This is a media storage unit called an LP.

And this is a media storage unit called a seven inch 45.

Now these have both been around the block.

But you know, each one of these sounds better than your iPod or that MP3.

So the question is what else are they lying to you about?

1234.

I want everybody to get up now.

Let's do the Saint Louis break down.

Come on.

My first album was millennium by the Backstreet Boys.

First album I ever bough was a Grand Funk Railroad album.

Aerosmith.

Night in the Ritz.

Sid vicious solo long was Pat Metheny off ramp.

The other one was Grover Washington, DC.

Michael Jackson's Thriller.

The first time I ever me it was probably Kelly Clarkson.

Yeah.

Shawn Castle, the fat boys, jailhouse rap.

I would have to be the Beatles.

Help.

It was appetite for destruction from the presence of like to call fire of unknown origin.

The first record I bought was an Elton John Kiki record.

It was a Prince cassette tape with two songs on it, and I'm not even sure if I knew who Prince was.

I thought it was just, like I thought, you look cool or something.

My first record was either Chumbawamba, Tom stomping or, maybe Third Eye Blind self-titled.

The first time I ever bo was Bach by Jefferson Airplane.

He came in a brown paper bag with a big J, and you opened it up.

There was a fish inside with a pair of false teeth.

It absolutely destroyed my parents day but I loved every minute of it.

Thank you.

The reason I decided to open up a record store was that I wanted to be in the music business on my own terms and be, to be quite honest, at that point.

I didn't know of anybody that would give me a job.

Walking into vintage vinyl.

The first time was pretty mind blowing.

I knew it was the real deal.

Instantly just a vibe there.

And, you know, the record racks on or on the wall or the display racks.

There are all these recommendations, and you can just absorb all this information just through locking the door.

That was vintage vinyl in the 70s, early 80s, right.

It was like this cool, tin little place where all the kids hung out and everybody, you know, collected.

That's where all our money went.

Tom should be rich.

I don't know any of us who didn't, like, save all our money to spend it in three.

When we moved in to the Varsity Theater.

We also inherited the marquee, which.

And the letters and all of that.

And that we were like kids in a candy store.

It's like we've got a marquee and there are thousands and thousands of cars coming up and down Delmar and we can put whatever we want on this marquee.

At one point they went out and put try our new steak fajitas on on the, on the marquee, which was hilarious.

We're a record store an the health department showing up and asking if we were selling steak fajitas.

And it was I mean, it was brilliant.

Point in time tha every relatively populated town had a record store, and now that doesn't exist.

The people that come in and know what record stores are and miss them coming fro wherever they're from, you know, almost church like, you know, oh, you can just see it.

Oh, man, this is so great.

And yeah, that's that's a nice feeling.

Music has a a mystical power at times when nothing else does.

When I would hear the vinyl record, just slap on that turntable, that little pop sound.

I love that the hissing in the records, the dust, you know, just the plastic sleeve, the paper being crinkled up.

Everything about wine.

I love a Saint Louis in the early 70s, struck me as, pretty dirty.

Unfortunately, more record stores than what I was used to where I'd grown up.

I mean, I first bought my first, B.B.

King, Howlin Wolf and, John Lee hooker records at a hardware store for Tom.

It's a spiritual thing.

The truth may be an offense, but it's no sin.

Lord willing I'll be here next Monday, 4 p.m. later.

In his own way, he is kind of a preacher for music and for the spirituality in music.

He lives it as a performer, as a deejay.

He loves being on the floor, teaching people about music.

It's not just about runnin a store or making money to live.

It's his life.

You know, you would walk in between these stacks of records and they would.

Tom and Lee would, like, educate you.

So I know my taste in music comes from here, because Tom would say, well, if you like that, then maybe you'll like this, right?

I mean, I still have like the weirdest collection of albums of anybod and the weirdest taste in music records are everywhere, always falling.

If I knock them down, I'm in trouble.

If I touch them, we usually talk about them.

