![]() “And he just said, ‘I can't express how much joy you brought to me.’ ”Ĭristina Kim produced this story and edited it for broadcast with Tinku Ray. “I had a guy call me on the phone just a few days ago and he was actually crying,” he says. With a tear in his eye, Voorhees says he tried to find music for people and make them feel comfortable in his store with a warm welcome. The legacy of Bop Street goes far beyond a few celebrity appearances. But he says, ‘I hear you've been selling this rare Nirvana set.’ I looked at him and I said, ‘Who's asking?’ ” Voorhees says, laughing. ![]() Two weeks after Kurt Cobain died, Dave Grohl came into the store. On one occasion, Gibbard introduced his fiance at the time - actress Zooey Deschanel - to Voorhees, who wasn’t yet familiar with her work. He actually signed a couple of records for me.”īen Gibbard from Death Cab For Cutie used to come into the store. “I enjoyed meeting him and talking to him. “It's probably about $1,000, maybe $500 worth of records, but he was cool,” he says. Voorhees said he didn’t know, so Crumb offered $75. A 78 collector, Crumb spent six hours at the store.Īt the end of the day, Crumb brought out a stack of records and asked how much Voorhees wanted for them. Crumb who illustrated the album cover for “Cheap Thrills” by Big Brother and the Holding Company, was one of the first. Over the years, many famous folks browsed the shelves at Bop Street, which was named after the song “Bop Street” by Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps. Now, a Goodwill in downtown Seattle is picking up some 16,000 records from the shop to sell, he says. After moving to Chicago from the south in the mid-1950s, Rush became an incredible left-handed guitarist who influenced Jimi Hendrix and many later guitarists, he says. One of the rare 45s he bought on the trip was Otis Rush's “I Can't Quit You, Baby” from 1954. Word of mouth spread around town and people started calling him to ask to see his records, he says. Within two weeks, he started selling records for $2 to $10 each. “I should have bought them all, but I didn't.” “I've had a lot of highlights in my life, but that was one of the highlights. In the small town of Angleton, Texas, a jukebox distributor was selling 100,000 45s for a dime apiece.Īfter a three-day drive with a friend, Voorhees spent $300 on 3,000 records, kept in boxes with silverfish scurrying around from a dusty warehouse with a dead mouse in the corner. While Voorhees worked at a used record store, a customer came in with a shoebox full of blues 45s that he bought from his brother in Texas. Sometimes if I hear a particular Buddy Holly song, I'll expect to hear the next song on the album,” he says, “because it's sort of ingrained to me the sequence, the order that those songs were on the record.”īefore opening Bop Street, Voorhees started selling blues records out of his parents’ basement in 1974. “I listened to that thing over and over and over. He loved the record and once entered a lip-sync contest with the song “Oh, Boy!” - though he says a mustache made him look more like “Weird Al” Yankovic than Holly. Voorhees’ love of records started when he bought a Fats Domino 45, or single, at age 8 and received “The Buddy Holly Story” on vinyl for his 10th birthday in December 1959, months after Holly died. Most of his customers are first-time record buyers from Europe or other parts of the world, he says, so the lack of foot traffic impacted business. Jay Inslee and Mayor Jenny Durkan for putting restrictions on nonessential businesses - though selling records feels essential to him. Now, he plans to continue selling records online.īefore the COVID-19 pandemic, Voorhees planned to renew the lease but later changed his mind. Once one of the top five record stores in the nation, Bop Street Records opened in 1979 and settled in the neighborhood of Ballard in 1984. “It's going to be a strange feeling when I look in this location and it's empty,” he says. ![]() Driven to an early retirement by the COVID-19 outbreak, owner and record collector Dave Voorhees says moving on from his routine of putting up the open sign and turning on the music feels “surreal.” Visiting a good record store is a one-of-a-kind experience: the exploration and discovery, the smell of thousands of records, the feeling of touching a vinyl record.įor over 30 years, music lovers flocked to Seattle's Bop Street Records - but now the home of 500,000 records will close its doors at the end of June. (Kamil Krzaczynski/ AFP via Getty Images) Facebook Email Seattle's Bop Street Records, once one of the top five record stores in the nation, is closing its doors at the end of June after over 30 years in business.
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