Over the years it's been obvious to me that the motley fans of Jonathan Richman usually have a few things in common: they're rare, they're devoted (they can't say exactly why and sometimes they may even deny it), they're musicians or know music in some personal way, and they frequent record stores- the endangered 'corner store' varieties being favorite haunts.
Sasha Frere-Jones is the pop music critic at The New Yorker. He's never, to my knowledge, written about Jonathan but this week he has an interesting writeup on Scritti Polliti.
Anyway, lately he's been compiling different people's nostalgic stories of record stores on his blog, S/FJ, good and bad and indifferent, but somehow all familiar.
The original call for tales is here, along with Sasha's musings in response to a story in The New York Times by Alex Williams called "The Graying of the Record Store" that includes this line:
Dave Marsh, the rock critic and author of books on popular music, noted that rockers like Jonathan Richman and Iggy Pop honed their edgy musical tastes working as record store clerks.
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