This is a record that we put out for Record Store Day many years ago, and it included cuts by people that worked in the store who were musicians or playing in a band.

And this is me playing harmonica over a piece called Sata.

I like it.

I don't know.

Whenever he's around, there's music playing.

When I'm sleeping, I hear the harmonica playing.

When I'm awake, I hear the harmonica playing in the morning.

On the night I. Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa.

I always came to the store.

You know?

I was always digging in the crates up there.

Digging for records.

You know, cuticles bleeding, hands dirty.

You know, you so.

And in all of the music and you dig.

And for songs to sample with for us was like that store, that main store that we can go to and find that vintage music for producers and then look, look what I found.

This is funny.

Tom used to write next to like a lot of the albums for those of us like he would say, like, this is the definitive 70s album, you have to buy this album because, you know, blah, blah, blah.

This was hands down the party album in 1972.

Every party I went to.

But you have to remember this, this is I was reading it because I just thought it was so great.

Sex, death, drugs, liquor, boredom and midnight romance.

That's the very.

That's the very first of our business cards.

Boy, time is longer than rope.

I'm gonna.

And now keep.

You know, in our early years, we didn't have much money for advertising, but we discovered the perfect place for our no budget, self-produced black and white commercials, some very attractively low budget overnight TV.

Midnight, some weekends, you know.

Thanks again for joining us on 26 hours of Studio Mania cable RTV channel 11.

Yes, Saint Lulu pop a vintage vinyl saying, look, it's time for some CD and DVD spring cleaning.

Yeah, that's right, time to get rid of those unwanted CDs and DVDs.

Vintage vinyl gives you more in cash, vintage vinyl gives you more in trade.

And yes, we want you you CDs, DVDs and vintage vinyl.

Your music now, now, now.

In 1978, I knew exactly where I wanted to put a store in Saint Louis, which was on the Delmar Loop for two very simple reasons, had a very rare advantage, which was that people in Saint Louis actually walked in the neighborhood.

And then, the biggest surprise of all was that it was the rarest thing in Saint Louis.

It was a racial neutral zone at the time.

And as one born in the South, I still had never seen a more racially divided place than Saint Louis because of our location and the fact that we've been around so long is one of the few places in this town where you would get such a broad swath of our community.

Shoulder to shoulder.

Myself, coming from Edwardsville, Illinois, which is a pretty white place.

Coming into Saint Louis and working at Vintage Vinyl really taught me a lot about how much I didn't know about race.

I had to learn about people, you know, music and vintage vinyl is a gateway to all of that stuff.

Yeah, we don't agree about a lot, but we all agree that music is awesome.

We get everybody young to old to obviously black and white and rich and poor and yeah, they're all in here.

And generally speaking, those are the people that have kept our doors open during a lot of the dry years.

You know, the true music fan, you can't spot them.

You can't look at them.

I mean, outside of unless they're, you know, wearing music memorabilia, but generally they're not when they walk in here.

It's pretty amazing.

I really I can't think o another institution or business where there is such a cros cultural pastiche, if you will.

We all search for music to have a neutral space like vintage vinyl is essential.

There should be dozens of space around Saint Louis that draw people of all races and income brackets and ethnicities, and unfortunately, there's just not.

I always thought that vintage was the cultural anchor of the loop, but there were others.

Now I feel like we're kind of the only, in my opinion, with the soul of this trip on, urban radio, meaning black radio.

There's a guy who called himself Gentleman Jim Gates.

He came in here one Saturday before his 12:00 shift.

I remember him standing there looking around the storm whipping office sunglasses and going, you know what I love about this place, right?

All the bets are off.

I go.

What do you mean?

Well, you've got every kind of perso in the store shopping at once.

You got every kind of person possible.

Black.

Yellow, gay, straight, brown, male, female.

Working for you.

Everybody's in the room at the same time.

I've never seen a fight break out.

I've never seen anybody pull a gun.

So, you know, hey, for Saint Louis, all the bets are off.

