The back room of Boogie Records looked like the basement bedroom of the coolest kid in the neighborhood.
Compact discs were scattered everywhere, skate boards piled against the wall, energy drinks stacked on the floor, and posters - vintage stuff like Talking Heads, Guided By Voices, Randy Newman and Bruce Springsteen - were hung all over the place.
A replica of a human skull with a wilted rose hanging from its mouth stared out from a shelf, and the clutter contained three decades worth of music memorabilia. Every now and then a big dog would wander in, looking for someone to scratch his ears and offer a kind word.
Today the back room of Boogie, in the Westgate Village Shopping Center, is being emptied out.
After 30 years, the Toledo institution - think a counter-culture version of Tony Packo's or the Mud Hens - is out of business, one of hundreds of independent music stores across the country forced to close in recent years by dwindling sales and a market that has changed dramatically over the past decade.
Early this year store owners Pat O'Connor and Debbie Marinik, along with their third partner Steve Essick, sat down, looked at the books, and decided they no longer wanted to fight the rising tide of file sharing, big box stores that sell music as loss leaders, and changes in consumer tastes.
"When we looked at the final figures, we were shocked," O'Connor said. "The industry has changed so much. "
"Things had been dwindling," Marinik said. "We could tell our market was going away and the younger generation wasn't coming up. I think that generation has been lost as far as the young record buyer is concerned."
So they're out of business, leaving an intensely loyal customer base feeling empty and more than a little sad, and at least one competitor ready to move in and take advantage of their departure.
Marinik and O'Connor aren't alone.
Ed Christman, senior writer/retail for Billboard magazine, said the entire music industry, including the big chains like Tower and the indies, has suffered over the past three years, with CD sales down by as much as 30 percent.
"The first one to be impacted was the retailers," he said, estimating that last year 800 chain stores either filed for bankruptcy or closed. And he said that while no one tracks the fate of independent music retailers, "anecdotally" he knows of about 200 independents that closed their doors in 2003.
Eric Levin, the owner of Criminal Records in Atlanta, has seen the same thing in his role as head of the national, 21-store Alliance of Independent Media Stores, of which Boogie was a member.
"It starts to seem like a blood bath out there," he said. "There is a certain amount of truth to the headlines that as indy retailers we are under siege."
When O'Connor started Boogie in 1973 with his original partners - Marinik bought in a few years later - the music industry bore little resemblance to what it has become.
The main mediums were vinyl records or 8-tracks, there were hundreds of large and small record labels, and the big box stores weren't on the scene. Records were relatively affordable to a kid with a halfway decent job or even a paper route, and only a few years after the breakup of the Beatles rock and roll still was a cultural touchstone. You could tell a lot about someone if he was a Lou Reed fan who didn't have any use for Paul McCartney and sometimes that's how you picked your friends.
Boogie - which also sold incense, magazines and other music-related items - expanded to several stores and was doing well, making the transition from vinyl to CDs without much of a problem.
"The demographics looked good and we had pretty good success after a short period of time," O'Connor said.
Over the years the store at Westgate became a highly visible local business thanks to the friendly, hip staff, visits by touring musicians that included Tom Petty and John Mellencamp, and the relaxed atmosphere.
Then the industry changed dramatically in the mid-1990s and suddenly, "business mattered more than music," Marinik said.
"That's when Best Buy and Media Play came into town and they had really heavy ad wars. There were more record store ads in the paper than car ads," O'Connor said.
The problem for Boogie and other independents is that the big box stores can sell music as a loss-leader. Compact discs are offered at below-profit prices to lure customers in the big stores to buy other items, which means Boogie's products always cost more.
Christman said it's no secret that retailers like Target or Wal-Mart use low-priced CDs to get shoppers in the store so they'll buy other things.
"Most front-line CDs cost [the retailer] anywhere from $12.02 and $12.07, so when you see a CD being sold for $9 . . . well, you do the math," he said.
Boogie's mark-up made it tough to compete with the big guys who buy large quantities of new work by popular artists from distributors at even greater discounts.
Then came file sharing, which O'Connor and Marinik said was a knockout punch to a business that had already been struggling. The controversial practice of downloading music from the Internet and sharing files - which many in the industry consider theft - exploded as Web connections grew faster and thousands of songs were available free to anyone with a computer and a speedy modem.
