Other Music (2019) Movie Script

- Other Music was the quintessential place

in New York City for people

that appreciated music.

It just was a place where you were able

to kind of search out things

that you had never heard of.

- If I was in New York,

I would always make sure

that I would be at Other Music

within the first day of being there.

Per square meter, it probably

had more interest value

than any other shop that I

had ever been in in the world.

- To be stocked on their shelves

meant that a band was in good company.

- What they did was

invaluable for people like me.

- Write a great song in a basement,

go play it at that club,

next thing you know,

it's gonna be in that store.

- People have awesome

experiences at record stores

all over the country,

but Other Music just cracked my head open.

It just was like.

There's a whole world that

you have no idea about

and get ready to learn.

- Do you remember this band?

- Yeah, it had something to do...

- Hi Rob, hi Puloma, what's going on?

- Hey Josh.

- Other Music, this is Josh.

- Azonto?

- Azonto.

- It's kind of like fast

house tempo but dancehall-y,

but with African sort of rhythms to it.

- Before the internet and

before iPhones or any of that,

people trusted other people.

- These were two tracks

that were on a deluxe

CD set of greatest hits.

- Yeah, he did vocals

on the original track,

the Sam Kerridge one is really good.

- They're kind of like

a bit Darkness vein.

I like the Darkness, don't judge me.

- I have a soft spot for the

Darkness, I can appreciate.

- Talk about me when I leave.

- The most exciting in the world for me

is to be around people

who have devoted a massive

amount of time to something.

Someone listening to you,

and hearing the stuff

that you like musically

and then saying, "Do you know this?"

- This is more experimental.

It's a cool record, but

it's not his new pop record.

- The place is reverberating.

It's like vibrating because

you just... what you can see,

and what you know is there

beyond what you can see,

and it's like, whaaat?

- I want to buy a lot.

- Okay.

- Yes?

- Getting your records

into good record shops is very important.

They're the hubs for music communities.

- And also people who just like

listening to records all day

deserve to have a job

where they can do that.

People who work in record

shops are always weirdos.

Weirdos need jobs.

- If anybody sees me and I'm

not listening to records,

what I want to be doing

is listening to a record.

Even if it's a record

that I don't necessarily

like or care about.

I don't like to take records

off even if I hate them.

- I still love the smell of records.

- We can't hire anyone

over a certain height

because the ceilings just won't allow it.

- This has not changed pretty much

in the 15 years I've worked here.

- Coming to New York and just

going to shows sometimes,

it wasn't enough.

I wanted to be bombarded constantly,

I wanted to have my ideas challenged.

And I wanted to be fucked with, you know?

- It was a place that I loved to go

whenever I wanted to find something new

or something I didn't know about.

I knew that there would be someone there

who's pretty invested,

who had listened to it.

- We tried to have more of

this kind of a holistic view

of all these different

things happening in music,

in new music.

Even if it was reissues.

It was definitely like trying

to be on top of what's happening now.

- To go find out what was new

and bands in the area and all that stuff,

Other Music was where you had to go.

When there was a whole batch

of new stuff on that shelf

with a bunch of new cards

that someone had written out,

that was a good sign I

was gonna be listening

to something pretty exciting.

- I would never trade

the handwritten signs.

It's done from a place of,

"I had to write about this right now

"when I was listening to it

because I loved it so much."

It's the first thing people

see if the record's new,

so I want to come in with my personal,

passionate endorsement,

as soon as possible.

- Maybe this is the

best "From NYC, Made in NYC"

hip hop album you'll hear all year.

Solid, thick, and punchy production

with a firm and meaty lyrical style.

- Sammus is

Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo.

Her latest EP "Infusion"

explores the screwed-up world of academia,

finding peace through

video games, and more.

Afrofuturism vibes that

carry us to the year 3000.

- The epitome of DIY,

the couple who ran the label

out of their Bristol home

upheld more of a punk ethos

than many who claimed that distinction.

- Recorded live at Matik-Matik,

Bogota Colombia's experimental music hub.

Folk, free jazz, tropicalia,

spoken word, it's all in there.

- A perfect menage a trois of voice,

sonics, and texture.

Soaring and emotional.

Political and pure.

- If you only ever

buy one record ever again,

this would be a fine choice.

- I like curators, you know.

I like people that are

gonna comb through it all

and really are passionate enough

to write 100 words on a little card

and make sure it stays stuck to the shelf.

- A lot of the stuff that

we feel really special about

or personal about are things

that we have such limited quantities on

that you can't present it

to the whole 30,000 people

who are reading our emails

because we might only have 10 copies.

And that handwritten sign

is going to turn more people

on just coming off the street.

- Hello.

- Hello, there's a box here.

Other Music, it's kind of

like a religious experience

a little bit coming here,

picking up new sounds.

After a while they get to know your taste

and sometimes I come in here

and just say, "Pick them."

- This is the original cover of it,

but I remember there was a

reissue on Rhino Records.

I mean not Rhino, Alligator, years ago.

My first job in a record store was,

I was in high school

and it was career week.

I loved the record store I used

to shop at when I was a kid

and I'd been working a

retail job at my Aunt

and Uncle's gift shop since I was 14.

I love retail and I love music, I'm like,

that's the perfect thing.

And so I went up to the record store

and the guy I used to shop at and I said,

"It's career week next week.

"I could work for free, for a week.

"You need some help?

"You know, I'd love to do it."

He was like, "Sure, come on in."

And I've been doing it ever since.

♪ Judy and the Dream of Horses ♪

♪ Dream of Horses ♪

♪ You dream of horses ♪

- Wasn't that beautiful?

That was Belle and Sebastian.

We have some guests with us today.

From Other Music, Chris

Vanderloo and Mr. Josh Madell.

The reason we chose that particular album

is that is apparently the

biggest selling record

they've ever had in the store.

Is that correct, gentlemen?

- It is, yeah.

That's from our biggest selling album.

We've sold a few thousand copies

of that one over the years.

- And it still continues to flow.

Now for people that are

not in New York City,

'cause we have to tell everybody,

Other Music is an institution

that I buy records from

for the last 20 years and

I'm really sad and pissed off

that you guys are leaving.

- Our plan is to close

Other Music on June 25th.

I guess we have about six weeks left.

- No, that's the truth,

closing on the 25th.

- When we first announced it,

a regular customer told me

"It was the Tweet heard around the world."

- It's sad.

It's like a home for a lot of people.

- So they're definitely gonna close?

Oh, that's really a drag.

Wow, what a drag, fuck.

- The way things are and

the way people consume music

is on a certain trajectory

and it does not favor Other Music.

- When's your last day?

It sucks the store is closing.

- The 25th.

- The 25th?

- Yeah.

- I've been coming here since I was 11.

- Wow.

- Just wanted you to know, I

made a special trip from L.A.

to come by.

- Oh really?

