House of Music

Just a guess, but the list of successful Twin Cities retailers who proudly remember encouraging their customers to show up naked at a promotional event at their store is probably pretty small. To pull it off—to suggest it—requires a unique bond between you and your clientele.

The details surrounding the birth of The Electric Fetus, Minnesota’s iconic music emporium, have become murky and misplaced with the passing of time, much like so many of its once hard-partying baby boomer customers. The path from “Great idea, man,” hatched by four music junkies, to a storefront on the West Bank in 1968 and then, in 1972, to the corner of Franklin and 4th Avenues, where today’s sprawling showcase for every T-shirt, tobacco product, and blues, rock, and hip-hop CD under the stars stands, tends to short circuit and spark out occasionally in the retelling.

“You’re going to have to talk louder. My hearing isn’t what it used to be,” says Keith Covart, sitting in his modest corner office adjacent to The Fetus’s sales floor, a couple of vintage Bob Dylan posters on the wall framing him behind his desk. Of the quartet of pals who cooked up the idea of the record store—Dan Foley, Roger Emslie, Ron Korsh, and Covart—Covart is the one who stuck it out and gets to be called boss today.

“Yeah, Ron, I think, was only in it for three or four months,” says Covart (who refused to be photographed for this story). “Or maybe it was five. Then he went to architecture school.” The last time Covart, now sixty-one, checked, Foley, who managed The Wedge Co-op after leaving The Fetus, moved to South America, and Emslie, who was living with Covart when they met Foley, “went off to Colorado, built a cabin, and kind of took the natural route.”

By the standards of modern American business, The Fetus should have been a foggy memory two decades ago. Think of it: An independent record store prospering in the age of the Internet, iTunes, and Twin Cities–based Target and Best Buy, and at a time when the million-pound gorilla that is Wal-Mart is so powerful it can dictate lyric content to a bunch of ex–Guns N’ Roses rock stars. The Fetus does have two out-state locations, one in St. Cloud and another anchoring a prime piece of real estate at the corner of Lake and Superior Streets in downtown Duluth. But three stores and eighty total employees still amount to a gnat that conventional wisdom says should have been flattened years ago.