The Elephant In The Music Room
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| from http://neurotica-.tumblr.com/post/15916100691 |
In 1991, I was working at Cargo Records, a nascent Chicago music distributor that we were running out of the un-airconditioned garage of an empty gas station at Clybourn and Greenview. (Like everything else, it's now condos.) Every day was an exciting, but exhausting, new scramble to stay on top of what was out there. We read every line of every zine we could get ahold of. We sent and received tons of US Mail inquiries every day. We sent and received reams of faxes. And we burned the hell of out our phone lines trying desperately to track down that kid that put out that one vegan hard core single that we needed 300 copies of to ship to Southern California (Hi Lou's! Hi Vinyl Solution!), Manhattan (Later Bleeker Bob's!), and London (Hi Rough Trade!). We could barely keep up with the flow of new music coming out, and sometimes we just couldn't.
I still remember the day that our order from the industrious indie pop punks (pop punk was not what it became) at Simple Machines turned up, and with it, an extra box of stuff we didn't order. In that box was