- Just 'cause I'm gonna miss you guys.

- Wow.

- You guys should have a therapist here.

- Yeah.

- Every person wants to

talk to me for 10 minutes.

They wanna know what I'm gonna do now.

- To me this store is synonymous

with everything that's

cool about New York.

Bands were probably formed

because of the music

people got exposed to at this store.

I think you can't quantify it.

- Let's go

back to the early years.

Where did you guys meet?

- We all met and we all actually worked

at Kim's Underground.

- And what

was Kim's Underground?

- Kim's was a video chain.

Pretty much it was always

video rentals and sales.

- Mr. Kim was a businessman.

He had a dry cleaners.

Somehow this really crazy

New York film buff guy

convinced him, let's do a

little video store here.

Everything from experimental

film to, you know,

just the history of indie cinema

and they would even bootleg videotapes,

you know if they couldn't

find real copies.

The store was very successful.

But I think Mr. Kim just saw it

as an opportunity more than anything

and Kim's had a video

store and a record store.

We were in the back of

a popular video store.

- At the height of Kim's success,

there were I think four locations?

And I'm pretty sure on the books,

he had about five employees.

And these were stores that were open

from like noon to midnight

every day, seven days a week.

So, you can imagine

that there were probably

a few more employees than that.

And when Chris moved here

and got the job there,

and Mr. Kim was like, "We

pay cash", or whatever,

he was like, "No."

He was like, "What if

the IRS comes after me?

"I can't be working under-the-table."

- That really just

speaks to the difference

between the two of them,

because I remember Josh

was working at Kim's

and he was like, "Look at

all this money I have."

He just had wads of cash everywhere.

- So then you met this

other character, Josh.

- Josh was working there.

When I moved to New York Josh

was already working there

and our other partner Jeff

Gibson was working there as well.

Jeff and I had always talked about,

we could do this ourselves

and do it even better

and with more freedom to buy

what we wanted to buy

and carry more things.

I think I just told Kim that

I was moving on, you know.

I didn't tell anybody about our plans.

I called him afterwards and

told him we were opening.

- He really freaked out

Jeff, our partner here.

Jeff was I think genuinely terrified

that Mr. Kim was gonna try to kill us

when we left and started this place.

I don't think Mr. Kim was

considering killing us.

- By the time we came

to Josh about joining us,

we had already kind of picked the space.

Obviously we wanted to be downtown

with all the other record

stores around here.

- It is significant, the actual location.

Astor Place is kind of the

village green of that hood.

Downtown New York, above SoHo,

the kind of commercial

side of the East Village.

But also if you keep going west,

you're heading into kind of

old school '60s bohemia land,

and to your east is Mercury

Lounge, isn't very far away.

Brownies wasn't very far away.

It's also NYU, you feel

this sense of the energy

of downtown New York City.

- Got a sublease on this

place on East 4th Street,

and painted the floor,

put some racks up and just

started buying records

and it took off very quickly for us.

- Here it is.

This is the very first sales

we ever did, handwritten.

We did $362.98.

- So, what do these guys go and do?

They decide to open a record

store across the street

from the biggest record

store in New York City

at the time called Tower Records.

An institution!

What madness led you to that location?

- I had a guy come in, he was like,

"So what are you guys selling here?"

And we were like, "We're selling music."

And he's like, "Have you

looked out your window?"

- There was a giant Tower Records

literally across the street,

so, you could buy anything

that a major label

had to offer at Tower

Records across the street.

- Hello Tower,

hello Tower, hello Tower,

hello Tower, hello Tower, hello Tower,

hello Tower, hello Tower,

hello Tower, hello Tower!

- We had a ton of

people coming here all the time

saying, "How can you do

it? "It seems so crazy."

And it always seemed like

they didn't quite get it.

- I always thought of it as

kind of like the curated,

cool place across from

this massive mega-store.

- I was like, "This is genius."

That's so smart of them.

It was subversive in its

geographical location.

And from that day forward,

I never went into Tower Records again.

- It made East 4th in between

Broadway and Lafayette,

that little block was a

very important music block.

- Music consumers and music

lovers from all over the world,

Tower was a magnet for them.

And we just happened to

be across the street,

so they came to us too.

- Jeff came up with the name

and he said that that was

how he always would describe

what he was into to his parents' friends.

"I listen to other music, something else."

There's a sense that underground music

or something is for the snotty kids.

But we try to have a little

more sophisticated look

at what that could mean.

There's such a broad spectrum

of experimental music,

from jazz and classical to

noise to electronic stuff

that may come out of dance

clubs, but pushes boundaries.

We just always wanted to be on the edge

of what was happening in culture.

- Growing up going to Other Music,

I literally discovered genres

because of the way they

would organize the music.

You know, you'd go to other record stores

and you might go to the world section.

Whereas Other Music had

these more specific ways

of dividing up music.

- We needed a

different way to organize it

that was the way record

collectors thought.

That was the way people, you know,

passionate fans bought music.

It wasn't just a list.

- A lot of international music,

a lot of European pop.

- Electronica, krautrock, experimental,

and then whatever the hell called "In."

- "In" is where you would find what?

I don't know, Galaxie 500?

- The first section I

walked into was "Out."

- What was "Out?"

- "Out" was where you'd find Stockhausen?

Okay, good, I got it, I got through that.

- "Then", which was bands

that do not exist any longer.

- And I was like, "What,

what the heck is this?"

And I just couldn't figure it out

and I got so freaked and I just left.

- In that "Then" section,

there would be classic punk

along with folk reissues.

It's just trying to find a different way

to both cater to the

passionate fans that came in

and also I think just

kind of surprise people,

shake them up,

make them think about

music in a different way.

I think our most famous

section in that realm

would be "La Decadanse."

- The "Decadanse" section

was thoroughly confusing to me at first.

I really didn't know what that was.

- Jeff was particularly

passionate about Serge Gainsbourg

and was married to a Belgian,

so he was much more familiar

with a lot of European music

and he would bring in these imports

and they were very hard to come by

and he was just so excited about it

he basically made everyone at the store

love Serge Gainsbourg.

I didn't know about him

and that's how I found out,

and then eventually the

records got reissued.

- It was like a strange

configuration of French pop,

and easy listening was

kind of coming back then,

so stuff like Martin Denny or Esquivel,

things like that we sold so many of.

- The early days,

they didn't have any paid

employees for quite some time.

- We still were slow in

terms of hiring people.

We still were working seven days a week.

We hired people when we had to,

but we it's not like we had deep pockets.

So it was just trying to make it work.

- We had just started

dating, so he would be like,

"Well, come to the store.

"We'll have a store date."

Which was kind of like

asking me to work for free.

- You had to have a store date

where you came and you had takeout

and you stood at the counter.

In between ringing up customers,

you might actually talk for a minute.

- Yeah, we just sat there

and taped a lot of records and hung out.

