Savory writer and editor Jim Juliano had a chance to sit down and interview Portland, Oregon record store icon Terry Currier of Music Millennium.
JJ: What role has music played in your life outside of being the owner of a record store?
TC: Well, music is the driver of my life. It’s my inspiration for getting up every day. I played clarinet when I was a kid. I didn’t listen to the radio, and I didn’t listen to records as a kid. But when I turned 16, I got a motorcycle and living in the Pacific Northwest with rain and sleet, after about nine months, I got a car! And the car had a radio! And three months later I saw my first concert, which was Leon Russel and The Shelter People at the Memorial Colliseum. And two weeks later I applied for a job at a records store, DJ’s in Jantzen Beach. I became passionate about music very quickly. After seeing Leon Russel, I went out and bought a drum set and decided to learn to play drums by playing along with Who’s Next. And, after about a month, I go, “I’m never gonna get this down! I can’t play like Keith Moon!” But that concert was almost like a religious experience for me. Leon was a madman on the piano. Then at some point he’s standing ON his piano playing guitar. He had so much energy you could just feel it bouncing out around the room, there was just something about it!
JJ: You played clarinet as a kid. Did your parents play music?
TC: No, no my parents didn’t. They encouraged me though. In fact, I started off playing violin in the 4rth grade and in the middle of my 5th grade year my dad came and he says. “You don’t seem to be happy with the violin.” And I said, “Well, all the other violin players sound terrible and it hurts my ears!” So, he asked me what I would want to play, and I said, “Oh, those long black things, a clarinet.” And like a month or two later he woke me one night and gave me a clarinet. He was working, I think, two jobs at that time to support the family so to go out and buy the clarinet was a pretty special thing.
JJ: As a kid, did that make you feel obligated to live up to those expectations?
TC: Probably a little. I think there was the expectation I would go to college on a music scholarship somewhere. But the main motivator at that time was that I was halfway through my 5th grade year and all the people in the band who already played clarinet were more skilled than I was. So, I took some private lessons, and I practiced hours every day. In the summertime I took summer music classes to learn theory. And in the 6th grade they invited me to come play in the Junior High band too. So, I would do three hours in the elementary school program and then follow that with three hours in the junior high program. I played a lot!
JJ: Do you still play?
TC: No, I don’t. The year after graduation from high school I quit playing because the record store became my university. I wanted to know as much about music as I possibly could. If it sounded good, I bought it. I had no peer pressure. My last year of high school I got out of school at noon. I could work 40 hours a week and I didn’t have any financial obligations, so all my money went to records. Then after I’d been working at the record store for a while I started dating a girl who was also working at the store, and some months later she said, “I’ve got a surprise for you tonight.” I was thinking something different, but she took me to Music Millenium! And the thing was, Music Millenium was divided into two parts. One part had all these great import records, and I was like, “Wow, they’ve got all these records we don’t have over at our record store.” So, I would get off work at nine o’clock and could be at Music Millenium around 9:15, and they were open till 10. So probably three or four nights a week I came here, and I read album covers, and I bought records. That first year, the number that comes up in my head is 665!
JJ: Do you still like to shop for records?
TC: Yeah, but I don’t really get the time these days. I work six days a week, twelve hours a day. But when I used to have two days off a week, one of those days always included making a swing around used record stores in Portland. You never knew what you were going to find in the used sections. All of a sudden you know you found this great record from 1965 or something. Now, an interesting thing about 1972, when I started, is that the 50’s were old. And you look at the way the music buyer is today, there’s a lot of 12–18-year-olds in the store buying records that are 40 to 50 years old! That would have been like me buying a bunch of records from the 20’s and 30’s back then. So today I look at the vinyl renaissance as a bridge across the generation gap. Parents and kids, grandparents and kids shopping together. Kids finding records in the basements of their parent’s houses. And suddenly, “My dad’s cool!” That’s been great to see. When I was a kid, you didn’t listen to what your parents listened to.
JJ: Can you talk a little about how Record Store Day came about? Was it your idea?
TC: It wasn’t really my idea, but in January of 1993 the industry came up with policies along with the major distribution companies that said if you carried used CDs in your store, they weren’t going to support you with advertising or marketing. And used CDs were not a big part of our business at that time but it was the whole principle of them dictating this to stores all across the country. So, I wrote a three-page letter to the industry and sent it to all the trade publications at the time, to presidents and vice presidents of labels, to distributors. I sent out over a hundred of these letters and it became a little war between Terry and the industry.
