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.
Talk to Covart or his right-hand man Steve Pearson—a walking encyclopedia of artist names, album titles, tracking numbers, and sales figures—or employees and clientele, and two main factors emerge in the explanation for the store’s success. Namely, the Twin Cities is not your average major metropolitan market, despite what conglomerate industry would like you to believe. It’s different here. Denver, Kansas City, Phoenix, Miami, Dallas, and other cities have never come close to supporting the number of independent record stores we do here, and even legendary taste-making outlets such as San Francisco’s Amoeba and Seattle’s Easy Street or Sonic Boom fall short of the whole Fetus package of album selection, employee music savvy, and homey vibe.

Secondly, The Fetus is and always has been a destination, a place with a reputation for being run—and run well—by music lovers for music lovers. It is a place where the incense burns, the brightly lacquered hardwood floors shine, and the PA plays invariably hip music. It’s a place that bears no resemblance to prefab, big box megaplexes where microwaves and Jessica Simpson T-shirts are hawked one aisle over from the latest Rascal Flatts CD.

In other words, The Fetus clientele patronize the place both for what it is and what it is not.

Pearson, The Fetus’s buyer, is only minimally concerned about the threat from outside competition. The store continues to carry an inventory of roughly 50,000 titles, down, Pearson says, from “maybe 60,000 at one time.” The difference is largely a factor of selling fewer “hits.” But, he says, “I’ve always said that once a record went ‘mall,’ it was over for us. That’s not our game.”

Ask Pearson what the single best-selling record has been in the store’s thirty-eight-year history, and he pauses. “Our computer system doesn’t go back that far,” he says, “but since we expanded so much [three times since moving to the Franklin and 4th location], I’m thinking it may be that Ry Cooder record, Buena Vista Social Club. That one just went on and on, for years.”

Think of it. Not Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Carrie Underwood, or Kelly Clarkson, but Buena Vista Social Club, a reunion/anthology recording of great and aged Cuban musicians, most of whom were unknown to even upper-middle-level music junkies when it was released in 1997. Moreover, it was a record that got almost no airplay on local commercial radio. Nevertheless, people caught word of the recording and sought it out at The Fetus, for years thereafter.

City Pages columnist and songwriter Jim Walsh is one of the most articulate and passionate music lovers in the Twin Cities. He echoes what many others say about the sensory qualities of The Fetus—the smell, the endearing clutter, the creaky floors, and the pleasure of happily losing an hour and a half flicking through CDs and talking music with either the staff or the customer standing next to you.
“I’m one of those people who loves to browse,” he says. “The Internet is OK. But I want to touch the stuff. I think a lot of people do. I want to be able to talk music if I want to with someone else who loves it as much as I do. The beauty of The Fetus is that the atmosphere is so cozy and so totally about music and nothing else. And I love the ‘in-stores’ [live concerts by local and touring artists]. The list of people who I’ve seen play there is incredible.

“I mean, Elvis Costello. Larry Graham. Larry Graham, man! Sly [Stone’s] base player and the man who invented funk! Mason Jennings, Billy Bragg. And Tim O’Reagan. In fact, the set I saw Tim O’Reagan play in front of maybe forty people at The Fetus one night last spring may have been the best thing I’ve seen all year.

“It’s moments like that. When you’re listening to Tim O’Reagan or Elvis Costello doing a set, and it’s completely quiet, and you’re standing shoulder to shoulder with people you may have never seen before, and they’re all into it as deeply as you are. Moments like when you look around and you catch someone else’s eye and you understand immediately they’re loving this as much as you. It’s a magical kind of connection. You never get anything remotely like that at Best Buy, and believe me, Best Buy would kill to get that kind of cooperation from artists.”

Watch the traffic at The Fetus on any given day and you notice the crosscurrents of inner-city hip-hop fans in sagging pants and gleaming new sneakers; upscale ’burbanites stepping out of BMWs; sixties relics sporting their same wispy, sixties-era beards, now accented with shameless comb-overs; vaguely Gothic new mothers with kids in strollers; and the inevitable rail-thin, Ramen noodles–and–beer rockers and rocker wannabes. In other words, nearly every type of music lover shops at The Fetus with the exception of, as Covart and Pearson confirm, the modern country music listener.

Devoted music fans—which is to say core Fetus customers—have, almost by definition, a respect and fascination with roots. Consider how The Rolling Stones led so many curious boomers back to Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, and the like. The Fetus, with its deep CD inventory and obsessively discerning staff, is an invaluable link to the roots of numerous genres, including bluegrass, R & B, and funk. Apparently, though, this link is not vital to what veteran music writer and former Fetus employee Tom Surowicz calls the “radio country” consumer.

