While filing away some records I came across a sleeve with a stamp on it from a record store on Genesee Street. When Duane lived up here we used to haunt the reggae shops on the west side, his old neighborhood. Their primary business was selling weed under the counter but they advertised themselves as record shops and they had Jamaican imports and a sound system to back up the claim, big dirty, bottom heavy sound systems. They displayed their wares like the photo above except this one was taken in Duane’s office/media/spare bedroom in 1999 after he had moved to Brooklyn. It took me a bit to find the photo as it was tucked away in a folder called “DC210Photos, my first megapixel camera, a Kodak DC 210.
We were talking to Dick Storms at Brian Williams’ bash and I asked, how come you don’t have a Jazz 45 section over there. He was taken aback and acted surprised, saying, are you sure? He said he knew they had boxes of them in a closet in the back room. So many that he began fantasizing about filling the juke box in the back room with jazz 45s. I have spent quite a few hours in that closet now I have only come up with Duke Ellington’s “Indian Summer” and a wacky version of Gato Barbieri’s “Last Tango in Paris” by the Ventures. Rochester’s Gerry Niewood plays sax on that one. Not complaining. I realize how old world my quest has become.
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Love your description of the sound system in the reggae store. That must have been so much fun to hang around in there.