JJ: Was that when things happened with Garth Brooks?
TC: Yeah, in June of ’93 I got a call from Mark Cope of the Album Network, and he tells me, “Garth Brooks just had a press conference, and he doesn’t want his new albums sold in stores that sell used CDs.” So, we immediately pulled all our Garth Brooks product off the shelves and wrote them up for returns. And the next day I said “Well, I’m gonna invite the public down to the parking lot to bring all their Garth Brooks products and we’re going to barbeque it on the grill.” And on the day of the actual barbeque the parking lot was just filled with media people. Forbes Magazine even had a photographer here! That night I did a talk show in Seattle and one of my employees called and said, “Hey, I’m gonna need to be your manager, you’re getting popular!” And I said, “Well you’re going on the road with me. We’re gonna go to record stores all the way down into California.” We started in Bellingham and went to San Diego. We had tour t-shirts “BBQ For Retail Freedom.” We set up nine stores for stops and each store did something a little bit different. In Berkeley at Amoeba Records it was like 5 o’clock and there was TV news cameras there. We ended up going to a San Francisco Giants game with barbeque hats and aprons on and people were like, “Hey, it’s the BBQ guys! Go get ‘em!” When we got done with the tour, it did what I wanted it to do. It allowed me to take this to the public versus trying to fight the industry back and forth. And within the month after the barbeque was over, the four major distribution companies rescinded the policy. Out of that, I realized that independent stores have a lot in common and it would be cool to put together a support group for a bunch of stores in non-competitive cities that might share ideas with each other and act as a strengthening for independent stores.
JJ: So that became the Coalition of Independent Music Stores?
TC: Yes. But back to Mark Cope who worked for The Album Network. I used his expertise because he talked with independent stores all around the country to get sales figures every week and he recommended stores and we put this coalition together. And out of that first coalition, two more were born, and in 2007, the three coalitions got together and talked about doing Record Store Day. Actually the idea came from Chris Brown from Bull Moose up in the New England area. So you could give the credit to me, or you could give the credit to Garth Brooks! Thank you Garth Brooks for Record Store Day! (LOL)
JJ: So has Garth Brooks ever contacted you in regards to all this?
TC: No, no. We would have put Garth back into the store when this was all done, but he was being interviewed nationally and he says, “You know, I believe people should stand up for what they believe, but those guys up in Portland, they were carrying my product the whole time they were doing this protest.” Which was totally false, so I immediately put up a divider card that said, “We no longer carry Garth Brooks.” And somehow, later, somebody stole that divider card. . .
JJ: How are the releases for Record Store Day chosen?
TC: Well, the first Record Store Day had about 50 releases. We went to the industry and said, “Hey we’re gonna have this day, would you guys give us some cool stuff on vinyl?” And, nobody cared about vinyl at that time. The industry had really pushed vinyl out the door in the late 80’s. But they were like, “Well, let’s throw these guys a bone,” and they did. So, we hired a publicist to get the word out about Record Store Day, but also to let people know, hey, there are still about 1800 independent record stores out there, and they carry vinyl. But back to your question. After that first year, record companies began to see that there was some substance to making some vinyl and they started presenting titles to us to consider. And each year Record Store Day got more successful to the point where one year I think we had 450 official Record Store Day titles. Now we have trimmed it back to the 250-300 mark. But there is a committee made up of retailers out there and when labels present things these days, the committee gives feed back, and a label will send a message saying, “We want to do these five titles.”
JJ: So they are more invested in the idea now as well.
TC: They are. And they will give suggestions on quantities as well, and the committee will weigh in those suggestions and guide the ultimate decisions about what is released.
JJ: Is it mostly the United States, or is it a world wide thing now?
TC: It started out as just the United States, but it is world wide. There’s organizations in Europe and Great Britain. There’s Australia, Japan. We have an actual Record Store Day conference every year just to deal with industry issues and some of these people from around the world will come to our meetings to see what’s happening in the states. And when it became a world wide thing, it became super important to have communication between the organizations and keep everybody on track. Dealing with holidays in a lot of these countries where you couldn’t conflict with doing a Record Store Day event. Traditionally it’s been the third Saturday in April. But during Covid we had to split it up into multiple days because a lot of stores couldn’t handle doing that much business in a day because they had limits on how many people could come in the store.
