Music's safe haven

By LANE DeGREGORY

© St. Petersburg Times, published November 22, 2000

Musically savvy inmates are running this Asylum on Central Avenue in St. Petersburg, the oldest independent record store around. Whatever your listening pleasure, they've got it. Or can get it.

ST. PETERSBURG -- Back behind the beaded curtain, where the Who languishes beside Lawrence Welk and Greg Allman and his gang still look good, where neon posters promise concerts by the Beatles, Bob Marley, the Doors and other groups with dead guys, a woman with long white hair and a black turtleneck hums softly to herself.

She walks slowly through the aisles of old vinyl, scanning faded faces on familiar albums, flipping through bins filled with soundtracks from her youth.

"Can I help you?" John Harris asks. He manages this anachronism on Central Avenue. Took over Asylum Sights and Sounds two years ago.

The woman smiles.

"Just enjoying the cruise here," she says. "Having myself a flashback."

On this Wednesday morning in mid-November, the air inside the record shop is sweet with amber incense. The Steve Miller Band blasts from stereo speakers. A purple lava lamp bubbles beside the cash register and tie-dye T-shirts spin slowly overhead.

"This place is a trip."

Silently, she strolls past three more racks of records, the Beastie Boys and Beethoven and B.B. King. Then she hums a little louder, so Harris can hear. Maybe he can help her after all.

"Actually," she says, "I do have a question."

When Walt Plott opened his original record shop in Sarasota, he chose the name "Asylum" so it would be first in the phone book.

"Aardvark was already taken -- can't remember for what," he said. Leon Russell had just released an album called Asylum Choir and a local band called Bethlehem Asylum was threatening to become big.

"The name was out there," Plott said. "You know?"

He didn't know that his single store would soon become four, with an outlet in Tampa and two in St. Petersburg. That eventually he would have to close all but this one on Central Avenue. That, years later, this last shop would live up to its name.

Asylum customer Shawna Harper of Palm Harbor looks for the Sex Pistols’ Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle.

He never intended to open an icon. He just wanted to sell records. And listen to music, and hang out in a hip joint, and have his friends drop by, and maybe have them drop some dough and turn people on to happening tunes.

"I was a frustrated guitarist, bassist, cello player," said Plott, 54. "Never got good on any instrument. But music was, always has been, my escape.

"For me, like a lot of people, it's how I communicate."

Late last month, Asylum celebrated its 30th anniversary. The yellow brick shop near the corner of 66th Street has outlasted disco and Dance Fever and the Grateful Dead. It has survived the onslaught of Borders and Barnes & Noble and CD sales over the Internet.

Somehow, without really trying, it has become the oldest independently owned record store in the Tampa Bay area, and one of the oldest in the nation.

"Thirty years? That's pretty amazing," said Don Van Cleave, president of the National Coalition of Independent Music Stores. "The average life of an independent, I'd say, is about five years. Everyone can buy CDs anywhere now: from Kmart to Best Buy to the computer. It's getting harder and harder for the single shops to make it.

"To last 30 years, that shows either insanity or amazing dedication."

At Asylum, there's always been a bit of both.

But there's something else, Harris says.

Something bigger helps this shop hang on.

In the beginning, before MTV and mainstream punk and censored lyrics, before 8-tracks and cassettes and CD burners, before Britney Spears was even born, Plott's place was sort of like a bar that sold records.

The Sarasota shop, when it opened, was the only store south of the Sunshine Skyway where you could buy concert tickets. When Plott would get to work some days (he was always at least a half-hour late), lines of music lovers would be waiting.

"Sold 3,000 seats when Led Zeppelin was supposed to play West Palm Beach," he said. "When they canceled, had to refund 3,000 seats. Folks lined up to buy 'em, lined up for me to buy 'em back.

"And on weekends, they'd come in with six-packs and hang out all day. We'd have the football games on TV, the music blasting, beer cans all over the counter.

"Anything went," he said. "It was a general store.

"We used to call it a hippie 7-Eleven."

Since the Central Avenue shop opened in 1976, it has expanded five times. It now fills eight storefronts: 4,200 square feet. Except for a tackle store and a tiny tattoo parlor on the west end, it takes up the entire block. There's no mall next door, no grocery or video rental or drugstore. Nothing else to draw anyone to this strip.