- Weekends, Lydia and Dawn

would work the register

and we would be out with customers.

Josh and I would be out with customers.

Jeff would be pricing used things

and other stuff that had just come in.

- With the Monks, it is not

in print in the United States.

It's available only from a

German label called Repertoire.

So we have to get them when we can.

- Jeff was incredibly

knowledgeable about music,

really passionate, constantly

finding new things,

always finding some new

obscure reissue or something.

Chris dealt with the business

and also was just very customer-oriented.

He's always been someone

who can spend all day

just talking to the

customers, helping people out.

He's very service-oriented.

- They incorporate a lot

of brass instruments,

and their earlier stuff

used to be a little more

eastern European sounding.

- That was a little harder for me.

I don't think I was instantly

as personable and easy-going.

- Josh was always

sitting at his back desk,

listening to people who came in and out.

He did all the training,

he was very strict.

- I don't think he had any hair then.

I think I think you just shaved your head.

- Oh yeah, I had a super short crew cut.

- He kind of had

that D.C. look about him.

- Josh was always looking for ways

to have the shop help the community.

In-stores, releases that

the shop could put out

that maybe no other labels would.

- He's two steps ahead of you

when you're presenting something to him.

He's very linear, already has

it worked out in his head.

He's just like, "Let's go."

- I'm thinking about going outside

and trying to get that flag down.

- I don't know

if I would, I don't know.

- Today is the day to do it.

- I mean it's, yeah, try, try.

- In some ways they're polar opposites,

but they've both been

really great to work for.

I mean, I would not have

been here for 15-plus years

if I didn't like working for them.

- Is there some ceremonial way

you're supposed to fold a flag?

You can't just throw it on

top of a garbage bag, can you?

- It's one of those things

where it transcends a job.

These people become your family.

- Duane worked at CMJ.

- He was my intern.

- He was an intern at CMJ

and so he would review

pretty much anything.

He could find an angle on everything.

For a young kid that

was pretty surprising.

- I was just so excited and happy

that a store like this existed.

So immediately after Lydia

told me to apply here, I did.

- All of them had

encyclopedic music knowledge,

but Duane was definitely full-spectrum.

Like, "Just get Duane,"

because he's gonna know.

- Check this out.

The original version of

"Bette Davis Eyes" is on here.

- What?

- And it's a country song.

- Shut up.

- Yeah, Jackie DeShannon.

She wrote "Put A Little

Love in Your Heart"

and did that really cool

Laurel Canyon album.

When I came in, I wanted

to learn about the sections

that were there.

But then what was also great

was that there was a lot of room

for me to bring my aesthetic in.

It was really, really cool to be able

to build a hip hop

section from scratch here.

- Beans worked here

before Anti Pop Consortium

put out their first record.

The day Beans arrived,

everybody was like, "Who

the fuck is that guy?"

- Beans would sit there in the corner

with his huge mirrored shades

and you could never see

where his eyes were ever.

And he would just be like, "What's up?"

- Beans is a hero of mine

and the fact that I could just walk in

and be like, "Oh I can't.

"There's Beans, I can't talk to Beans."

- He was the only staff

member I think we ever had

who would just relentlessly

suggest his own music.

It just didn't matter what

you said you were into.

He'd always be like, "Have you checked out

"the new Anti Pop Consortium?"

- This is the type of business

where it encouraged

artists to be on staff.

It encouraged artists to be artists.

- It was great at first 'cause

the exact amount of time

I could take off from Other

was the amount of time

we would go on tour.

Just in the beginning, three

weeks or something like that.

- People who work here

don't make a lot of money,

but working here enables

them to do other things

that they might be connected with,

and this maybe helps them.

- Other Music was a

tough place to get a job.

It was really stacked with people

who'd been there for a decade or more.

- What we did all day was talk

about records on the floor.

You had to wanna do that and

you had to have deep knowledge.

- I know dance music, I know

soul music, I know reggae.

But I didn't know indie rock so much.

So I was a little nervous

going into the interview.

But aside from that,

I knew I knew my shit.

One of my all-time

favorites, Keith Hudson.

Super spooky reggae,

but a no less spiritually-minded

left-of-center vocalist.

- You sold me on that one right away.

- Absolutely, classic record.

The first couple years,

it was like nowhere I

had ever worked before.

It was crazy.

Just from the amount of personalities

you had to interact with on the staff

and then the amount of people

that would come into the store,

and that amount of traffic

coming to you all day long going,

"What do you like?" Or

"What does this sound like?"

It was just like, "Oh

my God, I'm exhausted."

- Do you need anything?

Yeah.

- Do you have Depeche Mode?

- On vinyl?

- It's none of these.

- Yeah, it's

not these unfortunately.

Depeche Mode, it's the one

with the crazy beak person.

- I'm not seeing it.

- It looks like a bare-chested person

and the beak is crossing like this.

Can you tell me the title one more time?

Chris, "Walking In My Shoes."

Is it possible it's a single?

It is on this record.

- It's a specific thing I want.

- No, I get it,

because you want that cover art

and there's remixes or something?

Oh no wonder, it's a collectible.

It's a $75 record.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- Over time they knew what

was in your record collection.

They knew what excited you.

You knew what excited them.

So the conversations just went

to deeper and deeper levels.

- People love stories.

People love a good story.

That's one thing I learned

from Duane Harriott.

If people love the

story, they would buy it.

- The vocalist from the Spinners,

it was one of his last 12-inches

that he made before he died,

because he died on stage.

He had a heart attack on stage.

That's pretty gangster.

That's some gangster shit though, come on.

- It wasn't putting your

taste on someone else.

It's really about talking to the customer

and getting what they're looking for

and understanding where

they're coming from.

And being able to take what they tell you

and recommend something that they'll like.

- Holy shit, this one is amazing.

- Martin Newell is the gentleman

who is in Cleaners From Venus.

It's like a lo-fi, kind

of indie pop thing.

- I'm looking for something

that's like Lou Reed,

but I probably never heard of.

- Something by Loud Reed?

- That's like Lou Reed?

- That's like Lou Reed.

- Oh, like Lou Reed, okay.

- Oh do you have that?

It's kind of like Gina X Performance

but with more of a Grace

Jones sort of feel to it.

- What else you have?

Give me something fresh.

You have something fresh?

- If you really wanna be good out there,

you've gotta be really

up on so much stuff.

Even just being away for a month.

You can just be like, "I

don't know, it looks good,

"it's on a good label or something."

- The rite of passage

for the new clerk at OM

was to start at "In," grab a legal pad,

and write down every single

band in every single section.

- I wrote every card in the entire store.

I think it took me like two days to do it

or something like that.

- Just that alone was just like, "Whoah."

I thought I knew a lot.

- I didn't know really a single artist

in the soul/funk section.

I was like, "I guess I'll learn."

