. Shopping at Spin Street while uninterrupted by the outside world has been a simple ritual that I will very much miss.

Spin Street was a fun place to take a pretty girl after a coffee date and a fun place to buy a pretty girl a Def Leppard DVD for Valentine’s Day (I have strange taste in women). It’s also been a great place to pick up Seth Rogen movies for $7 on those beautiful nights where you have no plans with anyone.

But most of all, at Spin Street, you could peruse aisles and rows of music in physical form — something soon to be lost on a generation of Tinder-swiping, Uber-riding music streamers, who some say are out to kill businesses left and right.

I guess we were finally done with Applebee’s and Buffalo Wild Wings and had to set our sights on FYE Entertainment. I’d like to apologize on behalf of Memphis Millennials that we started locally with Spin Street.

Long before John Anderson, chief financial officer of FYE, explained to The Daily Helmsman that Spin Street’s lease has expired, and FYE was unable to negotiate new terms to allow the store to stay open, I was a long-haired high school student frustrated with “icky mainstream pop music.â€Â 

In those days, I could count on Spin Street to carry a selection of obscure CDs that filled my need to be “edgier†than my high school classmates. Finnish metalheads Children of Bodom and British breakdown-aficionados Bring Me The Horizon were just a few bands Spin Street had in stock for me on different occasions. Target tried but could never beat that selection. Meanwhile Spin Street seemed to always have my back with something interesting.

In college, my musical tastes changed and so did my platform for consuming music. Yes, I became an Uber-riding Spotify-streamer, but I also grew an immense appreciation for vinyl records. Go ahead, scream “hipster†if you must, but I think there’s something nice about learning how to operate an elegant piece of machinery like a record player. There’s something very satisfying about dropping that needle before kicking back to enjoy an entire collection of songs from one artist — in one sitting. 

Streaming, for the most part, discourages this kind of experience, and Spin Street has been a familiar stop around the corner from the University of Memphis where I could drop by and spend small portions of my Daily Helmsman checks on new fixes for my vinyl addiction.   

In a strange way, whatever was lying around Spin Street has also influenced what I stream on Spotify. As I picked up used records, choice cuts from these albums found at Spin Street would make their way into my Spotify playlists when I felt like listening to them on-the-go later.

I would never have discovered how much I enjoyed “Melanie†or “This Time I’m in It for Love†from Player’s 1977 self-titled album had I not stopped into Spin Street one day and thought “What the hell, ‘Baby Come Back’ is a pretty good song. I’ll take it.â€Â 

Spin Street has just been an interesting and reflective place to discover music. One time I picked out a Jeff Beck vinyl and took it home to drop the needle, only to hear The Clash bang out the first track on the “London Calling†album instead. I had prepared my ears to hear instrumental guitar music, but wherever the packaging mistake happened, the switch worked out for me in the end.

“London Calling†is a classic, and I wouldn’t have been pleasantly surprised with it unless I spent that time in my local record store. As the Stones sing, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.â€

In the last decade, you’ve been there for me, Spin Street. You’ve given me what I needed. As I found out who I was as a teenager and then found out who I was as a man, you’ve been responsible for singles on the soundtrack to my journey. Sorry we Millennials are hellbent on streaming our lives away. It’s been real—as real as the physical copies of music lining the aisles on the corner of Poplar and Highland. I’ll miss the discoveries I made there.