The shop still sells an amazing array of stuff: sparkling nail polish and Planet of the Apes action figures and black-and-white photos of Marilyn Monroe; framed Woodstock tickets and pewter dragon goblets and thousands of out-of-print greeting cards; bigger-than-life busts of all four KISS members ($150 each). Tapestries and videos and Buccaneer flags; guitar strings and H.R. Pufnstuf dolls and rubber masks of Beavis and Butt-Head; water pipes and rolling papers and dozens of different phonograph needles.

And, oh yeah, lots and lots of music: zydeco and Christian, easy listening and new age, hip-hop and comedy and Celtic; more than 100,000 new and used CDs (from Puff Daddy to Puff the Magic Dragon), at least that many recycled cassettes, plus a whole room of vintage vinyl.

You can trade in CDs and tapes for cash or credit, order anything that's out there, even ask employees to track down imports.

"We probably do 50 special-orders a week, at least," Harris says. "Folks who come in here aren't looking for some pop tune they just heard on the radio. Most of our customers are incredibly intense about their music.

"But they come in here for other things too."

Every day, all year-round, at least 200 people walk through the glass front door; more than twice as many on Fridays. Many are regulars who spend hours each week sifting through new stuff, and new used stuff, and whatever might have drifted in during the last few days. Some have been hanging out here since they were teenagers -- and now bring their own kids in on Saturdays to spend their allowances. Some are old enough to say things like, "How could a kid of mine like music like THAT?!"

A group of vacationers from Canada comes back every winter. A truck driver from Tampa stops by each Tuesday. A Continental Airlines employee drops at least $50 every Wednesday, his day off -- but he doesn't want his wife to know it, so don't ask his name.

And there are others, like the woman who is humming, who shopped here decades ago and is amazed her old haunt is still here.

The woman is Kathy Counselman. She's a hairdresser. She's 45.

"A friend of mine and I were talking," she tells Harris. "So this song has been in my head for weeks now. But I can't remember the words. And he can't either. Me and My Era, I think it was called."

"That's Nilsson," Harris answers, faster than most people can recall their own names. "Right over here."

He parts the beaded curtain so she can slip through, leads her past racks of antique Playboys, stops in front a shelf of shrink-wrapped CDs. The Point, he says. "Nineteen-seventy. They re-released the album on disc."

She scans the back of the jewel box, finds the song that's been bombarding her brain.

"Thanks. My friend will love this," she says. "It'll make his 50th birthday."

Harris used to be a disc jockey on WYNF and WHPT. He used to own a used record shop called Time Warp Albums. He used to travel through Tokyo and Amsterdam and London, trolling for guitar picks John Lennon once used. He can tell a real gold record from a fake one. He knows which band opened for the Beatles at every concert, what songs they played in what order.

Harris is 42. He looks like Jerry Garcia during the Haight-Ashbury days. He spouts lore from liner notes the way ESPN sportscasters spew baseball stats.

He tells stories about the time Jimmy Buffett walked into Asylum and Plott gave him $90 worth of albums; when Southside Johnny from Bruce Springsteen's band stopped by to sign autographs; the night Marilyn Manson draped black cloths over the counters, turned off the lights, and lined candelabras along the shop's display cases.

"That was one of the weirdest nights around here," Harris says. "And there have been a lot of weird ones."

Until the late '80s, Plott ordered all the albums, oversaw all the stock, worked in his store six days a week. Then punk got big. And Plott burned out.

"I was a crispy critter," he said. "You go on a couple hundred trips with different people every day, don't take a vacation for seven years, it'll wear you down. I was fried."

So he hired managers to run the place. First, a young hipster he thought might bring in the kids. Then Harris, who'd been coming in since the shop opened.

"He saved this place," Plott said. "He brought it back to its roots, back to where it was supposed to be."

Harris put all the vinyl in that back room, behind the beads, set it up as a sort of time warp. He overhauled the inventory, bought more used albums and CDs, even beefed up a bin of 45s. He set up a listening table, plugged in two sets of headphones, started letting folks preview music before they paid for it.