You would start to become familiar

with all of the names of

the artists in the shop.

So if someone came in and they were like,

"Hey do you have Chrissy Zebby Tembo?"

You'd be like, "Oh yeah."

- I just knew everything in

the store right off the bat.

Just kidding.

- The music that we carry here

is often obscure and confusing,

from the sounds to the

packaging to the distribution.

Although our buying philosophy

is not to simply unearth the unknown,

our passion for new

music and new directions

often leads us into

uncharted waters where,

frankly, we feel most comfortable.

One of our main purposes is to make new

or forgotten music available

to a wider audience.

- Even in electronic music,

an area where I thought

I was quite well-versed,

there would be stuff that

I had never heard of.

And I often found myself buying stuff

that was completely different.

- One thing about our store,

we always hired people partially

because they were into

stuff that was different

from what we were into

and they could add another

side to the selection.

- It kind of reminds me almost

of Bill Fox or something

where it's sort of Dylan-y

but with tons of hooks.

I think you'll love it.

They always gave me a ton of freedom

to just figure out what

I was interested in.

They were never like,

"Oh you gotta order this,

you gotta order this."

They're like, "We trust you

and we trust your taste."

- Jackson C. Frank was a

tragic '60s folk singer.

He had a pretty miserable life

but he made one absolutely

flawless beautiful record.

♪ Catch a boat to England

baby, maybe to Spain. ♪

- I just remember seeing

it in the bin one day.

I was like, "Let's check this out."

And just as soon as I put

on, within the first note,

it's just like, "Oh my God."

♪ Send out for whiskey baby ♪

♪ Send out for gin, me

and room service honey ♪

♪ Me and room service

babe, me and room service ♪

♪ Well we're living a life of sin ♪

- Michael Klausman brought

a lot of cobweb reissue

vibes to the store.

- Dan Hougland and Chris

O'Rourke who was a manager there,

kinda went up to Michael

and they were like,

"You know you can play some CDs,

"you don't have to play NPR all day."

- You could live in kind of

a dream world of esoterica.

- Stuff like Le Orme, an

Italian psych band I got into.

I think Duane recommended it to me once.

- Os Mutantes, at one point

we could not keep those

things in the store.

- I found that solo Masaki Batoh record.

I was so excited and I grabbed that like,

"Oh my god, I can't believe this exists."

- We would also stock everybody

from Pantha Du Prince,

Blossom Toes, Peanut Butter Wolf.

- A CD by Tristan Perich, but

instead of a compact disc,

it had components that made a loop.

We sold hundreds of them.

♪ In Canada ♪

- B.J. Snowden.

- "Songs In The Key Of Z."

- This Morton Feldman recording.

- The Shintaro Sakamoto,

the Nude Beach record, the Ex Cops record.

- 75 Dollar Bill.

- Quasimoto.

- Oneohtrix Point Never.

- Julianna Barwick.

- Karen Dalton, Vashti Bunyan.

- The Vashti Bunyan reissue.

- Vashti Bunyan, "Just

Another Diamond Day."

- Dungen, we reviewed Dungen.

- That Aphrodite's Child record.

- Arthur Russell, minidiscs,

cassettes, CDs, whatever.

- Digital experimental

minimal music, you know?

But patterned, patterned minimal music.

- Harmonia, Cluster, even that

Velvet Tinmine compilation.

- Other Music is the only retail store

where somebody would put on Diamanda Galas

to clear the floor at closing

time to get everybody out.

- Hey guys,

we're gonna be closing

up in a few minutes.

- That foghorn record.

- I loved that foghorn record.

- There was a record of foghorns

and it was so beautiful.

- It's suddenly so quiet.

- Let me flip this record.

It's nice how it steps up,

it just like, steps up.

- The art of learning what people

wanna listen to at a certain time of day

and putting records on the stereo,

it's such a difficult thing

that I feel like no algorithm

will ever be able to recreate.

We would be constantly

listening to records in the shop

and as soon as people heard it,

they were just, like,

this is something I need.

- Excuse me, do you know

who sings this song?

- What's that?

- Do you know whose song this is?

- I don't, what did you just put on?

- Is it for sale?

- It's for sale.

If you want it, I can

take it off the turntable.

- Thanks!

- So good it sold right away.

- Yeah, aren't there no more rock stars?

- He didn't get the message,

he's one of the last ones.

- Him and Dave Grohl are fighting

to be the very last one ever.

- Exactly, those two are.

They're two sides of the same coin.

- I just come sometimes to

look at the wall of vinyl.

It gives me this great warm feeling.

I grew up as a girl collecting records

from when I was very, very small,

and there was always

a lot of way older men

than me being condescending about records.

But I didn't get that vibe here.

- There were girls there, you know.

There were girls there

and they hired women and it was great.

- That's a rarity at a record store,

as an employee and as a customer,

to have ladies behind the counter.

- You would definitely see way more men

walk in through the doors, but

whenever a woman walked in,

it wasn't like, "She doesn't

know anything about music."

- I would compare

it to dark synth type stuff.

- I would go there and do research.

I didn't know any other people

really who were as nerdy as I

was about music, as obsessive.

I had this rock encyclopedia

and I would get in bed

at night and read it,

and going to Other Music

was an extension of that.

It was like, "Okay,

I've done some homework

"and some reading and

now I can go to class."

- Hello.

Excellent choice.

- Oh yeah.

- You can tell she's from New York.

- I could see that you're from New York.

- She can see that you're from New York?

- Visually, visual culture happening.

You, me, cats, I went

to college in Queens.

- Managing Other Music, it was

like herding a bunch of cats,

but super nerdy weird cats.

- Do you wanna do push-ups?

- Yeah, bro.

You wanna get swole bro?

I got this bro.

Alright, we're gonna clap

our hands when we get up.

- I remember so often I would walk in

there and be like, "How

did you guys get hired?

"I know you don't have a resume.

"How are you all here?"

- I think what we weren't

as good at sometimes was,

we would always try to see,

do they have any retail experience?

Trying to figure out if

they're gonna be responsible,

on time.

We famously have hired a lot of people

who could never show up to work on time.

- Everyone brings their peculiarities

and I think that the store

has been a home for everybody

who likes any weird number

of sub-genres of music,

in addition to struggling

with other aspects of life

where they maybe wouldn't fit

into a nine-to-five corporate job.

- Excuse me, do you have any

new concert tickets on sale?

- Yeah there's this new

Devendra Banhart concert,

it's gonna be in a

dumpster on 32nd Street.

We just got a couple

of tickets in for that.

- A dumpster, that sounds gross.

- Sorry it's not gonna

be in Wembley Stadium.

- Yeah, it's gonna be an intimate

little gig in a dumpster.

- Dumpster.

- I understood that.

- The concert's gonna be in a dumpster.

- I heard you the second time.

- There shouldn't have been

an intimidation factor,

but there was.

