By Joel Lipman
UT News Op-Ed
February 23, 2004
At the end of February when Boogie Records goes dark, Westgate Village will lose a well-loved and deservedly valued business and the Toledo cultural community will shrink by considerably more than the dimming of a single storefront.
Boogie's served several overlapping generations of the city's music devotees and once it's shuttered. The University of Toledo campus and the surrounding westside neighborhoods will be places of diminished cultural variety and musical vitality. Toledo's arts environment will become more limited, less spirited and unique. Boogie's deep blues racks will empty, the archival bins will be scrubbed clean of history, and the city will no longer possess a ready world music window generously open to the planet's people and their classical, indigenous and pop musical cultures. Area singers, musicians and producers will have to look elsewhere for grassroots support and product promotion.
But where?
Since opening in the late 1970s, Boogie's been one of those rare shops promoting significantly more than the stock on its shelves. Boogie Records has been our anti-Target, the Lilliputian in the shadow of Amazon, the un-Best Buy, the little box that could. Whether it was the latest teenage garage band from the South End launching its initial (and perhaps only) four-song CD, or an afternoon of amp-crackling music on the sidewalk under the Westgate canopy to raise a few bucks for a hard luck case or needy cause, or serving as ticket outlet for an under-resourced local blues festival, as backdrop to a parking lot concert, pizza fest or car rally, or making a few inches of shelf rack or counter space available for independently produced magazines, records, jewelry or clothing. Boogie and its community-oriented proprietors provided Toledo with an ardent business model rooted in '60s counterculture that valuably gave back to its customers and friends in proportion to what it received. You could drop into Boogie Records for an album and walk out with groovy information, musically nuanced insight and usable bits of storefront education. And it's been an outlet for intangibles - one could shop Boogie and end up with hard-to-measure immateriality such as good vibes and possibility.
But this is not a hot story, neither breaking news nor follow-up investigative coverage. There's little immanent or edgy to add to what we presumptively know is this reminiscence's lead and background - downloading rules, Napster, Audio Galaxy and Kaaza trump CD shelf life, mega stores undercut indi prices, Wal-Mart goes up and Steve, Debbie and Pat go under ... blah, blah, blah. Welcome to what is.
More problematic is what will be. In this context, reflect a moment upon Boogie Records' closing in the context of a city that is long on cultural aspirations, cant and polemics, but short on nuts-and- bolts investment and concrete accomplishment.
Mayor Jack Ford promotes an agenda that aspires creating an "elegant Toledo." The city's strategic plan for the arts and culture filters and blends the work of a 40-person task force, establishing priorities, and bringing in economist
Richard Florida as a creative stimulant - he encourages the city to support multiplicity, human diversity and to develop numerous small and modest arts initiatives. Under the leadership of UT's Urban Affairs Center, the Walk Westgate coalition gathers New Urbanists, city pols and planners, Westgate neighbors and businesspersons to re-envision and create a future-sighted model for renewed investment in an increasingly outdated but still reasonably thriving commercial district. The Blade hoists the banner of a comprehensive arts levy. But in fact the city struggles constantly to sustain, energize and build its arts environment while hoping for at least a modicum of street cool and trickle-down urban energy. So when the city's best independent record store goes out Of business its impact on metropolitan Toledo's cultural reality is neither small nor insignificant.
It's an imperfect and vaguely dreamy analogy, but I remember a drive to the remote Ohio town of Nevada not too many years after I arrived in Toledo in 1975. While it's likely that the nostalgic memory recalls and shapes inventively, my recollection is that there was but one business left in the town's center, a lovely and fading comer drug store with a long gray granite counter behind which were phosphate dispensers and ice cream coolers. Looking up, the parlor's mirrors cast about a half-century of good times right back at me and I saw myself in the reflection's center surrounded by shelves, racks and islands with the last remnants of the store's thinning inventory. When I drove through the town a couple years later the store was just another deserted pile. But I had had my phosphate and can still taste its carbonated fizz.
Enjoy Boogie's sweet and enduring aftertaste. I suspect for many of us there are significant cultural memories, fecund moments and nurturing tunes. Play the odd old vinyl "Wipeout" or some other vintage Toledo relic. And let's work for something to replenish the spot Boogie Records occupied in the city's past while moving on and building Toledo's future.
Lipman is a UT professor of art and English.