Meet Patrick Brown, New Owner of Twist & Shout

Twist & Shout, one of the great record stores in Denver and the country as a whole, was just sold by owner-founders Paul and Jill Epstein, who are retiring. But the new owner is hardly an unknown quantity. Patrick Brown has worked at the store, currently located at 2508 East Colfax Avenue, for thirty years and managed it for 29 — and to put it mildly, he's not planning any radical changes. "Not me," he replies, when it's pointed out that employees who take over heritage businesses are sometimes so eager to apply their personal stamp that they fix what's not broken.

Westword spoke to Brown shortly after he officially took possession of the business, an event that he describes as "anti-climactic. There was a lot of signing and organizing and scanning documents." But the process has been in the works since last October.

"Paul and Jill have been talking about retirement for a while and bouncing around the idea in their head about how they were going to do that," Brown noted. "I think the catalyst was a store in Boise that changed ownership last year when the owner sold to some employees of theirs. I think that crystalized in their minds that it was something they could do here. They approached me a little while later and asked if that was something I'd be interested in."

Turns out he'd been thinking along those same lines. "It's definitely something I've had on my mind — what I was going to do moving forward with life in general," he recalled. "When the opportunity came with them wanting to retire, I said, 'Yeah, let's definitely do that.' The decision was as simple as that once I recognized that it was possible financially." That was, if he could secure a Small Business Administration loan, which he did.

Once all the details were sorted out, Brown and the Epsteins addressed a meeting of Twist & Shout employees on March 7. As Brown told it: "Paul said, 'We're going to retire,' and everyone applauded that, because they've earned it. And then he said, 'The other piece is, Patrick is going to purchase the business.' And there was a second round of applause."
This reaction was in direct response to Brown's history with the business. Paul and Jill purchased longtime vinyl purveyor Underground Records at a tax auction in March 1988 and subsequently turned the store at 724 South Pearl Street into Twist & Shout; Brown was among the early customers. "I started shopping there when I was home on summer break the first year they were open and started working there in June of 1992," he recalled. "I was first brought on to help them with the transition for CDs in long boxes to CDs in the browser system we used to use. I was essentially opening boxes; we had the booklets out on the floor and the CDs in the library in the back. But within the first year, they realized I could do a little more than open boxes, and they asked me to be the manager — the first manager they had. And it just kept going from there."

In 1995, Twist & Shout moved to a former Safeway building near the intersection of Alameda and Logan and stayed there for just over a decade; it also operated a vinyl store dubbed Twist & Shout Underground across the street for a couple of those years. Then, in 2006, the shops were consolidated at the East Colfax location, in a new building at the Lowenstein complex. Each of these moves "has been the right thing to do," Brown said. "Paul and Jill had an amazing sense of when it was time to shift things."

Brown's contributions were key, as well. "I've been managing for 29 years and been general manager for at least twenty, so a lot of the feel of the store, a lot of the ideas of the store, are mine as well as theirs," he added. "Paul and Jill have been very collaborative with me. They had a vision of what the store should feel like, and I agreed with that. I've also done all the hiring for years, so a lot of the vibe of the store has been my responsibility."

There have been plenty of changes in music retailing along the way, and Brown admitted that "obviously nothing is going to stay the same forever. But we've been able to adapt. We went from being a CD store where vinyl was in boxes for people to look at to having a vinyl store that focused on electronic music to moving here and seeing vinyl ascend again. Everyone says, 'CDs? You still have those?' But CD sales went up last year for the first time in a long time. So whatever happens, I feel like we're going to be able to roll with it."