This is a dedication.
There are things in life that direct us this way or that; friends, family, even the less obvious: a shooting star you witnessed when you were five years old or a certain song. However obvious or obscure, these things turn us in directions we might not have gone otherwise. Not all of them are good, nor bad, but one thing is for certain: we are forever, irrevocably made different because of them.
During the 1980s, my musical outlook was pretty much limited to what my older brothers and sister were listening to. At one end of the spectrum you had rock bands like Yes, The Alan Parsons Project and Asia, on the other, contemporary Christian artists Petra, Daniel Amos and Steve Taylor. And somewhere down the middle, you had your thrash metal bands like Overkill, Testament and Anthrax. The end result was surely the most interesting witches brew of influence I think I have ever known to exist.
Nothing really was sticking with me at this point, however. Sure, I had a tape deck, people would buy me albums for birthdays, I’d make copies of some things, mix tapes, whatnot, but if you threw me Signals by Rush or Stryper’s To Hell With the Devil, it probably wouldn’t have made much difference; music was simply something to fill the silent spaces.
It wasn’t until somewhere around 1990-91 that I finally began to actually listen to what was coming out of my speakers and want to branch out a little more. Of course, being a highly impressionable pre-teen, I wasn’t going to be too daring. I was still listening to whatever Dw. and Dan were listening to, but at least I actually wanted to go out and buy the stuff myself. It was somewhere around this time that I first discovered Compact Disc and Tape Center.
Compact Disc and Tape Center was, is a small, family owned music shop in Middletown, NJ, about an eight-minute ride from where I type this. It has always served the music loving community at large with the latest from your major label artists like everyone else, but where it’s really shined was in its extensive collection of some of the most obscure shit you can possibly find. It was here where one of my very first compact discs, Dream Theater’s 1992 release, Images and Words, would be purchased.
By 1994-95, albums such as Tiamat’s mind-blowing Wildhoney and Paradise Lost’s Draconia
n Times were changing opinions on just what could and could not be done in heavy music, and it was in places that catered to the smaller circles of music lovers, places like Compact Disc and Tape Center, that this music was being brought to the people when the big boys were turning up their collective noses.
The reason why I am talking about Compact Disc and Tape Center now is because they will soon be no longer. A store which was able to compete with the Sam Goody’s and Wiz’s of the world for almost 20 years by carving out a little niche for themselves in the more obscure markets just cannot compete with even bigger powerhouses like Target, Best Buy and probably the most dangerous offender of all, the internet.
Don’t get me wrong, this is by no means an accusation against everyone who decided to “click to purchase” instead of taking the drive downtown, I’ve made my fair share of internet purchases, too. The industry now is simply not what it was even ten years ago. The explosion of the Internet and concurrently, Internet commerce, has resulted in some truly competitive pricing. No storefronts for an Internet shop means no need to have your shelves fully stocked. And multi-billion dollar companies like Target and Best Buy, who both moved into town in the last five years, can surely unload more merchandise at lower prices simply because they’ve got the coin to do so.
So, this episode of The John Dunphy Experience is a dedication to the memory of the Compact Disc and Tape Center which is, in a way, a dedication to the memory of a piece of my childhood that I can’t have back. We’ve all got to accept what’s happened and move on with our lives, but it’s not always the easiest thing to do. Like the nearby pumpkin patch where, as a toddler, my vivid imagination was filled with specters and phantoms, which ultimately gave way to yet another office building, this too must ultimately be mowed down and rebuilt into something else, something perhaps newer, perhaps shinier, but most certainly not as personal.
I would like to thank Tom and Sue for the many years they have provided us with the things that we’d probably not have heard on the radio as well as the things we probably would have. I want to thank you for the empty CD cases on display so I could get a chance to look at the liner notes before I made a purchase. I want to thank you for the special orders on the even more obscure stuff, including the stuff from overseas, that you didn’t happen to have in-store. And most importantly, I want to thank you for the music. Middletown will be a little more sterile and uninteresting when you close your doors for the last time.
That’s all for now, folks, I’ll see you next time.
