Celebrating 40 Years of Schoolkids Records: An Interview with Owner Stephen Judge

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Watergate. That’s not really anything to celebrate, it’s not an accomplishment, and what’s that got to do with music? Nothing. It simply marks the inevitable passage of time. But, 2014 also marks the 40th anniversary of Raleigh, N.C.’s Schoolkids Records, which is an accomplishment and is definitely something worth celebrating.

iTunes and streaming have cut into record sales and, due to declining sales of physical product, both local and national record stores are closing their doors at an alarming rate. But luckily everyone isn’t giving up and giving in. On July 13, Schoolkids Records owner Stephen Judge hosted a free concert at the Lincoln Theatre in Raleigh to celebrate forty continuous years of selling tunes and more to the Triangle.

Hal Bogerd: Thanks for putting on the Schoolkid Records 40th Anniversary show at the Lincoln Theatre. That must have been quite a bit of work! You must have had sponsors so you could offer a free show featuring  the Debonzo Brothers, Hank Sinatra, Six String Drag, the Baseball Project and Drivin’ N Cryin’.

Stephen Judge: Holy cow! Yes, that was a lot of work! I am somewhat used to it because every year I co-produce a day party for Blurt Magazine at SXSW with Dogfish Head Beer at the Gingerman and book over 55 bands in four days. It has become huge and it is one of the most successful day parties in Austin and I love doing it. I knew what I was getting into but this one show alone was just as much work as those four-day events. Lot of stress leading up to it and hoping it would turn out well. I could not be more proud of the way it went down. It was one of the proudest moments of my career and life, to have some of my favorite people and favorite bands participate. R.E.M. (Mike Mills performed with the Baseball Project)  is one of my all time favorite bands and a huge inspiration to me, to get to where I’m at. And Drivin’ N Cryin’ was the first  band I ever saw at the Cat’s Cradle in 1988. Steve Wynn and Scott McCaughey are two of the best guys I’ve ever worked with (I worked with them at Redeye/Yep Roc), so it all made sense and came together perfectly! And yes, Sweetwater Beer came in as the sponsor to make it a free event, with a little help from VisitRaleigh.com and my landlord York Properties.

Could you give a brief history of Schoolkids Records? When did you first shop at a Schoolkids store? When did you take over the store?

Sure thing. The store first opened in 1974 on Hillsborough Street, across from NC State University in Raleigh, N.C. It has been in four different locations on Hillsborough Street, over 39 years, until we moved it to the south side of campus this past January, to the Mission Valley Shopping Center. It’s the first time in 40 years we have not been on Hillsborough Street, but its also the first time in 40 years we’ve had ample parking and a bar in the store! So, its a nice trade off. That part of campus is not as “lively” as it used to be, without the Brewery and the bar life we had back from the 1970s-’90s. The nightlife has moved to downtown Raleigh since it was redeveloped in the last ten years.

Where we are now is a nice medium between the two, real close to campus and real close to downtown, but in an area with ample parking and a good history of other great local establishments. The stores expanded in the ’90s with the boom of indie music and the CD, and we eventually had six stores in the region. Two stores in Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Cary, Durham, and Greenville, N.C. We also had a store in Athens, Ga., but I don’t recall if that one and the Greenville one were open at the same time.

Eventually they all closed one by one as leases ran out and it became apparent to the original owner his money was best spend to not renew leases since no one knew what, ultimately, would be the long term impact of the digital revolution and he wanted to downsize to the two main stores in Raleigh and Chapel Hill (he was also getting closer and closer to retirement which factored in). In 2008 he decided to close the Chapel Hill store because it was having a harder time keeping up.  We were lucky that Raleigh’s economy did not face the same issues that many cities had  and we also had a nice spot at that point next door to Sadlack’s, a legendary bar here in town as well as the head-shop Buddah’s Belly, so the move to that spot six or so years ago (just before the Chapel Hill store closed) proved to be a good move to keep the store going for a few more years until I was able to come in and take it to the next era.

The whole idea of owning Schoolkids came up when the Chapel Hill store closed.  I had always dreamed of such a thing, as Schoolkids was the store I shopped at since I was 16. I grew up in Rocky Mount, NC and would buy records at The Record Bar there for years but as I got older, and my taste started to develop and diversify, it was becoming more and more difficult to find records there that I wanted. I was heavily influenced by college radio of the 1980s and a lot of those bands were not at The Record Bar which eventually sold out to Traks chain and became more of a chain/mall store and had even less than it had before. I had heard about Schoolkids from friend’s older brothers and older friends who were in college at NC State or Carolina and knew I had to check it out. So once I was old enough to drive myself I would make weekend trips to Raleigh and hit all of the stores in the area and easily blow $100+ on posters, T-shirts, LPs and CDs. As The Record Bar changed and sold out Schoolkids then became my only resource (unless it was the new U2 or REM record) I had to drive to Raleigh to find bands like Soul Asylum, Sonic Youth, Husker Du, Replacements, Split Enz, etc. I eventually was hired at Schoolkids in December of 1990 and worked here on and off for 12 years until I left in 2002 to  work for Redeye Distribution and Yep Roc Records eventually becoming the General Manager of Redeye.

