For an entire generation of Louisvillians, a record store called ear X-tacy, founded by John Timmons in 1985, was more than a record store. Ten years after ear X-tacy closed on Halloween 2011, people still talk about it like a beloved friend. It’s not uncommon to see the iconic ear X-tacy bumper stickers around Louisville, even now.

 

This is the story of ear X-tacy as told through the voices of the people who made it happen, of the people whose rise was helped by it and of the people who discovered music because of it.

 

As late as September 2010, Rolling Stone magazine listed ear X-tacy as one of the top three record stores in the United States, calling it “arguably Louisville’s second-greatest tourist attraction after the Kentucky Derby.” Little more than a year after that ranking, the store was gone for good.

 

What follows has been lightly edited for clarity.

By Eric Burnette

John Timmons (founder and erstwhile owner of ear X-tacy): I remember the first time I actually went into a real record store, like: “Wowww, this is all they do?” And ever since that point, I always thought about working in a record store. After high school, I was working at a record store. Going to college, I was working at a record store.

 

Benny Clark (musician, including lead singer of Graffiti and guitarist of Elliott; ear X-tacy employee from 1996 to 2011): I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Phoenix Records. That’s where John worked. I think they sold waterbeds. A record store with a waterbed [laughs].

 

Timmons: They had a store on Dixie Highway and one on Preston Highway. I worked on Preston Highway for, oh, it was at least three years until they went out of business. For a couple of years, I was selling records out of my apartment and started a mail-order catalog. On weekends I was traveling around the Midwest doing record-collector shows every weekend. There was a circuit I would do. I sold bootlegs for a while. 

After a couple of years of having people come over to my apartment at all hours of the day and night, I decided that I was going to move all my records out of my living room and put ’em in a store somewhere. 

 

Timmons grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, with an AM radio under his pillow. In grade school, he began buying 45s and 12-inch vinyl records, starting with the Monkees’ first album. When he was in high school, his family moved back to Evansville, Indiana. He spent most of his money at Karma Records, which was based out of Indianapolis. Timmons, unhappily trying to finish college in Arizona, received a job offer from Karma to open the company’s first store in Louisville, bringing him to town in 1976. Then came Vine Records, followed by Phoenix, until it went out of business. “And so here I was without a job in a record store and (there) wasn’t any place I really wanted to work,” he says. 

 

Timmons opened his first brick-and-mortar location on Poplar Level Road in 1985. The store was only there for six months. The building was later demolished to make way for an on-ramp to the Watterson Expressway.

 

Mike Bucayu (musician, including bassist of the band Kinghorse; ear X-tacy employee from 1985 to 1993): I started going to his shop when it was on Poplar Level. He had a tiny shop there. And he had so many cool records there. Plus, he had records that weren’t readily available to most people. 

 

Timmons: I tell people a lot of times that I named (the store) after the (British new wave) band XTC, which is partially true. 

 

Bucayu: I knew he was a big XTC fan. And I was a huge XTC fan. 

 

Timmons: The original name of the store was going to be “ear XTC,” but I was afraid the band was going to sue me. Every idea I had, I stole from somewhere. (Including the “Keep Louisville Weird” slogan, a version of which he saw in Austin, Texas.) The band Cheap Trick used the typewriter font for their logo, so I typed out “ear X-tacy” with my typewriter — my trusty Royal typewriter. Went to the post office — there were no Kinko’s — and used the copy machine and enlarged that logo over and over and over to where it got a little bit distorted. 

 

Bucayu: If you were a record-collector geek, that’d be the place to go.

 

ear X-tacy moved to its first Highlands location, next to the Great Escape, in 1986. Timmons kept an ear X-tacy store on Bardstown Road for the next 25 years.

 

John Timmons: I opened up on Bardstown Road, Derby Day 1986. I took the best parts of every record store I worked in and kinda put it into one store. 

 

Melanie Pell (employee from 1993 to 1998; indie music buyer): Tiny location.

 

Timmons: But three times the size of what I had before.

 

Clark: I was going to buy comic books (at the Great Escape) ’cause I was a huge comic-book collector in elementary school, and then I wandered in next door and was just kind of blown away. Like whoa, seeing a real record store.

 

Pell: I remember feeling like it was very sensory. Like there was stuff everywhere you looked.

 

Timmons: We sold posters and anything that had a profit margin to it.

 

Bucayu: T-shirts, books…

 

Pell: A wall of cassettes. I don’t know if they had CDs yet in that one. So, it was vinyl and cassettes. And just like stuff all over the walls. I think I went in to buy a Ramones End of the Century cassette.

 

Frances Zopp (employee from 1992 to 1995): I would spend all my babysitting money there.

 

Sean Bailey (employee from 2003 to 2011): ear X-tacy was the only place in town where I could find picture discs. You don’t see them a whole lot anymore, but it’s basically a record that has a photo-quality image as sort of the — well, as the record itself; you actually play the record as you’re watching the band members spin around on the turntable.

