Coventry Street has always been my favorite place in Cleveland ever since my Aunt took me there to sell all of her vinyl at Record Revolution. The guy checking for scratches found some suspicious seeds and they both laughed.
Record Revolution used to be a gigantic store filled with vinyl and other fun stuff both new and used. It took up three stores worth of space. It’s now just a small boutique selling T-shirts, pipes, a couple of hats and for all I know is a front for a cocaine operation. The movie theater is gone. The small used book store is still there and I have no idea how it manages to survive.
This may be the last dagger though
I have no idea how Big Fun has survived the last ten years, and sadly though I always stopped in I rarely bought anything, but it was filled with great stuff to look at from my youth, Six Million Dollar Man action figures, Pop Rocks, Beatles lunch boxes, mood rings, old issues of Rolling Stone and Creem.
These places were often guilty of selling these things for far more than they were worth. Once I had a first date with a girl in Los Angeles, she basically asked me to ask her out. I took her to see Jon Brion at Largo and Tom Petty was sitting at the table next to us. I thought it went well and spent like 80 dollars on a still in the box Charlie’s Angels toy van for her. Turned out that she felt I was too old for her and her encouraging talk of living in a chick pad faded, when I asked her out again. She told me a lie about having just gotten out of a relationship, but that’s fine I guess that’s how those things work and I didn’t call her on it.
Anyway, I never opened the box with the toy in it and sent it to my dad, who looked it up on E-Bay and told me it was worth five bucks. So yeah that woman who sold it to me and told me that it was very rare was a predator. There was a kid in Chicago once who noticed that a memorabilia store had mislabeled a valuable baseball card. It was worth something like 5,000 and the store had put a decimal point on it and sold it for 500. The store sued. I was on the kid’s side, because I knew that the people who bought used baseball cards from ignorant kids had screwed them over millions of times without even a tinge of guilt.
So yeah Amazon and E-Bay pretty much fixed the pricing of used goods. Hooray. Browsing those sites is nowhere near as fun as walking into Big Fun. I can now fit all 8000 of my songs on a tiny i-pod. My entire book collection which fills four shelves can all fit on my phone. There are no more record stores to just hang in. There are no more book stores to hang in.
The wealth disparity in this country was a joke far before Ronald Reagan started making it worse in 1981. Currently Jeff Bezos is worth 100 billion dollars by means of killing book and record stores and craft stores and musical instrument stores and any type of store that isn’t a hospital or a barber shop.
Let’s all laud his genius, which would be considerably less impressive if the government hadn’t have invented the internet.
I used to spend entire days at the library reading old Rolling Stone magazines on microfiche. Now with the internet you can get all the same info and know almost as much about old music as me in a fraction of that time.
So I’m worth 100 billion less than Jeff Bezos and I’m not really all that upset about that, but he’s helped turn us into a nation of slaves, sitting in cubicles, and thanking God that we are lucky enough to have a job. The government’s of cities, states and countries will pay him to bring his warehouses to their turf.
Remember when Jim Morrison drunkenly ranted “You’re all a bunch of slaves! Maybe you like getting pushed around! What are you going to do about it?”
Sadly, the answer apparently was worship rich people on the off chance that one day you will be rich one day too. The answer to slavery wasn’t to make nearly everybody into one too.
San Francisco used to be filled with weirdos and snobs. Guess which group can still afford to live there?
Yeah, I’m bitter. But then again I was bitter in 1993 when all of my friends had nothing to talk about except for how big their TVs were while I was still using the one my grandmother bought me for my Bar Mitzvah.
God bless my friends who were empire builders and made a fortune, while I could barely stand day to day life making more at 27 than probably 90% of the people my age with zero debt.
God bless the artists, who get paid to do what they love. Support them. It’s a big beautiful world and I don’t particularly like the way we’ve decided to share it.
RIP Big Fun.