Not only is the music cheap and easy to obtain, but also indy retailers argued that downloading - especially among kids and young adults - has fundamentally changed the relationship consumers have with the music, both in terms of how they acquire it and how they listen to it.
When Ed Jeziorowski, a 43-year-old West Toledoan, was a kid he rode his bike to Boogie at one of its other locations, picking up the latest Bad Company or Led Zeppelin albums and soaking up the ambience of the record store. With the smell of incense in the air, music playing over the store speakers, and other kids hanging around, it was a cool place to be.
"It was the kind of store where they knew their customers. They weren't worried about making a sale and if you wanted to come in and just hang out, that was fine with them," he said. "They definitely knew their customers."
For the indy retailer, an entire generation of music fans is in danger of being lost because they have no need or interest to leave their bedrooms to find their favorite songs. Their community is online, not in the neighborhood record store that was, as Levin said a "little temple to music."
"What file sharing did was really make music a very disposable commodity," Marinik said. "The important thing wasn't the hipness of the record store. It was getting music, listening to it, and moving on."
O'Connor said the experience of sitting down with an album cover, poring over the liner notes, studying the art, and listening to the music is forever lost. CDs at least offer small booklets that can be chock-full of information, but computer files are nothing more than bits and bytes to be stored somewhere in a machine.
"Music used to be put out as an art package," he said. "The musicians who put it out meant it as a complete package - the art, the liner notes.
"I think there's more to music than just beats, more to it than just a couple of licks. They do not develop the emotional connection to music any more."
Levin echoed O'Connor's point.
"For a certain segment of the world, music is no longer the be-all, end-all. For them, music now is just the stuff on in the background. Youths consume their music in a disposable format," he said.
What they're missing is an experience that 34-year-old Toledo musician Jeff Stewart compared to a well-cooked meal. He visited Boogie for years, and played an in-store concert there last Saturday with his buddy Gregg Leonard.
Stewart said that Boogie, most notably the people who worked there and suggested he check out alternative bands like Wilco and Blue Rodeo, helped him establish the tastes that would later inform his music.
"It forced you to raise your standards," Stewart said. "When you're a young kid you're impressionable, and it was like a litmus test. And you had the best people in the world telling you what to check out." He said he will miss that connection.
"It's like you're getting your music slow-cooked. It sure does taste a lot better than buying it at one of those fast food chains," he said.
Gabe Beam hears about Boogie's problems and sees an opportunity. He's the assistant chief of operations for Allied Record Exchange and manager of the three-store independent operation's Reynolds Road location.
He plans to move Allied's Secor Road store into Boogie's spot early this summer and sell CDs, DVDs, tapes, and other media. He's not worried about file sharing or any of the other concerns because he's confident those challenges can be met.
"The kind of stuff that is heavily downloaded is really popular, but it's got a fuse on it," Beam said. "It's really popular for two weeks, but it's kind of like the flavor of the week."
Allied focuses on niche markets of independent artists and tries to offer other media like vinyl LPs, stereo equipment, DVDs, and posters to give customers variety, he said. He plans to offer rack space to releases by local musicians and to sell concert tickets out of the store just as Boogie did.
Levin, who calls himself a "cranky old dude," said there's still hope for independent record stores as long as there's a market of folks who want something more than the mainstream offerings of the big box stores.
And he suggested that digital music and downloading could turn out to be a fad because listeners could yearn for a "quantifiable feeling of ownership" of their collection, especially if the technology goes bad.
"What happens to your collection when your hard drive crashes?" he asked.
Christman of Billboard believes the key for indies is to carve out their niche and establish a broad customer base. He said two-thirds of all CD and tape sales are current releases that can be sold cheaply by big retailers, so indies have to fight for that one-third that is back catalog of established and more obscure artists.
O'Connor smiled when he was asked what he plans to do next, and said he wants to continue in some kind of retail business.
"I might do another store with the focus on pop culture. I have a few options," he said.
The closing of Boogie is "very bittersweet" for Marinik, who said she's not sure what she'll do, but she knows it won't be the same.
"My girlfriend said, 'For 30 years you had the best job in Toledo. You were working at something you were passionate about - music. You could hang out. You could bring your dog to work. And you could wear whatever you wanted.' "
For long-time customers like Stewart it's the end of an era. "One thing you can never replace is that history they had there. I've been going there since my late teens, and when you walked in there you just thought oh, man, you were at a hip place."
First Published February 29, 2004, 2:30 p.m.