In 2008, while at Redeye, I was starting to see a small growth in vinyl but also in ‘specialty stores’ that we were selling to, that focused mostly on indie, vinyl and maybe things like clothes or just the social aspect of music and those who love it and continued to buy it in physical format.  When I heard Mike Phillips (owner of Schoolkids) was going to close the Chapel Hill store I was really upset because I felt like if he could just hang on, make some minor changes and maybe put a little more TLC into the store it would be able to survive and adapt. So we started talks for me to buy the store.

I knew what direction I wanted to take things but the investment was risky. I had saved up enough money to make the initial transaction happen and Mike and I agreed to terms, but I was nervous about cash flow. So, when I couldn’t raise another batch of money to bail me out if I got behind, I got cold feet and decided it was not the right time and backed out.

The Chapel Hill store closed and Mike and I had sort of this unspoken agreement then that we would talk before the Raleigh store closed. Then, about four years ago, he told me he was going to close the Raleigh store at year-end. He was burned out, tired of it and wanted to move on with his life, and was into other non-music things. I decided to buy the Raleigh store, move back to Raleigh, and get this idea going. I knew when I bought the store that it was going to have to move in about two years, so I waited until after the move to bring in the bar.

I wanted to rebuild the store’s inventory (which was getting pretty bad by the time I took over), rebuild the brand in the community and the industry, and be patient, and wait and find the right situation to add the bar/beer  into the fold. I took the first two years to rebuild the store and focus on the obvious direction it needed to go, which was a better quality vinyl inventory, both new and used. That has proven to be a good move as vinyl is now 70% of our overall sales. That ratio is pretty big for a store with a history as long as ours and still a solid CD history. There are a lot of “Vinyl Only” stores out there, which can just build that idea from scratch and focus on certain specific and specialized genres of music and survive (which shows how healthy the market is if they can survive). But, for Schoolkids, we can’t just make that immediate change because, with 40 years of history, we still have a lot of people who come in wanting CDs and a little more mainstream music than the new specialized store would get. So it takes a slow change to push that agenda without shooting yourself in the foot.

I know some of my colleagues in the CIMS Coalition (Coalition of Independent Records Stores-which is the first and longest running coalition in the country with some of the oldest surviving record stores in the country) don’t have that same ratio, its more like 50/50 or 60/40 (CD/vinyl).  I wanted a positive focus that the store was not on its last leg but was on the first leg of the next forty years. And that was to focus on the growth area (vinyl) and eventually slide the bar idea into that and make the ‘hang out’ aspect of the store more appealing. And here we are, finally we’re there.

Record stores and drive-ins are hard to find. I admire what you’re doing with Schoolkids to keep record stores alive. Beer and live music should help draw people to the store!

Yep, it certainly has helped. We are just in the third month of having the bar and its already contributing significantly. In the first two months it has grown to 5% of my business per month, and growing. There are times where its as much as 15% in a week’s time depending on what’s going on. And, for some events, like with the Guitartown 15th Anniversary shows,  it was the second best selling “format” of the day behind new vinyl records. That’s amazing to see, especially in this early stage. So it has already made a huge difference. And, in my mind, I haven’t really even started to focus on what I can do now with that factored in.

As the fall approaches, we expect another boom and I want to do more events like music trivia, music documentary nights, vinyl appreciation events (either DJs like 9th Wonder spinning or just bring your own record and let’s talk about it and sit around listening to records). The ideas are endless and this is just the beginning. So, in what traditionally are slower months (May, June and especially July), to have this sort of impact and the positive feedback is humbling and exciting, especially since this is something I’ve dreamed about for six years now. I love seeing the tap handles behind the counter and people have reacted to it beyond my hopes already.

When I’ve seen music at Schoolkids I noticed that the musicians usually buying some form of music (often vinyl).