 

Zopp: My sister was in college, so she’d bring home all these bands that I had never heard of and didn’t hear on the radio, like R.E.M. or XTC. 

 

Pell: I remember thinking: This place is so cool.

In 1993, ear X-tacy moved to its most iconic location on Bardstown Road, a building that had most recently been a Pier 1 Imports. ear X-tacy was there for 16 years and is what many people remember as the only ear X-tacy. 

 

Carney: It’s kind of a weird building. It’s got this weird parking lot at a weird angle.

 

According to University of Louisville regional history archivist Tom Owen, the building at 1534 Bardstown Road was constructed in the mid-1920s for the Laib Company, a local distributor of mill, mine and plumbing supplies. There was a warehouse in the rear and a display room up front. The building’s history was marked by sometimes years-long vacancies, including in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It was next the home for the JuceRich Beverage Co. and then the Cushman Motor Scooter Co., before being subdivided for offices in the 1950s. The building housed insurance offices until it became a Pier 1 in 1988. 

 

Timmons: It was massive. That space was 10,000 square feet.

 

Carney: The sheer volume of records that they had at that location was just staggering. 

 

Matt Anthony (employee from 1999 to 2011, local music consignment manager): It’s hard to even fathom it now. Like, I’ve got a picture; you see it now, your jaw drops. To see that much product in one space just doesn’t happen anymore.

 

Mercer: Just rows upon rows of music. 

 

Anthony: Obscure stuff, all over the place.

 

Mercer: It just felt like its own world in there. 

 

Timmons: I had more than a few artists tell me that the store had a soul.

 

Pell: A lot of it was that it came with these really crazy, cool red floors. It would have been cool anyway, but the fact that it had these red floors — I always thought that was just great. Red floors, black (record) bins. 

 

Carney: I think part of it was architectural, just the design of the building.

 

Pell: It was almost warehouse-y — exposed pipes, very open, high ceilings. 

 

McKnight: For someone who loves music, it was like being in Disneyland.

 

Kaelin: Magic. It had those high ceilings and that staircase that went up to that secret room up top. 

 

Pell: It had an upstairs, where first it was all T-shirts and…then it became the hip-hop area. You could stand upstairs and see around the store.

 

Bailey: The windows up front where you could peer out to Bardstown Road while looking at the jazz section.

 

McKnight: Such a big piece of real estate, Bardstown Road being the main cultural artery.

 

Zopp: That kind of weirdly intellectual creative spirit of the Highlands. That’s where that came from.

 

Timmons: We were at the right place at the right time. The industry was in pretty good shape.

 

Carney: When I went from the stoner crowd to the punk-rock crowd, that’s when we would just start hanging out on Bardstown Road a lot because there wasn’t shit else to do — and so we would go to ear X-tacy. 

 

Shadwick Wilde (songwriter, lead singer of Quiet Hollers): It gave the sense of being a place that was inviting the music community to come and be in that space. 

 

Mercer: It just looked like a place you’d want to hang out. 

 

Bailey: The people who worked there, that was their religion — music was their religion.

 

Mercer: It looked like people had made it their home over the years. 

 

McKnight: Stickers all over the place.

 

Pell: John gave me a little bit of artistic license to make the bins look cool. I went and bought a bunch of different paints — and confetti and googly eyes — and I handmade all of the cards that went in the back of each bin, each row where it said “Pop Rock” or “Oldies” or “Indie Rock.” I made all of those by hand. I got Christmas lights, and we ended up stringing Christmas lights and then hanging big pieces of different colored posterboard, where I spray-painted “Pop Rock” or “Rap” or whatever and hung them from Christmas lights over these big exposed beams and pipes. 

 

Carney: It definitely was not this clean-cut organized way of decorating that you would associate with the record stores I was familiar with — these corporate, chain-y kinds of places that you would go to in the mall. Essentially like Camelot Music.

 

Wilde: One of the more exciting things to me about it was the bulletin board where all the local shows would be listed. 

 

McKnight: It was the honeycomb. 

 

Anthony: It was a hub like that. Like bands formed there, you know — multiple, multiple bands.

 

McKnight: I can’t tell you how many times I posted on that damn board. All the time. “Need drummer.”

 

Kaelin: “Looking for a bass player” ads. So many people found each other through ear X-tacy. 

 

Anthony: There were rave flyers everywhere and sometimes you’d just use them for decoration because they were so artistic. Everyone was trying to get everyone’s eye because that’s what got people to the party. 

 

McKnight: As a producer, you always wanted the prime window space. 

 

Anthony: Before Twitter, Instagram, Facebook — before any of that, your flyer got people to your party. They were little works of art, man.

 

Kaelin: Those bumper stickers were like, “I’m cool. I’ve been to ear X-tacy.”

 

Timmons: I hated bumper stickers. 

 

Kaelin: You got a free bumper sticker when you bought a CD.

