Record Store Day Today @ Cactus

I’m a little hazy on the background of the whole Record Store Day thing — meaning that it seemed to magically appear out of nowhere a while back, and yet musical-type people I know acted like it was some long-standing holiday or something. Did I just miss those first ten years of Record Store Days, or something? Okay, apparently not; per the email I got from the good folks at my own personal indie-music-store hub, Cactus Music, no, the Day’s only been going on since 2007. phew. I hate to feel more uninformed than usual, y’know?

But hey, that matters very little in the long run, especially because anything that focuses on the dying breed that is the independent, non-megachain record store is very, very cool. They’re well deserving of respect & love. So today (Sat., April 18th), get on over to Cactus to show some of that respect/love, starting around 12PM — the store’s got a bunch of cool stuff going on, including cool-ass rockers The McKenzies at 12:30PM, The Octanes at 2:30PM, & Centro-Matic frontman-gone-solo Will Johnson at 7PM. Johnson will also be showing his baseball-centric paintings at the Record Ranch Gallery next door.

Yes, Cobra Starship was supposed to be there at 4PM, not to play but to sign autographs & such, but they reportedly punked out. Thanks, assheads. Not like it’s a big loss, though — no offense to the CS fans out there, but I sure as hell wasn’t planning on standing in line for God-knows-how-long just to get a glimpse of a bunch of people who made their bones on a novelty song for a movie that sounded like it blew in a big way. (And no, I never saw it, nor do I plan to. My Netflix queue’s got more dignity than that.) Fuck ’em.

Anyway, sarcastic bitching aside, there’ll be plenty more good things to occupy your time, including a ton of free shit. Some of it you have to register for & some are buy-something-get-something-else deals, but when I went by last year I got a bunch of stuff dumped in the bag without doing anything else. (And, um, I have yet to listen to most of it. Damn. [face reddening]) Go here and here to download a couple of PDFs listing some of what’s available.

Keep in mind, btw, that it’s all first-come, first-served — you wait ’til 6PM to slide on over there to Shepherd Plaza, & there may not be much left…