I'm not the first person

to say that, right?

- Do you have the Garden State soundtrack?

That's supposed to be indie-tastic.

- I think we might have that in the back.

- In the back room here?

- Yeah, come on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Wait, this is just a bathroom,

oh my God!

- I remember asking

someone who worked there

about an album that was in

the staff "We love" section.

He was like, "Yeah, I don't like it."

I was like, "Wow, this is badass.

"This guy doesn't even like

the stuff that they like."

- Every clerk has his day where

they're not in the best mood

and someone asks them for the

third time the same question

and they're irritated and they come off

as not being as welcoming as they could.

- What are we looking for, first of all?

Are we looking for reggae records?

Are we looking for dub records?

What are we looking for?

- Well...

- Let's just go over there.

- Even if you don't have one of these,

maybe what you do like.

- Let's just go over there.

If you come at me being a hot mess

and not knowing what you are looking for,

I'm not always the most understanding.

- I was hungover, I wasn't

meaning to be a snob sometimes.

I just couldn't speak.

- If I'm completely honest, I

was never just chill in there.

I always got that first

day of school feeling like,

"Okay, just don't fuck up."

- They are specialists in a lot of ways,

'cause they're dealing with music nonstop,

all the time throughout the day.

So they just hear so much

and that knowledge base

can be intimidating.

So even what isn't snobby can

be perceived as snobby-ness

just 'cause the knowledge

is kind of elite.

- I never quite understood that,

I would read that sometimes

and I just never quite agreed with it

because that's totally the opposite

of how I wanted things to be,

and how I believe that I conduct myself.

- The only instance of snobbery I ever saw

was this guy came in who was very drunk

and asked Chris Vanderloo if

they had Stevie Ray Vaughan.

And he said, "Sorry man,

we don't have that here."

And the guy stumbled out

and muttered something like,

"They were assholes."

But, yeah, he shouldn't have come.

- We never had anyone here

who was super into metal,

so if you were a metal-head

and you came in here

then you hated us because

there was no one here

who was super passionate about that.

- There was a lot of chips

on people's shoulders,

I mean are you kidding me?

It's a store in New York

where everybody's supposed

to know about everything.

Any place that has any hip

aura, people come in like,

"Fuck this hip aura.

"I'm gonna challenge this hip aura.

"I'm gonna dethrone your ass."

- I'd rather have somebody

with a really bad attitude

about what music sucks putting

up the stuff on the shelves

than somebody who's just

trying to like sell product.

Other Music symbolized

something that I find important,

which is keeping the bar

on everything high enough.

If your bar on art is high,

then your bar on kindness

is high, you know,

or something like that.

And when art gets dumber,

when movies get dumber and TV gets dumber,

I think we all get dumber

and meaner and shittier.

You should celebrate

the stuff that's better

than the average, you know?

They just made sure

that they weren't selling

the average stuff.

- The cool thing about Other Music was,

it wasn't just a record store.

It was definitely like a

community center in a lot of ways.

- Other Music hosted

in-store performances,

which was a huge way that the

shop supported the community.

They were all-ages, they were free.

Often you would be able

to get a band's record

for the first time, or

before it was even released.

♪ Hey wait ♪

♪ Oh please wait ♪

♪ Don't rush off, you won't be late ♪

- We would move the

racks to the side of the shop,

which is already very small.

And then a band, often

quite a high profile band

or an exciting new band, would play.

♪ Put a penny in the pot ♪

♪ Put a nickel in your pocket ♪

♪ Every nickel that you've got ♪

♪ Is a nickel in the slot ♪

- You basically just have the

store lighting on the band.

You would see everything super clearly,

you can watch the band

playing their instruments.

You could see what was happening.

♪ I am sorry to report dear Paris ♪

- You could also see the faces

of all the other people in the crowd.

It wasn't like you were having

this isolated experience.

- See, this is how we

talk amongst each other

and then we kind of figure

out what we're gonna do.

Any more fashion disasters

that we need to kind of fix?

- It was intimate and

it always sounded good,

and people were really

reverent and respectful of it.

- One of my favorite memories

is the Gary Wilson in-store.

Duane Harriott was talking up this record,

and I don't think anybody

had ever heard of it.

- Someone made me a cassette of it

and I listened to it on my Walkman.

And then I had to take it off

because I was scaring people on the train

because I had these facial expressions.

Gary Wilson was still incognito,

nobody really knew who or where he was,

he just kind of disappeared.

- The store that started

selling the record, Other Music,

they're the only people that

really have this record yet

and they already sold out.

- Oh great.

- We have to go over there

and bring them more records.

They ordered 120.

- It led up to this reissue

of the "You Think You

Really Know Me" record.

And then he came out of

nowhere, found a band,

and just destroyed everybody.

It was a big deal.

This record, I think, because

of Duane's word-of-mouth,

was huge here.

It was constantly playing, and

it was selling really well,

and so there was an in-store.

- First of all, he came into the store

with a blanket over his head

so nobody could see him.

- In the corner of the record

store was this little closet.

And it had a little blue

curtain, and he hid back there.

- And he would wouldn't emerge

until the beginning of the show.

He had doused himself in an

entire talcum powder bottle,

all over his face, then put sunglasses on.

It was just like, showtime.

♪ Foolish heart ♪

♪ You're keepin' me away ♪

♪ So far away ♪

♪ From all the things that I want ♪

♪ From day to day, from day to day ♪

♪ You keep on lookin' ♪

- It was the most amazing, bizarre thing

I had ever seen in my life.

He immediately became like

top five humans of all time,

for that year.

♪ From shore to shore ♪

♪ Out of repulse ♪

♪ That's what they try to say ♪

♪ I'll just keep on lovin'

you, I'll keep lovin' you ♪

♪ From day to day, from day to day ♪

- Going to live shows is a real,

visceral experience that's hard to fit in

with the rest of your

daily life sometimes.

It's hard to describe.

It's just a way of having

a very sensory experience.

♪ Two headed boy ♪

♪ All floating in glass ♪

♪ The sun it has passed ♪

♪ Now it's blacker than black ♪

♪ I can hear as you tap on your jar ♪

♪ I am listening to hear where you are ♪

♪ Two headed boy ♪

- Music, it's a way to

connect with other people.

It's a way to connect with yourself.

Maybe live more in the moment,

and live for a purer type of joy

than we get in our daily grind.

- Thanks.

- I'm just trying to

format something in Word

and I don't understand

how to change the font.

- Sure.

- I think you might

know better than me.

- That's adorable, "I don't

know how to change the font."

How's he gonna get another job?

- Look at this.

- I know, it's like fine wine.

Fine wine in a box.

- I'm gonna just keep

cleaning out back here.

What am I going to do

with that thing, come on.

Mmm, indie!

There's gonna be some weird stuff in here.

Oh man, the flier from when

we launched the website.

