| Hello all,
Writing to you from the 17th anniversary of Mississippi Records. Of course, I am feeling sentimental. It's been a great run so far with a ridiculously large amount of people to thank.
To celebrate our anniversary and prove that anything can happen, we present the unthinkable - the Mississippi Records tchotchke shop website!
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If you would have told me 17 years ago that one day the little record shop I just started would go online to sell tote bags, T shirts, postcards, posters, stickers and Sun Ra snow globes, I would have had a panic attack. I would have looked in the mirror and said to my image, "how could you?" The internet! Tote bags! Snow globes! 17 years ago, it would have been unthinkable. I was a punk who hated the idea of anything with "branding" and I'd never been on the internet because I assumed it was just for rich people.
It's surprising I was so anti tchotchke. All the Portland business's I was modeling mine after were big on creating branded ephemera. I thought of Mississippi Records as an extension of the spirit of old Portland shops and these shops self promoted like mad, but for some reason I thought we were not worthy of having commemorative items for sale besides records and tapes. All the business's I loved hawked T shirts and key chains and belt buckles with their name on them. It was in fact, a huge part of the Portland culture to make silly merch. Me and my friends collected this stuff too. My clock had Tom Peterson, a local furniture store owners, face on it and woke me up every morning to the alarm - his recognizable voice shouting "WAKE UP! WAKE UP TO A HAPPY DAY!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sYj-DOFFlk
I moved to Portland in the early 90's - a time when downtown rent was cheap. Portland was a wonderland of janky little business's. It really felt like anyone could start a shop or venue, even if you were totally insane and refused to compromise with consensus reality. Most small business owners in Portland had some kind of madness in them. Tres Shannon and Ben Ellis (the X Ray Cafe), Stephanie Pierce (The 24 Hour Church Of Elvis), Fred and Toody Cole (Tombstone music), Tom and Gloria Peterson (Tom Peterson's and Gloria Too) - these are the kind of people I thought of when I thought "small business owner." They seemed like weird visionary artists more than business people.
I was so young and shy when visiting these places, I have no doubt none of these business owners remember me at all. I was a pimply little teenage mouse. I skulked in the shadows, taking notes, almost never buying anything. I never would have started Mississippi Records without having seen these people operate. They had fun. They made bizarre and unlikely decisions. Most of what they did seemed more in the service of creating community and surrealism than making money. I wanted in.
In celebration of our anniversary and our new outright cheesy website, I'd like to pull back the curtain a bit to reveal some of the business' Mississippi Records tried to emulate. We stole from the best. |
| The X Ray existed on SW Burnside and 2nd Ave from 1990 to 1994, opening right when I first moved to Portland. Tres Shannon and Benjamin Arthur Ellis took over a truly disgusting pizza joint called "UFO Pizza" and turned it into an anarchic all ages venue. It hosted everything from a needle exchange to sewing circles to poetry readings. Of course, there were tons of punk shows too. Tres ended up running for mayor. I still have a T shirt somewhere that says "my name is Tres Shannon and I want to be mayor", an image he scrawled in crayon when he was 7 years old accompanied by a stick figure self portrait. A major talking point of his campaign was his plan to build roller coasters that looped around Portland's bridges. Tres got 5% of the vote.
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Tres Shannon in his band, the Kurtz Project. |
10 years after the X Ray, Tres started Voodoo Donuts, Portland's most famous business. He also opened the ill fated P Palace, a bar and entertainment center where everything sold and experienced had to start with the letter "P" - putt putt golf, pizza, pretzels, Pabst Blue Ribbon, pool tables, Pepsi and so on. Just like running for mayor, this business was an idea he had as a child. The P Palace was open for less than one day! A story for another time....
Documentary about the X Ray Cafe -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4DPx0RGr4o |
| 2. Tom Peterson's and Gloria's Too! |
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| Tom Peterson and his wife Gloria started their first furniture store in Portland in 1964. Tom Peterson Super Stores (featuring electronics too) starting sprouting up all over Oregon by the 1980's. Tom was a master huckster. His commercials are the stuff of legend, staring himself shouting "WAKE UP! WAKE UP TO A HAPPY DAY!" There commercials would air on late night television. Tom would open his stores from 11:00 PM to 3:00 AM, in case customers who saw the commercials late at night were suddenly inspired to run out of the house right away and go shopping. He created some of the worlds greatest promotional gimmicks. You could get a free "Tom Peterson haircut" (a flat top crew cut) on location, you could buy Tom Peterson alarm clocks, coloring books and halloween masks with his visage on them. Toms face was emblazoned on just about everything. Kurt Cobain was wearing a Tom Peterson watch when he passed away, making the item a $100 collectible among morbid weirdos.
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Tom was always on the sales floor, hawking goods. I remember him trying to convince me to buy a stereo system with a CD player built into it. He was very dismayed when I told him I didn't like CD"s and only listened to records. "CD'S HAVE BETTER SOUND! THEY DON'T SCRATCH! THEY'RE MORE PORTABLE! THEY'LL STOP MAKING RECORDS SOON!" He stood there and listed reason after reason that CD's were superior to records to me, a 16 year old kid just looking to buy the cheapest record player available. Tom came to represent something deep to me and lots of other folks in Portland. Graffiti artists made stencils of Tom's face and plastered it all over town with the words "TRUST TOM" underneath. Gus Van Sant put Tom in his best movies - Drug Store Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. Z - 100 radio produced a song called "I Woke Up With A Tom Peterson Haircut". Tom was everywhere.
