A Brief Comment by Doug Draper
I went into about the only place left resembling a real record store in Niagara, Ontario earlier this August to buy the new CD by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, only to be told by the good staff there that the store was no longer being shipped new releases.
Record Theatre in Buffalo, New York, one of the last great independent stores left between Toronto and New York City. Support it while you can!
All around the walls of the store were signs saying that a good chunk of the inventory still there was now 40 per cent off and that the lease on the store’s floor space at the Pen Centre mall in St. Catharines was expiring at the end of the month.
The store is (or it was, depending on when you get around to possibly reading this) Sunrise Records – part of a chain of record store with other locations that apparently will continue to survive, at least past this August, in Burlington and Toronto areas. In the meantime, Sunrise Records only remaining Niagara store, just like many other record and book stores across North America, is apparently one more victim of younger people, in particular, whose ear bugs and iPod have closed them off from the possibility of any real, organic contact with communities around them and are buying music and books online. And that is damn sad.
The ‘magical mystery tour’ that begins with entering a record or book store where there are stacks of records and books, and where there are knowledgeable staff and other record and book enthusiasts who might help you discover titles you may never have been exposed is going the way of the last few struggling tigers and elephants in the wild. It is being lost to zombies shutting out the world around them with twittering fingers and those fucking bugs, feeding them corporate marketing crap, in their ears.
With the loss of Niagara’s Sunrise Record store outlet and the great staff I kind of doubt that chain appreciated in that store, there is only one truly great music outlet in our Greater Niagara Region, and that one is the still independently owned Record Theatre in Buffalo, New York.
If you love music and you still enjoy the fun of walking into a real record store with staff that care as much about the music as you do, you got to support Record Theatre – if no other reason to keep one of the last great record stores between Toronto and New York City alive.
Let’s not let the last of the music and book stores in our communities die.
P.S. – I’m not getting a penny from Record Theatre for promoting it – believe it or not in this rancid age of advertorial or sponsored content disguised as news in the mainstream media. This post is just about supporting what is left of good record and book stores and this one –Record Theatre – opened in the 1970s on Main Street and Lafayette in Buffalo. You can find out more about it and its satellite store in nearby Amherst by clicking on http://www.recordtheatre.com/
Support Record Theatre. We have lost too many great record stores like Sam The Record Man. But while we still have a chance, let’s keep those few that are left alive!
(Niagara At Large invites you to share your views on this post. A reminder that we only post comments by individuals who share their first and last name with them.)
Niagara At Large 
I have severe hearing problems. For that reason I cannot enjoy listening to music any longer. The hearing problems are job related and not due to i-pods.
But I agree with your article. I use our public library to borrow books.
Newspapers are also having problems. Your site can also be only read online.
I am also using the Internet to promote tourism. I also do not get a penny for doing so.
I support your involvement in protecting our environment. By I disagree with your blind support of one party only – the NDP.
How many jobs were created by unions and how many investors left Canada because of them? The PC should use the chance to review their own program after the foreseeable defeat of Tim Hudak. Each party has good and bad people. We need Green Energy and have to protect our environment. Even when it means to read certain books and papers only online.
A Response from Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper
Dear Mr. Ebert – Thank you for visiting Niagara At Large and sharing your views.
However, I cannot let your veiled insult that I am so unopen to what is happening around us on the political front that am in “blind support of one party only – the NDP.”
I would challenge you, sir, to show evidence from my writings that I am a blind NDP supporter, just as I would challenge you or anyone else to show that the late NDP MPP for Welland, Peter Kormos was a blind party supporter. This was a politician who cared enough about te principles he stood for that it caused him to be thrown out of cabinet during the Ontario NDP’s short term as a government in the province in the early 1990s.
Cwertainly, I did not, and could not, editorial endorse the campaign of current Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath in this past spring’s provncial election due to the lame campaign – one that lacked any clear definition of her vision for Ontario’s future – that she ran.
As far as unions are concerned, I have had a written record on this site and in columns I have written for Niagara This Week and other publications of questioning demands by some unions – particularly police and teacher unions – of demanding another two-to-three per cent per year raise at times of great recession, when others are being downwaged if not losing their jobs.
On the other hand Mr. Ebert, where have three decades of federal Conservative and Liberal governments been around signing global trade agreements that has made it so easy for companies to close operations in Canada and the United States and set up shop in slave labour facilities in second and third world countries? Do have have to reprise the discussion on the cost, in thousands of human lives, of those cheap t-shirts and other garments imported from sweatshops in places like Bangladesh? Do we?
You may forget that the reason we have anything resembling a weekend off, maternity leave for families, laws against child labour, etc., etc. etc., in Canada and the United States is because labour leaders in the 1920s and 30s and beyond sometimes got clobbered over the head with clubs from company bosses to win those rights.
Or would you rather move toward the worker circumnstances they have in Bangladesh or China?
Yours sincerely, Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper
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Thank you Doug – Bashing Unions appears to be how the corporate sector justifies their failings. Life is best where democratic UNIONS participate. Progressive people of every stripe know this.
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