That’s by far the dominant and preferred format. We have a pretty good turnover in the used and I spend a lot of money to keep the new vinyl stocked. Everyone is buying vinyl, like I said its 70% of the sales, and beyond new releases the CD is more or less a dead format. It’s not worth the investment  to stock a deep catalog for CDs, even though its returnable, it’s a better investment to spend more on vinyl (even if it doesn’t sell) than to buy an old catalog piece on CD. New CD sales have fallen to 15% of my overall business and that’s going to drop again (certainly has with the beer coming in) I can see beer outselling new CDs in the next two years. I think CDs will settle down and we’ll always have a market for them and we will always will keep them in stock, but beyond new releases its just about used CDs now. I see us stockpiling those over the next few years as things move to vinyl. I’m sure there will be a resurgence of CDs at some point as not everything will come back out on vinyl but right now its a feeding frenzy of reissues The sky is the limit now and that’s exciting to see.

I assume a bunch of local musicians have worked at Schoolkids over the years? Could you name a few and share a few stories?

Yeah, we’ve had members of The Connells, Megafaun, Superchunk and countless others work at Schoolkids over the years. Ryan Adams used to hang out here all of the time back in the 90s before he formed Whiskeytown and he always wanted to work here, but I can relate to how difficult that was (especially during that time) as no one ever quit and it was really hard to get your foot in the door. I was lucky, I got in from a wonderful guy named John Hornaday who was my boss and took a liking to me and when he took over the North Raleigh store as manager in December 1990 hired me. No one ever quit the main stores and I knew it was tough to get in there, so I started in one of the smaller, suburban stores and worked my way to the main ones over time. If you were a musician, traveling a lot devoting that sort of time to getting your feet wet was difficult. I never wanted to be a musician. I always wanted to be on the business side of things and loved working behind the counter. It just came to me naturally and I felt like I had found my place right away. I’m just as excited about it today as I was that first day I walked into the North Raleigh Schoolkids and walked to the other side of the counter. I never saw things the same way again and I refused to ever get jaded or cynical about music, the business or anything around it. Twenty-five years later I’ve managed to not only survive but keep that enthusiasm for it which I think is very important not just with me but my employees too and I try to make sure I keep people who share that enthusiasm on staff.

Did you start Blurt magazine? Could you talk a little bit about it?

I did not start Blurt. Blurt was founded by Scott Crawford, who owned Harp Magazine. When I was at Redeye I worked a lot with them (Redeye owns Yep Roc Records) and they always covered our bands and we used to have our day parties together at SXSW in Austin. I developed a friendship and business relationship with Scott and Fred Mills, who was Harp’s editor. I had also started an imprint label called Eleven Thirty Records (Concrete Blonde,The Gourds, Tommy Keene, The Alarm) with Glenn Dicker (Redeye/Yep Roc’s co-owner). Ironically when I left Redeye to start my own label (Second Motion) Harp was dissolving and starting back up as Blurt, with some of the same people involved (like Fred). They needed some consulting help and with my experience and degrees in Business and Accounting, and the fact that I had time and a genuine interest in this business I started to get involved. I saw a lot of the same issues labels and stores were faced with that the print and media industry was starting to deal with. I think that my experience there helped and kept it going. Eventually Scott wanted to get out of it and after two years I bought Blurt which I have owned now for four of the six years. Ironically when I bought Schoolkids, Fred moved back to Raleigh. The timing could not have been better and it seemed like it was meant to be, so he started working with me here at the store and now we run everything out of the store.

How does Second Motion Records fit into the Schoolkids picture? Wasn’t Tommy Keene’s last release on that label?

Yep, I have released Tommy’s last four or five records, going back to Eleven Thirty. Ironically back in 1990 my first job (internship) in the industry (next to working at Schoolkids) was for Black Park Management, who managed The Connells, Queen Sarah Saturday, Finger and Tommy. So we go way back with each other. He’s an incredible musician and songwriter and I love that I can continue to put out his records and I will continue as long as its feasible for both of us. Second Motion was my main focus for the first three to four years and now with Schoolkids is still there but I only do one to two releases a year. It’s nice to have it there and I am sure I will do more in the future. My relationship with Bettie Serveert and Tommy is great. I’ll always support them and they remain active bands withgood devoted fan bases. But down the line I see myself doing more locally and connected to the store, such as releasing live recordings from the “Schoolkids Evening Sessions’ or maybe even pieces of the “Schoolkids 40th Anniversary Show” if that all comes out well (we recorded it and I am waiting to hear the first mixes). It is nice to have an established label (Redeye) as my distributor and even though my focus the last few years has been more on the store and opening the bar, it will always be an outlet, It is just a matter of the right artists and right times.

Thanks Stephen and keep fighting the good fight!

All  photos courtesy of (and property of) Dave Brainard (Brainard Photo)

from top down:

Schoolkids Records

The Baseball Project (40th Anniversary show)

Drivin’ N Cryin’ (40th Anniversary show)

Michael Rank and Ron Bartholomew (in store)

Schoolkids Records Taps

The Loudermilks (in store)

The Loudermilks (in store)