JJ: Even this year was quite mobbed. Sonic Boom Records in Seattle had a line out the door and halfway around the block until after three in the afternoon.
TC: It was like that here. A real phenomenon happened this year. Last year Taylor Swift was the ambassador for Record Store Day and she put out a single but only put out 4000 copies. And she has the biggest fan base in the world so there were a lot of disappointed people who were not able to get her single. So, she put out an album this year and they made substantially more, like 75,000 copies. There’s never been a Record Store Release with that many pressings. So, there were a lot of people in those lines this year that had never been to a Record Store Day before, and some that had never even been to a record store before. In our case, we ordered 300 copies of the Taylor Swift and we sold out in five hours. We had over 350 people in line at eight o’clock when we opened.
JJ: So as a collector are their titles that you would personally like to see released for future Record Store Days?
TC: I got lists and lists and lists! You know, my favorite band of all time is The Kinks. Any unreleased stuff from The Kinks I would be interested in. And some of that stuff has been coming out anyway. You know, the really great thing about Record Store Day is that it really started the vinyl renaissance. In 2008 on that first Record Store Day, new vinyl sales were less than a quarter of one percent of the business in the industry. Now if you go to independent stores most of the space is full of vinyl.
JJ: When I first came to Music Millennium in 1995, the whole vinyl room was full of classical CDs. There may have been some vinyl upstairs? Is that right?
TC: Yeah, there were LPs up there. But then about 13 years ago we made a big decision. We had two bookeepers that almost put us out of business. One ended up doing five years in prison and the other one was kinda incompetent. So, in desperation trying to figure out how are we going to go forward, big decisions were made. In two days, we transformed the classical room into a vinyl room and classical just became a piece of the store like folk, or country, or jazz. We’d seen a ten-year decline in classical sales, so this was a necessary change to go forward, and it was a good change for us. Now there is vinyl creeping up all over the store.
JJ: I saw that the ROCK section has expanded up into the middle room now!
TC: And if you notice underneath all the vinyl bins there’s like two rows of overstock, and we can’t even get all the new vinyl we want because the manufacturers are so backed up. So, anytime we see a title that’s available, I’m probably going to buy a four month supply because I don’t know if it’s going to be around again. It was taking eight to ten months to get your record manufactured. Now it’s probably down to six months? So, it’s getting better because more vinyl pressing plants are opening and existing ones are expanding their capacity. But you don’t know, if something is more obscure, it may not get pressed again.
JJ: I wish I could have got that Hal Blaine thing this year.
TC: Oh yeah, I picked up one of those!
JJ: What are some of the personal gems of your record collection and how large is your collection?
TC: It’s over 25,000 records. I really need to trim down, but I’ve never trimmed down the collection intentionally. I’ve trimmed it down from water issues and things like that, but you know, I’m hopin’ for that day when I can just go home and I can listen to records all the time. You asked me in the very beginning what did music mean to me. When I first started working in the record store every minute of the day was listening to music and I bought a house when I was twenty years old because I found out that you couldn’t listen to music at any time of the day you wanted in an apartment complex! I figured if I bought myself a house I could play my music any time of day at any volume I wanted! And it was good. When I got up in the morning the first thing that went on was the stereo. Stereo was on when I was in the shower, and when I was cooking breakfast and all the way up until I went to work and then I listened to music all day at work, and then when I got home at night the first thing that went on was the stereo. From age 18 when I first moved out of the house, until age 20 I didn’t even own a television. And it didn’t matter because I had music. The only thing in retrospect is I missed a lot of In Concert and Midnight Special. I watched things like Late Night with Tom Snyder because he had a lot of great musical guests on there and you know, you had to see these things.
JJ: So, out of your huge collection, can you even narrow it down to list the gems?