- We launched the mail

order website in 1998

and the store's newsletter

has been going out since 2000.

- We had an email newsletter

that reached a lot of people.

Tens of thousands of

people read it every week,

where we reviewed music.

- I've been writing

about music for 15 years

and I would obsessively,

every week read the mailers

which are I think the

best in the business.

- Those early days online,

you didn't have Pitchforks and Stereogums

and all these online

sources like you do now.

The Other Music Update at the time

was one of the main sources

for hearing about this

sort of music first.

- Are you writing down

the biggest sellers of all time?

- Top sellers ever.

That's what we're putting up.

- Is Jim Ford in there?

- Jim Ford is not on there.

It's only 100 obviously,

so it's pretty limited.

- I'm surprised at how

low "Ambient Works 2" is.

The big Other Music artists

are Belle and Sebastian, Boards of Canada.

- Stereolab, Broadcast.

- Everything on that list

is from like 2002 and south.

- Yeah, that was, I mean that

was like, serious numbers.

The guy from Ninja Tune

called here one time and said,

"You guys literally sold..."

- More than half of the U.S. sales

or something were just in this store.

- At this one store.

- In the late '90s, early 2000's,

I don't think that people

really have an idea

of just how many records

were sold out of this store.

- Fridays, Saturdays, two registers going,

two back-ups for each register

and just hours of ringing.

Throwing CDs across the room at each other

because we couldn't even

physically make it to each other.

- The whole time we were in business,

the year 2000 was our

highest grossing year.

And 2001 was on course

to be bigger than that.

So we were coming into

September and it was a Tuesday.

I remember a sea of people

walking up Lafayette Street.

The store wasn't open, we were just there,

and people wanted to use the phone.

There were some people who would

splash water on their face.

I remember a dude coming in and going,

"Do you have the new Dylan?"

And I was like, "Do you see

what's going on all around you?"

- We saw the top of the

south tower crack off

and fall from my building

and then we ran upstairs.

So we turned on the

Disintegration Loops really loud,

just went up on the roof

and sat there looking

at this new landscape.

- William came in with

Disintegration Loops,

a CD made as a response to 9/11

and it utterly blew my mind.

Basically it's a tape loop that,

as it winds its way

through the tape player it,

the magnetic tape would flake off.

So as it goes along it's

always subtly changing

with every turn of the reel.

- Each melody just fell away

in its own time in its own way,

and somehow managed to

retain the very core

of what made it special.

And then the fact that I had

managed to record the life

and death of these melodies, to me,

was an incredibly profound thing.

- I wrote a pretty

heartfelt review of it,

and I pushed it on tons of people.

- Nobody knew who I was,

so when it first came out it

was just a little slim sleeve.

- People had to talk about

it once they heard it.

That just connected with a

broad cross-section of the staff

and then the customers.

We sold hundreds of them.

We could just keep selling

those CD-Rs all day.

- Everyone was thinking

about "What do I do?"

I was like, "You're an

artist, make your work.

"This is important."

- You just felt it kick into high gear

because everyone was kind of like,

"Fuck it, what else am I doing?"

♪ You know they're gonna

want some, want some ♪

♪ I'm high in the back room

gonna have a pack soon ♪

♪ With this song you will regret ♪

♪ Just let it be a yeah, yeah, yeah ♪

- It was definitely the

case that post-9/11,

especially immediately post-9/11,

it was really debauched.

- No one was thinking about their future,

and that makes for a

very interesting scene.

- If you were young and your

city had just been attacked,

you're not an adult.

It was sort of just like, "You know what,

"I think I need to get drunk, and high,

"and whatever else I can do."

♪ Fucking for fear of not

wanting to fear again ♪

♪ Lonely is all we are lovely ♪

- The Lower East Side scene

was weirdly fetishized

because of the 9/11 events,

and a very hot spotlight

happened on a lot of bands.

- The '90s were

really dead for rock and roll

at least in New York City.

There was no industry attention

basically in terms of rock and roll.

But Other Music championed

a lot of these bands

really early on.

- Local bands would come in all the time

and drop off their record

with the hopes of us

carrying it in the shop.

- We had this guy Gian Carlo

who ran our consignment program.

He just loved music so much

and was wanting to help them.

And giving them a spot

on the shelf, you know,

a spot on the shelf, that

was prime real estate.

- People kinda made up the

early wave of that scene,

like Strokes, and Liars, and Black Dice,

they all came in here

and they sold their CDs.

They'd burn the CD-Rs themselves.

- Interpol would make demos

and I remember going down to Other Music

and speaking to those guys

about whether they'd be open

about selling it on consignment.

And they were cool about it.

♪ I wish I could eat the

salt off of your lost ♪

- We'd spent so many years

of no one really caring about us at all.

It was one of those early

things within the band's life

that really meant a lot to me personally.

♪ I saw my love with pretty boy ♪

- The first show at Mercury Lounge

and the first time we

got a card in Other Music

we were like, "My band is real,

my band's a real thing now."

- Aw!

My card.

- Okay, ready?

- Ready.

- Two of the members of Animal

Collective, Dave and Noah,

both worked at Other Music

in mail order and shipping.

- I started working at Other in 1998.

I actually worked on the

floor there for a short while

but because my social skills were terrible

I was quickly taken back up

to the mail order department.

When I started working there,

we weren't really doing

Animal Collective stuff.

- I had moved to New York

in the summer of 2000

and Dave said, "Well my friend is here

"and he's looking for work."

- We've been playing

together since high school

in various combinations.

And when Noah moved to New York,

that was when we decided,

let's actually try and do this.

- A lot of times after work

they'd be playing a show and

we'd all go to watch them.

- It definitely started really small,

playing it in the shop, and

they started slowly selling

mostly just on recommendations.

- They were definitely

more underground and avant,

for lack of better words.

It felt like a sinister Fraggle

Rock on acid or something.

- "Spirit They're Gone,

Spirit They've Vanished,"

they were the only outlet for us

to sell the record at the time.

I think we sent it around to a bunch

of labels and nobody wanted it.

- One of them, I don't remember who said,

"This really hurts our dog's ears."

Or, "Our cat freaks

out when we put it on."

- I remember Other being the first place

that gave it a review and put it up

and gave us our first name card.

Just being like, "Yes,

we made it, finally."

That's all I ever wanted

at the time, you know?

- I mean, Dave got fired.

Maybe that made things a little awkward.

- His head wasn't in

the game, at some point.

- He was not a great

mail order supervisor.

♪ Sweet summer night and

I'm stripped to my sheets ♪

♪ Forehead is leaking, my AC squeaks ♪

♪ And a voice from the clock ♪

♪ Says you're not gonna get tired ♪

♪ My bed is a pool and

the walls are on fire ♪

♪ Soak my head in the sink for a while ♪

♪ Chills on my neck

and it makes me smile ♪

- This is where we shopped

since we were teenagers.