Joe Edwards and I, I've been sharing a small piec of the Delmar Loop for decades.

His restaurant, Blueberry Hill, has been hostin music legends like Saint Louis.

Great Chuck Berry since the 1980s.

And vintage vinyl.

I can't tell you, Tom, how much vintage vinyl means to the loop.

It's a store with an edge.

A good edge, and it's a store that the employees and you really know musi and can talk music to people who come in as customers.

The fact that you've grown from I don't know, your first store, I'm guessing, was maybe six feet by ten feet and is probably a little bit larger than that, but pretty close to that.

And now you're in a 7000 squar foot space and you still retain that same, you know, down to the earth, down to the, you know the soul of the music mentality.

And that's rare.

You're one of the top five record stores in the United States in the world, in my opinion, because of that Saint Louis music scene.

I mean, to me, I felt like I walked around in the city thinking, why don't people realize this is one of the great music cities of the entire planet?

We just always wanted to, promote and champion that.

And right now, in the 21st century, Saint Louis has the most vibrant music scene overall it's ever had.

And yet somehow, the people that run Saint Louis, the government and the corporate, interest have yet to figure out how to effectively monetize this great musical heritage that the city has.

Other places like Chicago, Memphis, Nashville, obviously New Orleans, they've got it down.

But for some reason that's not the case here.

We had the talent, but we never had the Berry Gordy.

We never had the Sam Phillips.

In other words, we never had the business side of the music business here to record those artists.

So everybody that went on t national and international fame from Saint Louis had to leave the city to record with someone else.

And that's just the way it is.

But they were still from here, and their influences were from here.

Of what Vintage Vinyl has done.

On recording various artists and putting out, various things by Oliver Sain and Benny Smith and others.

For each one of those albums was, you know, a great moment in Saint Louis history.

Now, over the years we've produced and manufactured a number of albums and CDs on Saint Louis artist, including Oliver Saint, Tommy Bankhead, hip hop releases on The Wiz, a Tron label, and even a collection of music by our own employees titled Don't Quit Your Day Job.

Tenacious D and it's full blown glory.

Did a performance here.

This is a little chestnut from The Pick of Destiny.

A wonderful performance packed out the store.

Later, I, walked up to Mr. Black and said, I want you to know that, the character you performed in the movie, High Fidelity, made me cring the entire time because you were sort of the nightmare employee that alienated customers.

And it literally made us rewrite our handbook on, you know, customer relations.

Now, other in-store performances.

Well, they were a bit more controversial.

We did two, in stores with the Insane Clown Posse, the first in store.

We totally underestimated ho many people were going to come.

We figured there'd be a few hundred.

There were over 1300 people a the store before the university.

City polic put roadblocks up on either side of, Delmar to keep anybody more from coming in.

Interestingly enough, we had been able to turn the event of their first record being pulled off the market by Hollywood Records, who, by the way, had also passed on this band called Nirvana.

And the da before the Insane Clown Posse's first record was going to come out, they decided, we're not going to put this out.

And they had already agreed to run radio spots.

So when they called u that Monday, you know, basically our reply was, well, look you you've got to allow us to go on the air and cancel this in story you were talking about.

It was okay, okay, okay, okay.

And we started a commercial out and it was me and Randy Roberts who's currently the, music critic, the head music critic of the LA times.

Send in the clowns.

Oh, it's not easy being a clown.

Corporate big boys are trying to kill the clowns.

Vintage vinyl sadly announces the cancellation of the Insane Clown Posse appearance in our store.

Gone no more.

You cannot buy their CD.

Oh, that's not right.

You can still buy it at Vintage Vinyl.

They don't want us to, but tough.

Disney's trying to kill the clowns.

They can't kill us.

But we're down with the clown.

Right on.

And when they do come to town, they'll be performing at Vintage Vinyl.

Too bad.

Disney.

What's more important, the little Mermaid or freedom of speech?

Vintage vinyl.

Down with the clowns.