And he brought in new staff: Lenny Austin, a friend he'd known forever who has backed Charlie Daniels on guitar (Austin knows almost as much about classic rock as Harris, who also knows his jazz); Bill Speakman, another old friend, who knows videos and, more important, country music; Rachel the Punk Queen, who has blond bangs and black hair and a hand-stenciled shirt that says, "Opression is the Aesthetic of our Anger"; and Jen, who wears earrings in her left eyebrow and tongue, and is into techno music; and his 14-year-old daughter, Melissa (whom he named after his favorite Allman Brothers' song), who knows how to clean the CD-buffing machine.

"A good record store is like a good restaurant: It has to have chefs who can cater to every taste," Harris says. "Between the bunch of us, we know about most kinds of music. So we can answer most all the crazy questions our customers can come up with.

"Plus," Harris says, "we give them good karma. And, like conversation, they don't have to pay for that."

Karma, for Harris, is doing good things to promote good vibes. Cleaning scratches out of CDs for customers (often for free); holding albums for guys who don't have the cash; calling regulars when something they might like comes in. He stocks 350 CDs -- most of which may never sell -- from local bands because they could use a break.

"It doesn't cost us much," Harris says. "And it always comes back to you."

Speakman once taped some records for a woman named Sunshine whose turntable had broken. She baked him a tin of raspberry granola. The Punk Queen once gave a skinny skinhead too much change. He brought it back that afternoon.

"We don't all like the same music here," Harris says. "We're always battling about what plays in the store. Jen thinks my blues suck and I can't handle a lot of hip-hop.

"But we all believe in karma. That's the most important thing we have here. That's what keeps people coming back."

Just after lunch, while a man in a red turban thumbs through music videos and a 70-something bald man buys a Gene Simmons compilation and a big guy in gold chains comes in looking for Gangsta Rap, a woman plops a bulging Publix bag on the counter and dumps out 27 tapes.

Damn Yankees and Simply Red and AC/DC; Spinal Tap and the Ramones and Frank Zappa; Bonham and Keel and Raven.

"Finally, my husband cleaned out his collection," she says. "I don't even know what's in here."

Her name is Leesa Whitcomb. She's a dental hygienist from Seminole. Her husband is a guitar player. She wants to trade in all these cassettes. Wants a credit -- or, better yet, Willie Nelson's jazz CD.

"Willie Nelson has a jazz CD?" Harris asks.

"Yeah, he did it with someone else," Speakman answers from the reggae section. "It's recent. But we don't have it in here right now."

"We could order it for you," Harris offers.

He takes the AC/DC and Spinal Tap. Rejects Bonham and Keel.

"We don't need Anthrax, John," Jen informs her boss. "Got about a billion of them. Ditto for Def Leppard."

Asylum doesn't keep an inventory. Not on the computer, at least. It's all in the employees' heads.

Scary.

The most-traded-in disc of all time, they say, is the first album by Hootie and the Blowfish. Followed by the Wallflowers' debut. Then anything by No Doubt, Cinderella or Jewel.

"People just get sick of listening to certain stuff," Harris says.

Other albums, it seems, never seem to lack fans. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon still sells well -- at least a disc or two a week. Almost anything by the Grateful Dead and the Beatles goes quick.

"I can get rid of your Zappa," Harris tells Whitcomb. "But I think you're stuck with Simply Red."

"You keep them," she says. "Give them to music-starved children, whatever. Order me that Willie disc."

"You got it,' Harris answers. "I already know a customer, a guy named Mark, who buys a lot of heavy metal from us. I'll give these to him.

"You get yourself one of those scented soaps or something off the counter in trade."

"Really?" Whitcomb asks, sniffing the sage, the patchouli, the pine. "That's really nice. Thank you."

You can't barter like that in Borders. You can't hum a tune to your computer and hope it will know the artist, can't inhale amber incense over the Internet. You can't find many chain stores where the manager knows half the customers by name, knows what CDs they already have and what they're hunting for, knows where to find an album that has been out of print for two decades.

You can't put a price on karma. Can't say for sure if it pays.

But at Asylum, you can count on it.

Whitcomb selects a lilac soap. Harris stacks her worn tapes beside the lava lamp. The Steve Miller Band is still blasting through the store speakers.

"We'll have Willie in for you next week. Probably Tuesday," Harris says.

"Great," Whitcomb replies. "I'll be back."

"Great," Harris says. "We'll be here."

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