- I think also in a way it's like,

knowing that all these folks

who worked at the shop,

if we could excite these people,

that felt like kind of an accomplishment.

I think I can safely say I'm

not sure we'd be doing this

still today if it wasn't for the shop.

- Yeah, definitely not.

- Thanks so much for being here,

thanks for having us.

- You know what's funny, I

wrote a poem a few years ago

about how I used to love

going into record stores

and hiding whatever I

wanted to buy later on.

So if I found something I loved,

you would put it in the back

where nobody would find it

until you had enough

money to buy it yourself.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- I can relate.

- I was just thinking of that recently.

Take it easy.

- Thanks.

- Daddy.

- Yeah?

- I wanna get the "Hamilton" soundtrack.

- The "Hamilton" soundtrack?

The vinyl is really pricey,

we have to take a look at it.

$90, holy smokes, that's

a lot of money, iPod?

- We can always listen to it.

- Yeah it'll be on Spotify

too anyway, we can stream it.

Are we part of the problem

or part of the solution?

That's what I wanna know.

- Solution!

- Are we?

Yeah, we wanna buy it on vinyl,

so I guess we're part of the solution.

- There's a whole generation of people now

who didn't grow up with the

concept of paying for music.

- I don't wanna say post-9/11,

but, you know, the

early 2000s, 2002, 2003,

things were starting to turn a little bit.

Record stores were growing

mindful of the fact

that their customer base was changing.

- The internet was definitely happening.

But it was more of like,

the nerds that would come into the store

would start their conversation

in these chatrooms online

about obscure crazy weird music.

And then they would come into the store

and they would buy the records

and talk to us about it.

Then I guess that kind

of symbiotic relationship

started to go the other way,

and the conversation online kept going

and stopped happening in real life.

- On Thursday, Tower

Records will sell off its assets

in a court supervised auction.

The money will go to pay creditors

of the twice-bankrupt company.

As NPR's Laura Sydell reports,

Tower's troubles are signs

of larger changes in the music industry.

- The big stores, the big music stores,

like Virgin and Tower and

Sam Goody and those stores,

were having a hell of

a time competing with,

at the time, Circuit City and Best Buy.

They were fighting it

all out for the hits,

low-balling stuff.

We would go to Best Buy

and buy stuff cheaper

than we could buy it from our distributor.

That just destroyed the

bigger part of the industry,

that low-ball stuff.

- When they closed, I

think it was a loss for us.

Both a loss of foot traffic,

but also just kind of a change

in that downtown corridor.

The East Village going from the hub

of the New York underground music scene

to really being completely

disconnected from it.

It's not a neighborhood built

on arts culture anymore.

- I'm just waiting for someone

to go on that rant about like,

"New York is killing

everything," you know?

- Blink Fitness is now across the street.

Yeah the whole second

floor of Tower Records

is now Blink Fitness.

What is going to be in this neighborhood

without Other Music to anchor it?

So Broadway is shoe stores?

That's it?

Is New York going to be only a place

where you go to buy clothing?

- It used to be you come here

and you find something

out of the ordinary,

something you don't find

when you live in Brooklyn

or in Queens or whatever.

Now there's nothing but Starbucks

and tofu yogurt places, and all of that.

It's ridiculous.

- Best of 2000, Other

Music, best record store.

We're number one,

above the Virgin

Megastore-Times Square, closed.

The Virgin Megastore-Union Square, closed.

HMV, closed.

J&R Music World, closed.

Bleecker Street Records is actually open.

We opened up our download

store a few years

after iTunes opened their store.

People were buying fewer CDs

and we were trying to stay current,

to see where music was going.

- The first time that

Vampire Weekend's music

was ever officially

available to buy digitally

was in the Other Music online store,

and that was before we'd signed a deal.

♪ Johanna drove slowly into the city ♪

♪ The Hudson river all filled with snow ♪

♪ She spied the ring

on his honor's finger ♪

♪ Oh, oh, oh ♪

We had all sorts of people

coming to us saying like,

"Hey kids people are gonna try

"to get you to sign a record

deal, don't be a moron."

But Other Music, that

actually was the one deal

that made sense to us 'cause

they were forward-thinking

in launching an independent

digital distribution platform.

- This is something that

we had all the time,

customers coming in and if you didn't have

what they wanted you'd say,

"I think Tower should have

that across the street."

People would go, "I don't wanna shop

"at a big mass market retailer like that.

"The reason I'm here

"is 'cause I love shopping

at independent stores."

But iTunes, you know,

Apple still maintains

this kind of cool factor.

So we never found that most people

cared about shopping online at

a cool, curated indie store.

- So we announced that we

were gonna be shutting down

the download store 'cause

LP sales were picking up.

We wanted to get back into focus

on the more physical formats.

And I got an email from

Lou Reed's manager,

"Lou Reed is despondent.

"He is so depressed

"and he wants to know where he's going

"to be able to download music from now."

- One of the reasons that

the Other Music digital store

didn't flourish was because

people who shop at that store

are so dedicated to the

idea of physical media,

whether it's a cassette

or a CD or a record.

I mean, I never used it.

- This is back, cool!

For me, music has always

been very physical.

I'm really into cassettes

and going out to shows.

And I'm very involved in

that DIY scene of exchanging,

and sharing and being present.

- What's been really cool actually,

since the birth of streaming

and MP3s and all that,

is the rise of vinyl.

And watching younger people

now build their collections

and come in and be like, "I

just got a vinyl player."

As they say, vinyl player.

"I want some records."

- The quality stuff, you want it archived.

The quality stuff, you want

to make a special spot for it.

- I'm such an analog human being.

I can't read a book on a Kindle.

I like touching records

and flipping them over

and looking at every little thing.

- It is a fundamentally

different experience

than lying back with

your laptop on your bed

and just clicking around.

I think there's something important

about the physical nature of it.

- Almost done.

- Yeah.

Your total is $964.26.

- Vinyl has been growing,

and it's been growing

dramatically in the industry

and it was growing for us.

But it never came close to

replacing the loss of CD sales.

- CDs were great because they

don't cost very much to make,

they don't cost very much to ship,

they can be made very quickly.

And all those things are

not true about vinyl.

- The record business

is always a really tough business.

It's a volume business.

You have to sell a lot of records.

You're making just a couple bucks

most things you're selling,

so you need to sell a lot every day.

Even if you're not paying

$15,000 a month rent.

- It's been pretty rough.

You have years where

you do better or worse.

So, you pay your employees

and you take what's left over.

In 2003, they didn't make any money.

And since then, they have not made a wage

that they could live on without spouses

who kept them afloat

for a long time I think.

- We live week to week.

The deposits that we make every

day help us buy more records

to keep going and it's just been tough.