Tom Peterson free watch commercial - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWBZHF_JYms
Tom Peterson free pizza commercial - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leWnh-hbAeE
Tom Peterson teaching you how to cook with a microwave - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GGshoUA3lQ |
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| Back before cell phones, there was the TeleCafe. This downtown Portland coffee shop had a phone on every table. You could buy a cup of coffee, sit at a table and call friends to check in. When I was 17 years old, I lived in an apartment by myself, 2 blocks from the TeleCafe. I did not have a phone in my apartment and would go to the cafe a couple days a week to make my calls. My friends would sometimes leave messages for me with the staff at the cafe. Some of my friends would also write me postcards to make plans. Those were the days.
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| 4.The 24 Hour Church Of Elvis
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| In 1985, Stephanie Pierce quite her corporate law job and decided to start a coin operated church dedicated to the worship of Elvis. The first incarnation of this had elaborate window displays, the hall of art horrors, and "Sex or Money" (a parody of the Catholic confessional booth). Stephanie also had a cable access show called "Where's The Art?", a "talent show" where she let anyone do anything they wanted.
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| Stephanie continued to innovate through the years. She created a bunch of coin operated machines powered by Commodore 64 computers that would talk at you in a terrifying stilted robot voice as a screen showed you incredibly crude computer graphics. All of the machines were running day and night. The church's tchotchke game was absolute tops. You would put a quarter in a machine accessible from the street, and 50% of the time you'd get anything from a Church of Elvis Keychain, to Elvis's drivers license, to a fortune written by Dr. Justin D. Nikov-Time, the World's Cheapest psychic. The other 50% of the time, you'd get nothing.
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| Famed street musician Elvis would hang out at the church most days, doing "research" - this being watching TV. Elvis impersonated the O.G Elvis, but with his own extreme personal touches added to the Kings performance. Elvis wore thick black glasses, a big scraggly beard and a homemade Elvis jumpsuit complete with cape. Elvis could be found at the X Ray Cafe most nights, singing and dancing on stage between bands no matter what the show was. He still performs at Portland's Saturday Market.
The 24 Hour Church Of Elvis ran at 4 different locations between 1985 and 2013. At one point in the early 1990's, Stephanie decided to enact a science / perfomance art experiment - "let's see what happens if I live in the display window of the church for 30 days, 24 hours a day, being out of view only for bathroom breaks." She called this window display "Biosphere 2,000". It was a truly tragic thing to witness. I would stop by once a day and see Stephanie curled up with a blanket in the corner, watching TV and looking miserable. I often brought her food, which she would except through a slot, like a prisoner in solitary.
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| Started in 1982 by Cathy Hagen and John McNally , 2nd Ave Records first location was only 600 square feet. It was stacked top to bottom with crazy cheap and great underground music of every type. The owners and employees were always very curt, to the point and intimidating to a teenager like me. I always felt like they knew something deep that I did not - they had the only copy of the lost book of Thoth in the back, had memorized it, and held vast knowledge the likes of which I would never even begin to know.
When I was 15, I was shopping at 2nd Ave and spotted a record by a couple kids called "The Clarendonians". Nowhere on the record did it say what kind of music it was, but it looked like something I would like and it was only $3.00. I brought it home and was stunned. It sounded like the American R&B and soul I liked, but it had this really weird off rhythm and the singers had an accent I could not identify.
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| The next day, I returned to 2nd Ave with the record to ask if they had any other records that sounded like it. Todd Ahseln was working (he's still there today, 34 years later). Todd was especially intimidating to me - a very cool rocker who did not suffer fools. When I showed him the record and asked where things like this were, he pointed over to the reggae section. I was shocked. At this point the only reggae I had heard was awful - Ziggy Marley's radio hit "Tomorrow People", "Red Red Wine" by UB40, Reggae By The River 80's nightmare music and so on. How could this grungy badass trippy R&B be reggae?
Todd walked over to the section and gave me golden advice. He said, "for this kind of stuff - rocksteady and ska - go through this section and get anything that says "Trojan", "Prince Buster" or Studio One",and where the musician pictured is wearing a suit and doesn't have dreads." That week, I got records by Prince Buster, The Ethiopians, and Desmond Dekker - all for under $5. Still some of my favorites to this day.
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| The ultimate role model for the Mississippi Records ethic and esthetic came from Fred and Toody Cole. Beside being in bands like The Weeds, The Lollipop Shoppe, Zipper, Zap Spangler, The Torpedoes, King Bee, The Rats, The Range Rats, The Western Front, Dead Moon and Pierced Arrows, Fred and Toody Cole also operated a ton of retail business's through the years. Some of these were absolute failures, like there dollar store "Buckaroo", while others became institutions. Whizeagle Music (later renamed Tombstone Music) was their instrument shop in downtown Portland. It moved to their self built western town in Clackamas.
