#691: Put another nickel in....

Boise's Nickelodeon Records was a hole-in-the-wall record store located on main-drag Fairview Ave. at Garden Street, just a couple miles west of downtown. At its height around 1976-77, Nickelodeon was pretty well-stocked with mainstream rock&roll for a tiny store, had a "head shop" doing a bang-up business next door (with an arched entryway connecting the two stores), & an upstairs loft with a pretty good selection of imports and used albums.
By the time my employers The Musicworks had taken the store over in their drive to monopolize Boise's record-buying dollars, the head shop was gone, the archway had been sealed off, and the loft upstairs was closed off and used for storage. This took a lot of atmosphere out of the place.
I worked there part-time for awhile around 1980-81, and a lot of it was pretty dull. People seemed to have forgotten the store was ever open.... Working there helped inspire a piece of fiction in which I (*AHEM*) sort of predicted the invention of Walkmans & i-Pods, though through a more direct route to the brain. I might even post the story here, someday....
I was introduced to the store by my old buddy Jeff Mann while we were still in high school, searching for more great new sounds. I was grabbed by the place immediately: When you walked in, mounted on the wall to your immediate left was a wildly warped old vinyl album, posted there to warn lazy record-buyers about the dangers of heat on vinyl. The album they warped on purpose was an old favorite of mine, Rare Earth's ONE WORLD -- still worth hearing for tracks like "If I Die" and "I Just Want to Celebrate," "Under God's Light," "Someone to Love," "Any Man Can be a Fool"....
Though I looked around a lot, I don't actually remember BUYING much at the Nickelodeon -- though the folks there did set me up with Be-Bop Deluxe's SUNBURST FINISH and Al Stewart's great MODERN TIMES and Miles Davis's IN A SILENT WAY....
I remember only 2 other guys running the place after MW took over -- one older, overweight guy who could've almost been a double for Gentle Giant's singer Derek Shulman, & a tall dark-haired skinny guy of about my age & the same level of starry-eyed-ness about finally having his Dream Job. It was these 2 guys I filled in for a couple days a week.
At one point I lived in a "classic" 8-by-40-foot mobile home directly west of the Nickelodeon and could have walked to the store in 90 seconds. But I don't think I worked there during that period -- it wasn't until after I'd moved that I got to fill-in at the shop. (Like the Nickelodeon, the trailer is long gone....)
Don't remember much of what we played in the store back then -- it all seems like a boredom-filled haze, looking back. Played lots of Kansas's AUDIO VISIONS and perhaps Styx's PARADISE THEATER. Nothing too stunning.... Oh, except for the Go-Go's BEAUTY AND THE BEAT, that was pretty great....
Mainly I just remember waiting for someone to walk into the store. The place sure was livelier when the head shop was next door....
Management noticed this too, and closed the Nickelodeon as a money-loser midway through 1981. The 2 other guys who worked at the store (and whose names I've forgotten over the years) went on unemployment, & I was transferred to the Fairview & Five-Mile MW store, by which time my starry-eyed-ness was pretty much gone, paychecks started bouncing more & more often, & I gave my co-workers a pretty rough time. The honeymoon was about over between me & the Musicworks.
I was too stupid to realize it could just as easily have been ME looking for a new job as well....