TC: It’s too many! I can narrow it down to my five favorite artists: The Kinks, Spirit, Mott The Hoople, Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention probably lent the most inspiration to me in those first couple years. In fact the first couple of records I ever bought on my own were Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. And then my fifth favorite band is a band that hardly anyone knows anything about. They were from Scotland, and they were called The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Alex Harvey was 38 or 39 when this band formed, and he’d been in since the 1950’s and he was giving it one last try! He hooked up with a bunch of younger folks. They did mostly rock music, but they would take a Jacques Brel piece and give their own adaptation to it. Most of it was straight ahead, even a little harder rock, but they would take a 1940’s song (sings) “I wanna be rich and famous.” The Jacques Brel song, you know, was about a soldier dying due to gonorrhea. They did a version of The Impossible Dream. The one song that probably kinda destroyed their career but made ‘em so popular in the U.K. at the same time was a cover of the Tom Jones song, “Delilah.”
JJ: What was the deal with that song? Just that it was a Tom Jones song? It seemed square?
TC: Yeah, yeah, they were on The Top of the Pops, and it became this big hit and you know. . . parents liked it. . .and so all of a sudden it was like “Well these guys must not be too cool. . .”
JJ: Are there any records that you still want that you haven’t been able to find?
TC: Well, there are records that I could break down and buy. . . there’s a lot of gems out there. I mean records have gone way up in value. There’s a Kink’s promotional box for The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and inside of it you got a little cellophane bag of grass, from The Village Green, you got a God Save The Queen button, you got a little jigsaw puzzle, and if I went to go buy one right now it’d be like $1500.00! Do I really need it? If I was in my 30’s, I really needed it! I don’t really need it. I own multiple copies of that album cause its such a phenomenal album, but yeah, I see a record here and there, and I still need to have it.
JJ: I read a quote from Questlove, he said “Collecting is an act of devotion.” Have you felt that over the course of your life collecting records?
TC: Yes, I do, and in fact, you know, maybe at the time I didn’t really realize it, but later on I did. One of my musical heroes was Dave Edmunds and I brought Dave Edmunds to town to play. And it was going to be a solo Dave Edmunds show. So, I called up this guy John Jorgensen who was in the Desert Rose band and he played guitar with Elton John for about five years. I thought he was still living in L.A. so I said, “Hey John do you wanna come up and open for Dave Edmunds?” And he was like, “Wow, that’s really great but I live in Nashville now.” But then he thought about it and called me back and he called a friend down in L.A. and he came up and they did it as a duo. The thousand bucks I gave him was probably all used up in travel and hotel bills. So, we did the show. After the show, I go, “Dave, would you come down to the stage, there’s a bunch of fans there that would like to get autographs.” Me included!! And I had brought a bunch of Dave Edmunds stuff. And he goes, “I’ll come down, but I hope there’s none of those people that bring every one of my records and want’em signed.”
JJ: And you’re like “that’s me!”
TC: I’m going. . . “uhhhh.” So, I ran downstairs real quick and I told people, “Pass some of your records to your friends and have your friends get him to sign ‘em. Don’t hand him a big pile of records.” So, he signed them, and then he came upstairs and I opened this box and I said, “I know, I’m one of those people who brought everything, but why don’t you just pick out three or four things to sign?” And he gave me the riot act. My wife was standing next to me, and he goes “I don’t understand how you could possibly do this. . .” and he just went on and on and on. He goes, “Do I have any autographs? Can you see me walking up to James Brown and saying, ‘Mr. Brown will you sign all these records for me?’” And he kept talking and I went from being six foot tall to five foot tall to four foot tall to three feet tall. I had talked to my own two record labels at the time, and I had planned on talking to him about making a solo record. But by the end I could just barely mumble “Uh, you got any plans for a new record?” Then I got halfway home in the car, and it came to me, “You know what I should have told him. I should have said, Mr. Edmunds it was the people in the record store that made your career. We were always talking him up to customers and turning them onto records. And if I had the room in my house, I would have a little Dave Edmunds shrine with all these autographed records because that’s what your music meant to me!” But, after the fact and too late. . .But what I am seeing out of the younger people in the store these days, the 12 to 18 year olds, they want a piece of ownership of an artist. And buying the physical goods is that inroads for them. And there are even a few people out there who don’t own turntables that are buying LPs.
JJ: So, did you ever talk to Dave Edmunds again after that?
