Slipped Disc Records: 1982-2008
April 19 2008 at 10:22:04 PM  Slipped Disc Records of Long Island, NY finally closed its doors today, leaving behind 20 years of experience dealing in underground Punk and Heavy Metal music. I’m left feeling that vague sense of how things have changed “back home” while I’ve been away. Slipped Disc was it. The one store left in the area where you could still kill time and enjoy fingering through new releases alongside CDs nearly forgotten by time. I say nearly because finding something like a copy of Belial’s Never Again was trumped by finding tapes of Bolt Thrower’s peel sessions or Cemetary's An Evil Shade of Grey that owner Mike Schutzman didn’t even realize he still had. The store was a veritable archive of videos, magazines, patches and music. Even the T-shirts were still pretty vintage. In later years, the store added a guitar section while the “planned” remodeling to re-stock the vinyl section never really happened, but I always came in taking my own personal inventory. Picking over every last disc in the shop and coming away with towers of music every month. Of course, the business was hanging by a thread for years. Every now and then customers would see liquidation flyers and call into the shop frantic. Mike would shyly look down and explain that it was a printing error or something else that never really made sense. On that, I could never get a straight answer. And if it was on purpose, you couldn’t really blame him or Randy, the glam rock store clerk, for trying to wake people up, let them know the store was still around. I rarely saw more than a handful of people in there at one time. But when you walked into the shop it was like another world. I came out of there on weekends or from cutting class holding my copies of Onward to Golgotha, Blessed are the Sick, Don’t Break The Oath, Beneath The Remains and Minor Threat’s discography, feeling drunk, ridiculously evil and unstoppable. It seemed like it took forever to walk there in High School and later became more convenient than paying shipping costs and waiting for things to arrive by mail. Between 2004-2007 I visited the store even more frequently than I had as a kid. First of all, because I had a full-time job; second, because it was still just as fun. And third, because Mike was always a stand-up guy. Over the last three years I never once paid the shelf price on more than one CD. I would see the same old calculator Mike used to mark up the sale and no matter what the final tally was, it always came down a bit it more. He said “thank you” as he handed you your bag and he meant it perhaps even more than customers understood. All I can say now is thank you, Mike. The old neighborhood really won’t be the same without you. You can also read a pretty scathing interview with Mike for Hoftra's Pulse magazine from 2007, where he vents his frustrations over the store's impending close, here. One poignant excerpt: We react with scorn and near resentment as we dispose of anything that is aged, from black and white movies to architecture, Schutzman intimates. "It's imbedded in our culture. We have no historical memory," referring to, in his view, one of the major differences between our culture and the vast majority of those outside of the United States. We don't embrace our past as other cultures do; we merely discard it in light of the new and improved. "I've been in little music stores in London, Toronto, Paris, even Tokyo and they are packed on a Saturday the same way this store used to be 20 years ago," says Schutzman. Europeans and Japanese love product, he muses, but there is also a more open cultural mentality that pervades on all areas, even the music industry. An openness which both relishes the music and bands of the past as it simultaneously fosters a new wave of prominent independent musical talent. Comments (0)
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