There’s an amusing culture-war component to the absence of radio country fans from The Fetus sales floor, and it’s another example of The Fetus’s customers appreciating the place for what it is not. If there is a stereotypical Wal-Mart–shopping music consumer, the Fetus-style music cognoscenti seem to believe it’s someone whose tastes are dictated by the bland, rigidly controlled playlists of modern country radio stations. These music listeners, the thinking goes, don’t appear to have much curiosity or desire to explore their musical interests any further than national advertising directs them, not even to country music’s roots, such as Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, and others, who sell reasonably well at The Fetus.

Truth be told, there isn’t much of a classical music clientele going through The Fetus either, but radio country is a format disdained by the musically astute as crass, homogenized, red state swill long before radio giant Clear Channel and other big country stations threw the Dixie Chicks, one of the genre’s most popular acts, under the bus after they popped off against President Bush days before the invasion of Iraq.

Put simply: Radio country equals soulless big box retail. Independent-minded and intellectually curious equals The Fetus.

From 6:00 to 9:00 a.m. on Wednesdays, attorney Donald “Tad” Selzer, AKA Brother Tad, cohosts The Rockhouse, a KFAI–FM program specializing in R & B, soul, and blues. He too has made regular pilgrimages to The Fetus to expand his personal music collection, which, he says, numbers 4,000 LPs. “I was in there so often, buying so much stuff, and so familiar with the clerks, I’ll tell you how bad it got,” he says. “One day, I’m laying all this stuff out on the counter, and the guy at the register is sorting through it and he picks one up and says, ‘Tad, I think you’ve already got this one.’ I had bought it weeks before, and he remembered. It’s that kind of place.

“Its core appeal is to record-buying fanatics, to people who want to deepen their musical experience. That’s interesting about Buena Vista Social Club and the way that record created a demand for Cuban music. I know how that works. For me, it was [Paul Simon’s] Graceland. I heard that record and immediately wanted more African music, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and the rest. I went to The Fetus. They had it.”

Covart has been with The Fetus for all thirty-nine years, Pearson for twenty-nine. Jon Rodine spent nineteen years there before leaving last summer for a new job with Red House Records in St. Paul. (Red House handles Prudence Johnson, Peter Ostroushko, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Greg Brown, and five dozen or so other artists.) “It’s a pretty good atmosphere at The Fetus,” says Rodine. “You want to work there because you love music, and working there means you get to listen to music all day, and talk about music all day, if you want. The pay isn’t great, but it was good enough, and Keith has always been real good about paying health benefits, which is a big deal now.

“I worked there nineteen years, and I mean it when I say I can’t think of anyone I worked with who I didn’t like. People are doing something they really like, and that translates into a big part of the store’s appeal.”

Rodine reels off stories of local musicians who are counted among The Fetus’s regular customers—Slug (Sean Daley) from Atmosphere, Gary Louris of The Jayhawks, Sheila E., who once arrived in a pink convertible, and Prince, who usually sent his brother in with a list of records to buy, but once caught Rodine at closing time and was allowed in for some private browsing. Bonnie Raitt, of course, has dropped in, and Rodine remembers Billy Bob Thornton being delighted with the place while he was in Minnesota shooting A Simple Plan. Thornton wanted Rodine’s help hunting down some old War CDs.

“I remember Billy Bob even mentioning The Fetus in an interview he did with some national magazine,” says Rodine. “I think he said it was the best record store in the country.”

Given the level of expertise—mixed with just the right touch of snobbery, à la Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity—that customers expect from The Fetus staff, you’d think they’d have a way to screen prospective employees. Reputation is something an institution must guard zealously, and for The Fetus, that means never putting some pimply dweeb behind the counter who thinks John Coltrane was an old Delta blues man or that Gram Parsons was British.

“There was a quiz a few years ago,” says Rodine. “I forget which manager made it up. I don’t know if they still do it.”

“We’ve still got a kind of test,” says Pearson. “It’s twenty or thirty questions, kind of an overview of different genres of music. I don’t know how much bearing it has on getting hired, but it’s still around.”

What if you completely bomb—can you still get hired?

“Well, if someone completely bombs, they might want to try a different line of work,” says Pearson. “The thing is, when you’re at the counter, you’re being bombarded with questions all day long. People sit at home and read up on all this stuff, then come in here and expect us to be kind of a college professor, with all the answers. It’s part of the service we’re providing. But it gets intense.”