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| Ton's of local musicians credit the store with giving their bands a chance. Fred and Toody offered them equipment for cheap or with generous credit payment plans,. They provided a place where musicians could meet. They repaired their shitty gear, lent out PA's for free and offered general guidance. The store's floor was covered in a crazy patchwork of carpet samples. They used every homemade trick in the book to suspend guitars, strings and other odds and ends to the walls. The place felt like a mad scientists lab. It had a holy glow.
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| Evve Weston and Bella Foster, age 16, playing a the X RAY cafe in their band SMUT. I was technically the first drummer for this band, though I left town before I could attend a single practice or show...but I still reserve those bragging rights. I met Evve the day after I moved to Portland, we worked at multiple restaurants together when we were teenagers, and now she runs our tchotchke website and the new "Mississippi Records Special Products Division". Time is longer than rope....
Thanks to Sean Crogan, Evve Weston, Jay Martin and Gabe Taylor for providing photos from their archive for this newsletter. (I've know Gabe since the third day after I moved to Portland)
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Mississippi YouTube Mixes
Because I have lost the luxury of DJing records in my record shop for a captive audience all day, I am now creating daily "youtube mixes" - 10 songs a day as long as this shut in continues
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt2giAvNmgcm-wnnCIlcmXA/playlists?view_as=subscriber
Mississippi Records is still buying record collections in Portland!
We are being selective, but our retail store is buying record collections during this pandemic. You can expect to receive 60% of the retail value of your records, but - keep in mind that's based on our retail shops usual cheap prices, not inflated internet prices. We are only buying in the Portland area and can do pickups. Happy to help you out with cash in this tough time - but please bare in mind we are bing selective on what we buy.
If you are interested in selling, email -[email protected]
Mississippi Store Gift Certificates
Support the shop while we're closed with gift certificates by mail. Each gift certificate comes with special offers (see dropdown menu below).
Here's how it works:
If you paypal, please include an address for us to send the gift certificate to. No need to specify what bonus prize you want until you come to the shop. Same if you mail us a check (Mississippi Records 5202 N Albina Ave Portland OR, 97217). You will only get the gift certificate by mail. Once we are re-opened, you can come in to redeem it for records and collect your bonus prizes. Gift certificates cannot be spent on our discogs store, website or bandcamp. (AND THANKS TO ALL WHO ALREADY PURCHASED THESE!) |
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| Gift Cards Amount | | Gift Card $20.00 USDGift Card $50.00 USDGift Card $100.00 USDGift Card $200.00 USDGift Card $300.00 USDGift Card $400.00 USDGift Card $500.00 USD |
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Mississippi Records Website
Flat $5 shipping no matter how much you order.LIMITED RESTOCK: V/A - Remolino de Oro: 12 raw and stunning cumbias from the northern coast of Colombia on this classic comp from Domino Sound Records. Visit the site to get our label's records and tapes direct from us. We will continue to ship packages on a weekly basis as long as it's safe to do so.www.mississippirecords.net
Temporary Mississippi Discogs
We'll be adding at least 200 records to the site weekly. This online store will disappear the minute this pandemic is over.
https://www.discogs.com/seller/mississippi-records/profile
Mississippi Records Bandcamp
There are hours and hours worth of albums available for free listening, and a whole lot of the releases are "pay what you want" if you want to download em. Check it out -
https://mississippirecords.bandcamp.com/
Mississippi Home Stereo (Retail and Repair)
Mississippi's home stereo shop is now operational though in a smaller capacity. we can still provide affordable stereo equipment and full systems, basic replacement parts (needles, belts, etc.), and tech support by direct communication. We are maintaining limited hours at the shop on Wednesday and Sunday from 1-5pm for pick up/drop off only, and are available by email most any time. Please don't hesitate to reach out for technical support, trouble shooting, or equipment questions. Music is life essential!, we're here to help you stay in tune and vitalized by supporting your ability to experience it.
Please reach us here - [email protected]
Mississippi Records CSR
Our Community Supported Records program directly supports the label. Get each Mississippi LP at a discount as it's released, no matter how limited, plus special schwag and gifts on occasion. Limited to 300 spots. The CSR contributions help us pay for record pressings and generally stay afloat. More details here:
https://sites.google.com/site/mississippicsr/
Toody Cole / Junkstore Cowboy
Toody Cole will be shuttering her Junkstore Cowboy Shop in our basement until the record shop reopens, but that does not mean you can't get your Dead Moon / Pierced Arrows / Rats / Range Rats / Tombstone schwag and records still from her badass online store. Dead Moon shirts look just as good on you around the house as out in the world -
https://www.deadmoonusa.com/
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Michael Hurley at home!
Michael did a nice concert at home in Brownsmead. You can view it here -https://www.facebook.com/katiandluke/videos/2681529455465623/
And, if you'd like to tip him for it, you can do that here -
TIP JAR- earmark it for Michael Hurley
Michael Hurley TIPS: PayPal.me/thehackles
Or Venmo: @barry-southern-1 |
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3231 S Halsted
#197
Chicago
IL
60640
United States of America
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