We weren’t sure if the space we bought on Main Street was a storage unit or an actual operating business. And we certainly didn’t care. We wanted it. All of it. Every inch of it. And we got just that. Seemingly 20-miles worth of rock and roll everything — books, cassettes, DVDs, CDs, VHS, records and records and some more records.
Our bar, Pembroke City Limits, is right next door to the former Village Music in Suncook. Before then, the brick storefront was Bobby Dee’s Record and Audio Shop. Bobby was known as the “King of the Golden Oldies,” and his record store gave the Village a real nice shine for a while.
And more than a few times I bought old CDs and old books off the former owner of Village Music. He had shops in Manchester that I visited often before he came north. I bought Kerouac, Bukowski, Brazilian beats, a DVD of “Glengarry Glen Ross” and a couple used Dylan T-shirts straight off the backs of strangers.
At 55, I was that guy in the record stores in the ‘80s — Strawberries, Newbury Comics, Stairway to Heaven in Boston — those stores, that smell of vinyl and cardboard, magic marker, eyeliner and hairspray. It’s in my bones. My partners too. Different high schools, different states, same bones.
Saturdays were all about going to a record store. Whether it was off Route 1 in Saugus, or on the “T” to Downtown Crossing, I was going with a friend, and we’d be there for a bit, looking for B-Side 45’s mostly, the rare ones from our favs. Maybe a new release by Men at Work, or a double album by Cheap Trick if we could afford it.
Then, you lay your money down and rush home to open that puppy. Glory herself comes blasting out. The art, lyrics, and photography were always moving, and sometimes the whole layout of the album could be transformative.
Opening the doors of our new spot, now called Pembroke City Limits Records and Books, I nearly lost a tooth on a bookshelf that came out of nowhere when we hit the lights. A cascade of nostalgia rained down on us.
From our toenails to our temple, we felt love for this space immediately. The smell was dusty and stale, but within the dusts balls was the delicious sent of cardboard, hard polish, old paper and plastic. Delightfully appealing to a product of the ‘80s. A well-earned reunion between scent and man.
My partner and his son attacked hundreds of DVDs lining the walls, dividing the dogs from the keepers, which is subjective of course. Our new collector friend, Joe from Maine, comes in once a week and divvies up the 45’s by old labels. My wife, daughter and son bulldogged through a hundred boxes ready for storage.
I was more than happy to focus on the books. A Beats section that topples most stood before me. All the ones I wanted to read, had read, forgotten to read or stolen from a library — Papa Hemingway, Buk, Jack, poets of the mind, writers come and gone, heroic and tortured — they were all right there.
We have our work cut out for us. The space was a mess, yet chaotically well organized. Things were falling apart, old country records were mixed with punk and a George Burns biography was next to a Stephen King horror story. Hundreds of pig ornaments surrounded us, which we still can’t explain. Framed pictures of Groucho Marx and Marilyn Monroe hang on the walls, monitoring our progress.
Meanwhile, we’ll do our best to pump some blood back this space, breath some of that fresh Village air into it, where a Vintage coffee and a stroll down the Lit Classics aisle sounds like a nice nooner.
To music junkies like us, it sounds like a slice of vintage heaven.
Rob Azevedo can be reached at onemanmanch@gmail.com. He can also be found mopping the floors at Pembroke City Limits.