That resulted in three different local television crews coming into the store talking about it.

And, the basic take was local retail store stands up to the Disney Corporation details at six.

And, because of that they did an in-store literally.

I was across the street playing on the patio, doing some dinner music with a friend of mine, and I look over and I see the windows of the store bowing in from so many people in front of the store was starting to make me think about that movie day of the Locust.

You know, where there's a riot and but it all went off well.

And then they came back fo the second album, which was huge when Mindless Behavior came there like a really small boy band like we thought they were going to only be like 25 people here, but we ended up having 500, like screaming little girls.

Oh.

And we did not know what to expect.

Like they were like clawin at us, trying to get to the boys and like my dad got scratched in the neck and there was like, blood everywhere or so it was like crazy, but like, I was just supposed to, like, cut everyone's wristbands once they met them.

So we knew, like, they needed to leave the store because there was like 600, 500 people was just so many.

And the bodyguar made me stand on stage and like, push people off of the boys and like, off the stage and like, here I was like eight years old and I'm like, pushing these girls.

Over the years, there have been several occasions when the store became an impromptu worship center and safe haven for music lovers who had nowhere else to turn.

Saint Louis DJ Supreme Ron Butts, aka Gee Whiz, is part of a group that brought the healing feeling of music to those who needed to heal over the death of a beloved artist.

The sudden, unexpected death of Prince just totally floored the music world.

And, I remember tha the turntable orchestra came in and did a special, master mix of this man's music and, it really, really moved the people.

It moved us.

That was the most touching performance.

The turntable always start with that.

I mean, people were were they was out there like it looked like.

I mean, like an arena.

And when it was over, people were in tears.

That was it was tears of thankfulness.

And yes, they were happy.

They were like.

And me and Allen, and Biko we at the end we like, kind of gathered together and said, wow, we all see a while at the same time, like that was unbelievable.

We've had, Queens of the Stone age not only do an in-store, but perform a midnight show full blown.

They then took part of the footage and included in a DVD.

My most favorite memor is Mumford and Sons coming here, because my dad was like, hey, Morgan, come back here.

You got to meet them in the eyes.

And I can tell you a long ways.

Me day to we've had it tonight, but here's a group that's on the road playing an enormous rooms, if not arenas.

And I think what they wanted to get out of it for them was to have a real personal contact in a record store with their fans.

And I can tell tha by just looking at their faces.

From internationall known artists to the ones from.

Right in our own backyard.

The man Little Richard credited with recording the very first rock and roll record.

The brilliant, controversial and troubled Ike Turner.

He came into our store the day he received his star on the Delmar Walk of Fame.

Next to so many other Saint Louis icons.

Chuck Berry and rock n roll, Albert King and blues.

I mean, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton owe a lot to Albert King.

Scott Joplin and ragtime.

The King of Ragtime, Willie Mae, Fort Smith, and modern gospel music as we know it.

The co-founder.

But in Saint Louis, a city with more than his fair share of iconic musicians, it all comes back to Chuck Berry, the father of rock n rol who never stopped making music.

Chuck Berry performed here 209 consecutive months at Blueberry Hill.

The father of rock n roll.

The first person inducte in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame.

The first person inducted the Saint Louis Walk of Fame in the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

It's just the guy was just a genius.

I know at the store, we were so pleased when, the label that was, going to put ou his final record entitled Chuck, wanted to put a mural on the wall of our store.

Of course, we immediately said, yes, I'm grateful you have that up there, because that that is a great mural and people still comment on that and will forever.

My first record was a box of records that I found on the curb, but I remember ther being a lot of Neil Young in it.

Hello, my name is Norman an this is the only album I bought.

It's the essentials by Bob Dylan.

My favorite and first album ever bought with my own money was Alanis Morissette.

Jagged Little Pill.

Hi, I'm Kelly Keenan.

My first album was Sean Cassidy.

My first album that I ever got on vinyl was actually Ultraviolence by Lana Del Rey.