“The most mystical place for me as a little kid was Waterloo Records right next to Amy’s Ice Cream in Austin, Texas.”
“I remember sitting outside waiting for my mom to get out of her hair appointment next door, eating strawberry ice cream in my plaid school uniform and looking like a complete loser watching all these edgy older kids come out of Waterloo. They would be talking about their records, smoking cigarettes, and making out against their cool cars. I’d think, “Damn that’s cool, I wanna be cool too.” So, I begged for a light blue record player that was the same color as my walls, my bedding, and my carpet (I really liked the color blue).
My parents already had a pretty hefty record collection so they were game…Cat Stevens and Van Morrison being the most played. I stole a bunch of their records in the beginning. I just wanted the records that had the coolest album art like Remain In Light by the Talking Heads, Ocean Rain by Echo and the Bunnymen, Disraeli Gears by Cream and stuff like that.
However, what I was really listening to at the time was stuff like Katy Perry on my brother’s iPod while I danced around my blue room singing “Teenage Dream” and pretending I had a boyfriend. But I still loved my blue record player, with my parents’ records lying next to it the corner of my room. I still have that little blue turntable even though it broke when my family moved to Dallas. A keepsake, I guess. It has “I heart Jim Morrison” written on the inside of it… I misspelled Morrison.