Audio By Carbonatix
John Carter has his work cut out for him. In a city where there’s a Sound Warehouse in nearly every strip mall, Carter is trying to carve a niche for himself with Locals’ Music, a store that sells only locally made recordings. And he hasn’t exactly made the job any easier for himself. From its beginnings, the undertaking has suffered from the indifference of many consumers toward homegrown talent as well as from a few of the decisions made by Carter himself.
A child of the Sixties who’s been everything from a Pacific Northwest logger to an actor and a renaissance-fair puppeteer, Carter says, “I’ve been a frustrated artist all my life–and I’ve hung around with artists all my life. What happens to artists is, no matter how hard they try, no matter how talented they are, it’s a constant kick in the teeth.”
In the hope of foiling oral surgeons everywhere, Carter set out to even the odds. During a visit to Portland, Oregon, last August, he peered into a hole-in-the-wall store that dealt exclusively in music made by performers from that area and was so impressed by the excitement the merchandise seemed to generate that he decided to try the same thing here. His goal was to create a modest outlet that could also serve as a hub for the kind of information, networking and cheerleading support often needed by fledgling artists in all media, from music and video to fashion and fanzines.
After happening upon what he considered an ideal location, at 13th and Marion streets in Capitol Hill, Carter and a female partner he prefers not to name prepared to open the store in January. Unfortunately, the launch didn’t go as planned: Carter’s associate absconded with nearly all of the store’s inventory, much of which Carter had not yet purchased. While Carter acknowledges that his now-former partner executed what he calls a professional “face-plant” brought on by his decision to give her too much responsibility too soon, he otherwise chooses to leave details about this incident somewhat sketchy. He says only that the situation has been worked out quite cordially with both the party in question and the owner of Bakeman’s CDs, a store (at 666 Logan) on whose shelves a fair amount of the merchandise subsequently appeared.
In the meantime, Locals’ Music was forced to open with little more than Carter’s desk and six cassette tapes inside. “It was the store with nothing to sell,” Carter recalls.
To help attract customers, Carter fashioned an impromptu puppet gallery, fired up a coffeepot and, he says, “smiled and waved at everybody that went by.” Fortunately, one of his early visitors was Mike E. of Poor Boy Productions, who expressed a desire to expand that business’s retail operations by opening a clothing store, dubbed Groove, in Denver. The two soon decided to split the shop, and the arrangement has worked so well that at press time Poor Boy staffers were hauling their hip-hop haberdashery two doors down the block in preparation for a mid-June opening in a larger space.
Carter has no shortage of ideas for filling the parts of the store newly open to him–and he already stocks a healthy selection of alternative-lifestyle accessories, including skateboards, sunglasses and aerosol-art tools (sorry, Cheech and Chong fans; there’s no drug paraphernalia in sight). Still, his focus remains on music. With 200 local titles now in stock, give or take a handful that are temporarily sold out, Locals’ racks seem modest in comparison to those at your average Sam Goody. But Carter claims that the response he’s received thus far has convinced him that Locals’ Music is “just scratching the surface” of the Mile High music scene. Indeed, while store traffic can still be spotty, an early-evening visitor to the shop is likely to witness a seemingly endless parade of black-clad youngsters earnestly perusing everything from the latest Somebody’s Sister cassette to a compilation of Denver punk bands.
Not that Carter’s amassing any nest eggs from the business. He admits that running the store is “like somebody’s put a vacuum-cleaner hose in my pocket and turned it on high.”
Locals’ Music cannot be judged strictly from a financial basis, however. Carter’s admittedly heady models for the store include the sidewalk shops of Paris’s Left Bank during the Twenties and Thirties and San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore, which became a cornerstone for the Beat poetry movement in the Fifties. As much a retail outlet as a haven for underground youth culture, Carter says about his venture, “You’re talking a Sears and Roebuck of the sweaty-pig record labels.
