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Don't get me wrong: I have no intention of claiming that chain music stores of the oversized variety are entirely bad. For folks living in the suburbs, for instance, the sudden appearance of outlets with mammoth inventories moments from their homes is nothing but good news. But a recent visit to the heavily hyped Virgin Megastore at the new Denver Pavilions project (mentioned in this space two weeks ago) didn't exactly leave me wowed. Sure, the outfit stocks a wide variety of albums, including deep catalogues of acts major and comparatively minor--but most of the prices are sky-high (I saw plenty of single discs going for $17.99), and local music is conspicuous by its absence. Westword contributor Thomas Peake was told by a Virgin employee that the Megastore will be taking CDs on consignment after the first of the year. Until then, Westword Music Awards Showcase compilations pretty much have the category to themselves.

That's certainly not the case at Wax Trax, a Denver institution that just celebrated its twentieth anniversary under current ownership. With four interrelated stores on the 600 block of East 13th Avenue in Capitol Hill and another branch located at 1143 13th Street in Boulder, the operation is sizable, but it continues to make room for recordings by area performers. Moreover, Wax Trax is one of the region's foremost employers of musicians--a lucky thing, since a lot of them couldn't get jobs anywhere else. According to head import/indie buyer Dave Kerr, a onetime member of Foreskin 500 who's worked at Wax Trax for seven years, the list of present employees with band ties is typically lengthy: "We've got several different DJs, someone from Blue Ontario, someone from Koala, Lonesome Dan Kase, Frank Hauser Jr., who's been concentrating on his own stuff ever since Slim Cessna's Auto Club broke up, Sundog, who's a jungle artist, and probably some others that I'm not thinking of right now. And over the years, there's been millions."

As that comment implies, Wax Trax has a rich history. The store was started in 1975 by Denver dweller Jim Nash and his English partner, Mike Smythe, who quickly cultivated a clientele dominated by punk and new-wave fans who weren't being adequately served by other vendors. But by 1977, the twosome had grown frustrated with what they saw as the limitations of the Denver scene and decided to shift the enterprise to Chicago. To help finance the scheme, they sold the Denver store to Dave Stidman and Duane Davis, two Jefferson County social workers who were among their most loyal customers. "We had never done anything in the music business before," Stidman remembers, "but we had a lot of similar tastes in music to Jim and Mike, and the idea of running this thing was kind of a dream come true."

On November 7, 1978, when the Stidman-Davis era began, Nash and Smythe were still moving out of the original store, at the intersection of 13th Avenue and Washington Street. "They were taking all of their records to Chicago with them," Stidman says, "so all we had in the place were about twenty new records, a bunch of used records I'd picked up at garage sales and flea markets and a few posters to put up on the wall--and some of them, like ones for Jimi Hendrix and Talking Heads, are still up there today. We had a little gray box instead of a cash register, but we didn't have any money to put into it, so when the first couple of customers came into the store wanting to trade records, we had to take money out of the pop machine to use for change."

Despite this rough start, the sale of the Denver Wax Trax wound up having positive results for everyone involved. In Chicago, Nash and Smythe used their new store to launch the Wax Trax record label, an imprint that was extremely important in the development of industrial music. (Nash has since died, but his daughter is still overseeing Chicago's Wax Trax legacy.) Meanwhile, Stidman and Davis--assisted by first employee Steve Knudson, a member of the popular Denver group the Young Weasels who's now an executive with Tommy Boy Records--turned the Denver business into a mini-conglomerate. Taking advantage of cheap rent, they added an oldies store in 1980, started Across the Trax, a video-specialty shop, the following year, and opened a used annex in 1986. (The Boulder Wax Trax came to life in the late Eighties, moving to its present site several years later.) Along the way, Wax Trax became known as the most musically hip album-seller in Colorado--a place where consumers could find the newest, coolest sounds first.