This story was updated on Feb. 12 at 10:42 a.m.
When Bart’s CD Cellar permanently closes its doors on Valentine’s Day, it will mark the end of a Boulder institution.
The store announced in mid-December that its parent company, Value Music Concepts, Inc., was shutting it down in early 2010. Bart’s has been offering discounts of 60 percent to 80 percent off its remaining merchandise.
In interviews with Boulder Weekly, current and former Bart’s employees shared their memories of working at the store — and their views about the music industry trends causing similar closures around the country.
But others, including founder Bart Stinchcomb and Value Music CEO Rob Perkins, remain mum about the shop being shuttered.
When asked about a rumor that the closure of Bart’s and several other Value Music stores was prompted by the parent company’s need to pay off a loan that was called in by a bank, Value Music CEO Rob Perkins told Boulder Weekly, “No comment on that. We’re a private company.”
Stinchcomb did not return calls from Boulder Weekly.
Jon Martinez, who has worked at Bart’s as vinyl manager for about 15 years, says it may be too painful for Stinchcomb to discuss the closing. “He raised it from nothing,” Martinez says. “He’s probably not very happy about it. Even though he sold it, it still had his name and was his legacy. His kids grew up in the shop.”
Until it was sold to the chain several years ago, Bart’s — and Albums on the Hill — represented the last surviving independent record stores in Boulder, although last month a new vintage records and book store, Absolute Vinyl and Little Horse Books, opened in north Boulder.
Glenn BurnSilver, who was Stinchcomb’s business partner during the store’s early days, told Boulder Weekly that in 1990, Stinchcomb was a partner in another music store, Trade-A-Tape, which was located on the Hill. When Stinchcomb began operating his own music store out of his house, BurnSilver would buy music from him.
“We shared a love of music,” BurnSilver says.
Then, in 1991, Stinchcomb got a bona fide store location near the intersection of 8th and Pearl streets.
BurnSilver says it was a renovated bathroom.
“It still had a showerhead sticking out of the wall,” he recalls. “So I said, ‘You should at least hang a CD from that.’”
BurnSilver says he started working for Stinchcomb in the shop shortly after that, and then became a partner after inheriting some money. The store, known at the time simply as “The CD Cellar,” had moved across the street, near Lolita’s Market, and it began to expand, offering not just CDs, tapes and records, but posters and other musical accoutrements.
As Martinez recalls, when he started working at the shop in the mid-1990s, there were about 10 record stores in Boulder. In addition to Trade-A-Tape, past Boulder music shops include WaxTrax, Rocky Mountain Records and Tapes, RePlays, Cheapo Discs, Wherehouse Music and Second Spin.
Both BurnSilver and Martinez have fond memories of working in the shop.
“It’s always interesting being in downtown Boulder,” says BurnSilver, who is now a journalist and a radio DJ in Fairbanks, Alaska. “Every now and then, someone would come in and buy 50 CDs, and you’d flip out.”
He remembers one day, when the store was located near Lolita’s, a tan, muscular man came in with no shirt on, wearing only construction boots, wool socks and cutoffs.
“He looks around,” BurnSilver recalls, “and he says, ‘Wow, man, do you guys fix surfboards here?’”
“No, we don’t, we sell music,” came the reply.
“Cool, I’ll be back,” the man said.
Martinez says one customer was carrying a big stack of records around the store, albums that he was presumably planning to buy, but then he disappeared. Martinez says the man had gone into the store bathroom, locked the door, left the water running, and stole the records by climbing out the window.
He also remembers clearing out and renovating the second level of Bart’s, which he says used to be “a dusty attic” with a couple of offices and storage space, to serve as the vinyl department.
Both agree that the closure of the store, and others like it, is being driven by the emergence of the Internet, digital music files, mp3 players and services like iTunes.
“Most people don’t want a whole album, they just want one song,” BurnSilver says.
“There are some people who have never set foot in a record store,” Martinez adds. “People want things quicker. Life is just speeding up. But people, deep down, are still going to want to shop.”
He predicts that smaller niche shops, such as those selling only vinyl or a certain style of music, could emerge.
Martinez says that while he was well aware that record store closures have been on the rise nationally, Bart’s was profitable, and the closure came as a surprise. When a business is part of a corporate chain instead of being independent, simply being profitable is not enough. He confirms that Bart’s was not as profitable as other Value Music stores, which probably led to its demise.
“We were making money and didn’t expect to get shut down,” Martinez says. “It was just kind of sudden, out of the blue. … I think it was inevitable. We just thought we’d have more of a warning.”
The hard part for him, Martinez says, is giving up what has been his baby for 15 years — the vinyl department. “It was pretty agonizing,” he says of the decision to close Bart’s. “I guess I came to realize that I had a little more invested in it than I thought.”
He acknowledges that it was especially difficult seeing the crowds descend like vultures when the going-out-of-business sale was announced. “When they announced that sale, people came from all over,” Martinez says. “It was right before Christmas. There was a mad rush. … It was a feeding frenzy.
“It’s been a depressing two months, to sit there and see everything shrink down,” he adds. “I had handled pretty much every piece of vinyl, and to see it picked over was hard.”
Martinez, who estimates that his personal collection of vinyl exceeds 20,000 albums, speaks fondly of the medium and the advantages it holds over the digital format.
“It’s something you can hold, it’s something tangible,” he says. “It’s the ritual of taking it out, reading the liner notes. … It’s just a different quality of sound. It’s fuller, even though it may be more flawed.”
Martinez, who says he does not yet have another job lined up, has worked in music shops since 1982.
“Most of my adult life was spent in record stores,” he says. “I guess I’m seeing my way of life getting snuffed out.”