TC: No, No. And it kinda soured going back and listening to his music. You know, there was a time in the industry when I got to meet a lot of artists. The industry was really vibrant. It was almost like every show you went to there was a representative from a label there. And afterwards they’d go, “You wanna come back and meet the artist?” And that kinda stuff doesn’t happen anymore. And most of the artists I met were quite nice or at least cordial. But there was a couple of people I met that left an impression that you didn’t really want to go listen to their records anymore.
JJ: Well, speaking of live music, why do you think Portland is such a fertile place for musical artists?
TC: Portland’s always been a good place for artists to get their music out. It’s a little harder now because there’s a lot more people out there performing music and not enough venues to do it. But if you really go back in time in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s a lot of the promoters were putting local artists on bills with national touring artists. And it gave a lot of exposure to the local artists. You don’t see it as much anymore. But like this last weekend, The Hold Steady were playing at Revolution Hall and The Minus Five, which is a Portland based band, really an all-star band based in Portland. Peter Buck is in that band. And Jenny Conlee of The Decemberists too. But when Monqui Presents was doing concerts in the 80’s they always put a local band on the bill, and maybe even a regional act too. They did a lot of triple bills. The opener might be Heatmiser, Elliot Smith’s band at the time, then Soundgarden would come down and be the second band on a triple bill before they got popular. There was a time in Portland when touring artists came through and they really noticed how friendly the music community was here. Everybody kinda shared and there was certain amount of comradery, and a lot of people moved here!
JJ: Did K.D. Lang live here for a time?
TC: Yeah, she has dual residencies. Here and in Edmonton, Canada. She’s a Blazer fan.
JJ: I saw her at the Portland Art Museum and Thomas Lauderdale opened. He came out in a white sequined ball gown and was just hilarious. And then after he played I thought, “Well shit, whose gonna follow this guy?”
TC: I saw what was the first Pink Martini show in town. And I can remember Thomas calling me, he was going to put on a show at Cinema 21 with these three older women in their 70’s called The Del Rubio Triplets. They had an album at the time called Whip It, based on Devo’s “Whip It” and on the cover they were wearing metal mixing bowls on their head’s, kinda like the Devo hats, and they had little whisks and Pink Martini did their first show. They were the opening act. They are backing Darcel on Darcel’s first release on vinyl is coming up next month. They had Darcel’s celebration of life last weekend at the Schnitzer and Thomas Lauderdale was one of the speakers.
JJ: Do you remember a band called Sneakin’ Out? They were on that same bill with K.D.Lang and Thomas Lauderdale at the museum.
TC: Sneakin’ Out! Talkin’ about John Jorgensen again. He was the first American to be invited to play the Jango Rheinhardt festival in Europe. And he had this six-piece band and I brought them to town to play at The Old Church and I called up Sneakin’ Out to be the opening act.
JJ: John Jorgensen also made an album with Davey Johnstone once right?
TC: Yeah, you know the interesting thing about John is he majored in music on the bassoon, and then there’s this guy from Portland named Tim Gorman who played piano with The Who when they did “Eminence Front.” He did that piano at the very beginning. He also majored in music on the bassoon. And I ran into both of them in Nashville at the same time and John had this band, The Hellecasters which were three Telecaster players and I grabbed them both and I go, “You guys could start The Bassoonacasters!”
JJ: How do you see places like Music Millennium in the larger context of a city in addition to just being a place of commerce?
TC: Um, when Music Millennium started back in 1969, record stores were like community centers. Way before social media and stuff like that began you went to the record store to see what shows were coming to town, and you met people in record stores. And I think that’s kinda what is happening again. When you go to the record store and talk to somebody who works there, they’re gonna tell you something about music that you don’t know. And we have a lot of employees and we have certain customers that gravitate toward a certain employee because they know that employee knows what they like and can turn ‘em on to something new that they’ll like. It’s interesting because in the 2000’s record stores didn’t mean anything to a lot of people and to society in general and the excitement of music seemed to go away because there weren’t those fan bases. People were streaming and not coming in the stores, but we see an excitement for the music again in a way that it was when I started working in a record store in the early 70’s. The 70’s was a phenomenal decade for music. I think the best decade ever for music was from about 65 to 75 because people were creating new sounds that had never been done before in rock music. All of a sudden people were stretching out. We have to credit The Beatles for doing that because they set a standard from record to record not sticking with the same sound, adding new things, and it inspired other people to do the same thing.