Not that there isn’t a low-level battle of taste and sensibility in the air at The Fetus from time to time. Take for example the in-store PA system, also known as “the box.” Ever canny, Pearson has been known to apply both ego and sales strategies to what gets played. If he gets tipped off in time, he makes sure a visiting musician’s tunes are “on the box” when the guy arrives. Or, as Surowicz remembers, Pearson simply “lays on some Tony Mathews’s Alligator recording, because he knows it’ll sell fifty or sixty copies over a weekend.” (Little Johnny Taylor’s Greatest Hits, an infectious soul/blues delight, is an example of a Fetus “on the box” standard that never fails to gin up sales when it plays.)

For the most part, though, what gets played in the store is pretty democratic, with each employee getting his or her turn. There is the story of the misbegotten, short-lived employee with too much fondness—that is, any at all—for REO Speedwagon. Vanilla Ice would have been worse, but playing REO Speedwagon on The Fetus box is like bringing Twinkies to a dinner catered by Paul Bocuse. Whenever the clueless sap went to the restroom, Speedwagon got the eject button.

The musical literacy of the staff means even the boss has to take a shot. “Keith is a Dylan guy through and through,” says Surowicz. “Whenever it was his turn to put something on the box, you knew it would be Blonde on Blonde. Keith has his strengths, but it’s not as a music hipster. His main strength is being able to go to the bank and get a thirty-year mortgage when he’s fifty-five and laugh about it.”

Covart rolls with the shots. He’s content to be old school, disdaining iPods and the sound quality of all compressed, downloaded music. He goes strictly vinyl when he plays music at his lake place.

Maurice Jacox sang for fifteen years with Willie and the Bees, in addition to half a dozen other groups, including his current act, Soul Tight Committee. Respected music critics invariably include him among the best voices in the Twin Cities. He goes about as far back as The Fetus in Minnesota music history.

“It was 1971, if I remember,” he says. “Winter. Probably minus two. Damned cold. And we were just laying around a place we had over on Powderhorn Park when we heard on the radio that this record joint was giving a free album and a pipe to anyone who came in naked.

“Well, at the time, Rebecca Rand [once notorious as Minnesota’s foremost madam and sexual libertine] and I were an item, and this was the sort of thing Rebecca could get interested in real easy. So we said, ‘What the hell? Let’s do it.’ So the two of us and another guy, Marko Manthey, drove over to this place on the West Bank.

“Now everybody else who was doing this was just kind of coming in and flashing open their coat real quick and saying, ‘Gimme my album and pipe.’ There must have been maybe ten people while we were there. But we looked at each other and said, ‘How punk ass is that? Just flashing.’ So, we all peeled off our coats, draped them over our arms, and, you know, just calmly strolled around for twenty minutes, picking out our albums and pipes. It was a kick.”

Local photographer Greg Helgeson remembers being in The Fetus that day. “I just wandered in to browse,” he says. “Then I turn around and here’s this guy and girl standing there buck-naked. I had no idea what was going on.”

As Covart remembers, The Fetus had just been muscled out of its lease by West Bank developer Keith Heller and came up with the Nude Record Sale as a kind of in-your-face, stick-it-to-the-man prank, never really thinking anyone would actually strip for an LP and a pipe. (The Fetus and other “head shops” were hassled by the cops for years for trafficking in drug paraphernalia, to the point where a strict protocol was developed in which clerks were instructed to never refer to a “hash” pipe or “coke” spoon or hand one to someone who did.)

Covart has begun thinking about some kind of anniversary celebration for The Fetus’s fortieth anniversary in June of 2008. “Yeah, if I still remember anything by then,” he says, “I might put out a call to every [old employee] within range and have ’em come in, have a party, and let ’em work the counter for an hour. Maybe that’s a bad idea. Maybe it’d be too much confusion.”

Until then he’s not going to lose a lot of sleep worrying about Wal-Mart undercutting him on Darryl Worley CDs or thousands of Minnesota kids listening to nothing but badly reproduced songs from iTunes.

“Maybe people like the Internet because they can shop in their pajamas,” he says. “But we think people will always want to get out and interact with other people who like music. And if they want to come to our store in their pajamas, we don’t have a problem with that. Hell, we told ’em to come naked and they showed up.” 

Brian Lambert is a longtime Twin Cities journalist and former TV/radio critic for the Pioneer Press.