Customers rifle through records and cassettes of their favorite artists in Let’s Boogie Record & Tapes as the morning sun streams through the store windows. Behind the counter, co-owner Jason Keller keeps track of the day’s sales while greeting new patrons. His brother-in-law and co-owner, Phil Lesnik, organizes albums around the shop.
The small record store in the Bridgeport neighborhood buzzed with activity Saturday, April 20, as customers and employees celebrated Record Store Day.
Started in 2008, Record Store Day is a globally observed celebration of independent music stores that takes place each year. The goal of the holiday is to celebrate these small businesses’ role within the communities they serve while also emphasizing the importance of physical media. In an age when music is available at the tap of a finger, many still opt to support their local record shop.
Marcia Levin drove in from the Beverly neighborhood to support the business for Record Store Day.
“The brick and mortar (store) is definitely going away, and it’s sad,” Levin said. “But I do think that niche places like this will continue to exist because they’ve been going this long. You know, you can go online, and I suppose google the name of an album, and someone somewhere will sell it to you at a better price, but it’s not the same.”
Keller said there’s a common reason people frequent local record stores when they could find the same products online.
“It’s the nostalgia, you know?” Keller said. “The posters on the walls have been here since 1977, and we have a very great collection of ‘old school’ plus ‘mid-school,’ plus ‘new school.’ It’s just been a fun experience to be part of, and I’m super excited that people are taking an interest in it.”
Record stores are seeing a rising trend of consumers from new generations who see the obsolete medium as a physical way to show support for their favorite artists. With demand growing, stores such as Let’s Boogie are seeing an influx of younger people.
“Local record stores like this are really important,” said Julia Soulsby, a senior music major at DePaul. “They give me a place to find some new stuff to listen to. Usually, I’ll go with my friends and we all find a new album or artist to get into. Without them, we’d be stuck with digital stuff.”
Keller’s father opened the shop in 1976 and ran it six days a week until he closed due to illness in 2019. The store, located at 3321 S. Halsted St. remained closed through the pandemic until 2021, when Keller and Lesnik took over the business. The pair, the sole owners and operators of the store, recently celebrated the three-year anniversary of the store’s reopening in January.
“I spent a lot of my Saturdays here with my dad through grade school, junior high and high school,” Keller said. “Then, in college, I would come back for Christmas and spend time with him while selling records.”
Keller said his father Neal always wanted to get into the record business. He worked for the Illinois government, but Keller said his dad didn’t like working for “the man.”
“(My dad) started this before I was even born,” Keller said. “There’s pictures of my mom and dad setting up the shop, getting the records in, getting the crates, and starting in 1976.”
Keller said even if the pandemic closed down the shop, it proved to be beneficial for the record industry as a whole.
“It was something you could do at home,” Keller said. “It shipped to your house and you could talk to people about it on the phone and on the internet.”
The record store stocks genres ranging from jazz and blues to rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop. Keller said that people are drawn to the music they grew up listening to, and he stocks his shelves with that in mind.
For customers like Levin, it’s all about the experience of picking up something unexpected at the record store.
“I don’t know what I want until I see it, but that’s the beauty of the record store,” she said.
Keller and Lesnik open Let’s Boogie every Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. While they are unable to dedicate more time due to their other jobs, they aim to use the shop’s profits to support Keller’s parents financially.
“We’re gonna keep the record spinning as long as we possibly can,” Keller said.
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