JJ: Think about Robert Moog and guys like Stevie Wonder. Take the records before Talking Book and then look at what came with those next four or five records. Technology then allowed for different kinds of growth.
TC: Oh, yeah, there was kinda a formula to the whole Motown sound and Stevie Wonder just kinda stood up for himself and said, “I’m gonna do my own thing.” And it opened up people’s minds to what they could do.
JJ: So with the Renaissance of vinyl, how do you see the future of music media?
TC: I think the Renaissance in vinyl brought people back to music as art. Vinyl has always been really the best format to experience music. And people will argue that fact, you know, CDs don’t skip, streaming. . . I can just go grab this and grab that. . . but when you experience an album it’s really perfect. First there is the 12X12 graphics, and a lot of time put into most album covers, most, not all (LOL)! Vinyl can only contain about 20 minutes of music a side and I think that is the perfect amount of time for the attention span of a music listener. When we went to the CD, you could put 65, 70 minutes of music on a CD. It’s too long.
JJ: Do you think that record companies said to artists, “Okay, we want to charge $17.99 for this CD, it can’t just be 30 minutes long, whatever you got, just throw it on there.”? In my opinion a lot of albums that came out originally on CD would have been much better if they’d been shorter.
TC: Oh yeah, lot of things that would have ended up on the cutting room floor if it had been vinyl, ended up on those records. You know, people would sit with the album cover in their lap and learn about the artist, the producer, the engineers the guest artists. . . and they retained a lot more of it. When it went to the CD everything was shrunk down into this little, tiny book. It just wasn’t as inviting and after that 20-minute mark people started to wander. Out to the kitchen to get a beverage, went to the restroom. The concentration was just not put into it. And both CDs and cassettes went into these cold little plastic boxes where I really think people are experiencing music as art again when they buy LPs.
JJ: Do you have a Spotify or Apple Music account?
TC: No, I don’t. The record industry fought against digital downloads, and they should have somehow embraced it. Though it seemed like it was from the evil side of life and it did a lot of damage to record stores, streaming is a different thing. It’s more like a modern radio station. I see a lot of people that stream that shop in our store. They use it to find out about music. It’s much like the radio in the ‘70s. Somebody would hear a song on the radio and a certain amount of people would come in and buy the seven-inch single. Some people would buy the album. Then there would be a second single off that record and a few more people would buy that single and few more people would buy the album. If there was a third single, usually the album would start selling like crazy. And I think the same thing happens with Spotify.
JJ: Do you think LP’s will have some longevity from here forward due to the current revival?
TC: I think vinyl will have some prosperity for years to come because it is hitting that younger demographic and they will carry it on. In our case, we have a lot of CD customers too. And the CD will only go away if the record industry makes it go away because a lot of record companies, once they run out of a CD now, they are not making anymore. I’m going to an industry convention next week, and one of my messages is going to be, “You guys gotta pay attention to the CD.” There are young people out there buying CDs because there are used cars out there with CD players and kids are saying, “Hey, I’m gonna go get a few things to play in this thing.” It’s still a good medium for people.
JJ: Another Questlove quote: “A collection starts as protest against the passage of time, and it ends as a celebration of it.” Do you see Music Millennium as being a celebration of music?
TC: Oh! Definitely so! I came to Millennium to in 1984. And in 1984 the owner who had bought the store in 1979 from Don McCloud, the original owner, was going to file bankruptcy. But Don McCloud didn’t want to see his baby go so he assumed a half million dollars in debt, this building and the inventory that was left from four other locations. But none of the vendors had been selling to him for almost a year. So, when I came to work here my goal was to get the store out of the gutter because Music Millennium meant a lot to me even though I’d been working somewhere else. I figured at that time that I was going to become the curator. And I wanted to keep the feel of the way Music Millennium was in 1972 when I walked through the door that first time. It was always a passionate place. Employees were passionate. The customers were passionate about music, and you know, I need to continue that feeling into the future and find the next person to take it into the future. And luckily, we’ve made it through 54 years. And there were a few times when it would have been easier to just throw in the towel, but it was always the music that thrusted me forward, thinking “Somehow were gonna make this work. We’re gonna do whatever we can to try to make it work.” And somehow it has.
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Check out Jim’s five-part series on the Vinyl Revival; part 1 found here.