♪ Just another diamond day ♪

♪ Just a blade of grass ♪

♪ Just another bale of hay ♪

♪ And the horses pass ♪

♪ La la la la la la la

la la la la la la la ♪

♪ La la la la la la la la la la ♪

♪ Just another ♪

- I think he sees the store as like

he feels like he has

responsibility to the customers.

And then I think his other main

hold back was the employees.

I think he just felt like,

"What are they gonna do?"

And I'm like, "Chris, it's

great to think about that,

"but what are you gonna do?"

'Cause he's always at

the back of the list.

♪ Just a word to say ♪

♪ Just another love to give ♪

♪ And a diamond day ♪

♪ La la la la la la la

la la la la la la la ♪

♪ La la la la la la la la la la ♪

- XL, XL, papa.

- XL it is.

Kind of our number one customer

broke down in tears yesterday.

Rockstar Rob.

- Really?

- Rob came in yesterday

and he was fully crying.

- Aw.

- I like that you guys have

nicknames for everyone,

like Thursday Michael.

- Rollerblading Mike.

- Rollerblading Mike?

♪ Everything must go ♪

♪ You wanna get on some fly shit ♪

♪ Get on some butterfly to the fire shit ♪

♪ Everything must go ♪

- It's crazy, it's hectic, it's nonstop.

- People are buying stuff so fast

that we can't keep it on the shelves.

- Look at the line.

Hey do you have any more

Radiohead upstairs on CD?

- We close at eight, but

we'll probably be here later.

- Yeah, the store's open tomorrow.

♪ Like it or not ♪

- Thank you.

- Oh Jesus, I'm so, so sorry.

- See, now you better pace

yourself, pace yourself.

- We don't have any large left.

- I would recommend

ordering from the website.

- Last night we were here

until 2:30 in the morning.

- Should I be saying to people

have a nice night or have a nice life?

"Thanks so much, have a nice life."

Today's our last day.

We have a huge celebration

happening on Tuesday.

- Are you sad because it's the last day?

- I am very sad.

- I have a job, you

could clean up our house.

- We could use some help.

- I could clean your room.

- I've been on the verge of tears all day

since I've been here, but

they're kind of tears of joy.

- I looked it up.

- Awesome.

- It looks like we got three copies.

- She's almost like a classically

trained singer and pianist

who went into more of a

dark rock kind of thing.

It's really beautiful.

If that sounds interesting, to

you, I think you'll like it.

- You have, like, two live

copies of Professor Longhair

in the Blues section.

- No one's picked those up yet.

Someone's gotta get those.

- But when did you get

them in? Yesterday, today?

- We got them in yesterday.

Alright, it means a lot.

- I will come back to the empty space.

- The world is changing

quickly in a lot of ways,

and so much of it happens

in the virtual world now.

And for sure there are a

lot of positives to that.

But the magic of human interaction

and the way it forces

you to be in the moment

and have a real give-and-take dialogue

is something that can only

be experienced face-to-face.

- It's easier than ever to reach people,

but at the same time

you're constantly trying

to cut through a wave of noise

that's coming at people all the time.

- Hey man, how are you doing?

- Good.

- I really feel for musicians

trying to get started nowadays.

It's so much easier to

get lost in the crowd.

Whereas something about

knowing that there are people

at a record store there to

stand behind certain groups

and talk to people about

them that they really like

and get people to get

things, it's different.

And now it's also strange

because robots are

telling you what you like.

- What makes it good?

- Yeah it's good.

It's good but the Leo Zero

mix, he edited it a little bit.

But it's cool.

I was supposed to be a lawyer, you know?

And if it wasn't for Other Music,

I would definitely be a lawyer.

A very bored, unsatisfied,

angst-ridden lawyer.

- Who's the last person to

buy a record in this place?

Is it gonna be you?

Other Music, this is Josh.

We're closed and we're just

cleaning out the store now.

Hey man, is your truck here?

We'll start here, and

anything this way too.

All this stuff.

That's just a little bitty truck.

We've got a lot of shit to fit in there.

Oh yeah, big guns.

It's a lot harder to put it together

than it is to take it apart.

I think that one's loose,

you can do the same on all of them.

- Is the store moving?

- No, it closed Saturday.

This past Saturday.

- Is this how you inherited the floor?

- No, we painted it on

a couple of occasions.

And then over the years, you

could see where people walked.

We used to use the floor as a way

to see what sections were most popular.

The way the floor was worn out more

was where most people stood.

You can see the ghosts

of the records up there.

The seven-inches.

- Yeah.

- Oh my God.

Wow.

Thanks so much, Daniel.

- It's been great, it's been great.

I'm gonna miss it for sure.

- You're a huge part of this place

and made it what it was, you know?

- Say it again?

- You're a huge part of what

this place became, what it was.

- Yeah, I felt that as well, yeah.

You know, you did a really

wonderful thing for 20 years.

And I am honored to be a

part of New York history.

♪ There were your eyes

in the dark of the room ♪

♪ The only ones shining ♪

♪ The only set I had met in years ♪

- More than ever people being together

is very, very important.

For me, theaters,

bookstores, and music stores,

record stores, were a type of temple.

And they would have a community.

♪ Rising ♪

♪ Rising together ♪

- We're swinging away from

tangible places where we meet,

and we have things together.

♪ What are you doing ♪

- Maybe we'll swing not all the way back,

but maybe there's a way for the digital

and the streaming and the loving of music

to swing back to a place

where we could still have these temples.

♪ They just said don't go, don't go ♪

♪ Don't go, don't go, don't go ♪

- I would like to introduce,

all the way from the tristate

area, and the boroughs,

Yo La Tengo!

- Hey Josh, you around here?

♪ Sometimes the bad days

may take their grip ♪

♪ Sometimes the good days fade ♪

♪ But the rain today

hurts the head to drink ♪

- Other Music was that place

that knew what you wanted

before you knew what you wanted.

- Other Music was a

champion of the underdog.

A lot of the artists who maybe

didn't want to be rock stars,

but they wanted to say something.

It was a place where the underdogs won.

When they opened, I don't

think that they even knew

how much people needed it

or wanted it, but they did.

- You carry the spirit of it,

I think, by being curious.

No matter how much music they knew,

there was still more music to discover.

So I think it's everyone's job to,

if you find something you

love, to tell people about it.

- Hey everybody, we just

want to say thank you.

Thank you for an amazing 20 years.

Look at Chris back there,

he's not even thinking

about coming out here.

A place like Other Music

is only about the community

and about the people who shopped

there and about the family.

It's not about buying and selling,

it's about being a part of

something and, oh Chris came out!

That is an incredibly special moment,

when somebody finds a record,

a song that means something to them.

It's very emotional.

It's beyond just like,

"That's a cool record."

We were really trying to connect

great art with great fans.

Helping people find great

art, it's a tough living,

but it is a pretty satisfying life.

♪ Resisting the flow ♪

Other Music (2019) - full transcript