 

Timmons: I had a sales guy that kept coming into the store wanting to sell personalized stuff like pens with your name on ’em or calendars with your name on ’em. He kept coming in, would not take no for an answer. I said, “What’s the cheapest thing you got?” and he goes, “We got these bumper stickers.” So we did a small run of bumper stickers just to get him off my back. 

 

Bucayu: Accidental marketing — accidental successful marketing.

 

Kaelin: I remember going to New Zealand when I was in 11th grade maybe, and we saw ear X-tacy bumper stickers there.

 

Bucayu: I don’t know who started it, but I guess somebody had cut up a sticker — I don’t know if it was “ax yer cat” or something — and put it on their bumper, and all of sudden everybody started doing it. 

 

Kaelin: People would go in there and collect them, and at school everyone would be making their [drops voice] “show posters.” I went to Atherton at the height of the indie-rock stuff; everybody would be like [drops voice] I’ve got a show this weekend. I do that dumb voice ’cause I’m bitter at the boys who wouldn’t let me into their Cool Club.

 

Mercer: There were genres that at the time I didn’t even really know existed. 

 

Clark: Man, (employee) Michael Steiger used to get the longest rockabilly CDs and play them. These like 80-minute CDs [laughs].

 

Bailey: When I walked in to ask if they were hiring and to get an application, they happened to be playing one of my brother’s bands at the time — Second Story Man.

 

Clark: The first day I ever worked at ear X-tacy, (then-manager) Billy Sims — I’ll never forget this. He was playing this group called Panasonic — experimental electronic music. And it’s like a bass trip, like DU-DU-DU-DU-DU. It’s crazy insane. I could even hear the music through the front door. I ended up buying that.

 

Bailey: I just remember going in there (for an interview), not feeling super confident, and just wondering if it was going to turn into like a Q&A session of what section Billie Holiday belongs in and what section Kinghorse belongs in — and there were those questions. It was like a pop quiz.

There was a learning curve big time with working at ear X-tacy, because not only were there artists that had been around for decades that people are coming in asking for on a daily basis, but you also have to be hip to the latest releases and the trends and what people are listening to.

 

Kaelin: I was always a little nervous and felt a little uncool going to the checkout and getting my jazz CDs. It was always like, “Oh, god, who’s going to be at the counter. I hope it’s a girl.”

 

Mercer: There weren’t, quite frankly, a lot of women. I think there were maybe four or five total the entire time I worked there. 

 

Kaelin: The first girl I remember working there was Rebecca Mercer.

 

Mercer: It wasn’t that we didn’t hire women or that we didn’t try, but people just didn’t apply. Most of the people, at least in my time frame, were in bands that didn’t have female leads or didn’t have women in them. And so you’d hire so-and-so’s friend because they were in the band together. I don’t know, we just never had a lot of females apply. Usually when we did, as long as they interviewed well and knew music and could handle our crazy hours, we’d hire ’em. But we didn’t get too many.

 

Bailey: It was just a melting pot of all these different fans of various genres. So if you didn’t know the answer to a question, you could go check with our indie-rock guy or you could check with our jazz guy or you could check with our hip-hop guy.

 

Jaxon Swain (musician, including lead singer of the band Jaxon Swain; ear X-tacy employee from 2008 to 2011): Closing the store down was always a blast. 

 

Clark: Saturday night it could get kind of wild.

 

Swain: We’d be turning on whatever music we wanted, no matter how weird or challenging it would have been for everybody. 

 

Clark: Christmastime was always my favorite because it was so busy and you’re helping people.

 

Swain: When Michael Jackson died, everybody in the city who had a copy of Thriller on vinyl came in with it, thinking they were going to get a million dollars for it — when really, it’s one of the best-selling records of all time, so really, it’s worth nothing.

 

Pell: One time, one of the employees stuck his head in the back room and said, “Hey, does anyone know anything about the band Smog? There’s some guy in here who wants to talk about Smog.” I’m like, “Yeah, I love Smog.” It’s this British guy, and I said, “Here’s the Smog album.” And then we started talking and I got him to buy Slint and I got him to buy Built to Spill — he was one of those great customers. I loved when people bought what I was recommending. He ended up buying a big stack of records. Somebody told me it was Gavin (Rossdale) from Bush.

 

Mercer: (John) spoiled any artist that came in town. If they had a stack of stuff they wanted to buy, he just gave it to them. That was kind of always his thing.

 

Bailey: I remember Ryan Adams coming in and thinking to myself, Is that really Ryan Adams? Or is that just some dude with dirty hair and a jean jacket that looks like Ryan Adams? And no, I mean, it was him.

 

Anthony: White Stripes coming to shop there. I mean, Jack and Meg in their red and white outfits coming in digging for records.

 

Clark: (Rock journalist) David Fricke — that was pretty awesome. He wrote for Rolling Stone. To me that’s a huge deal. 

 

Anthony: No one anticipated the draw for Tenacious D. 

 

Timmons: Two fat guys sitting at a table signing autographs and being smartasses. 

 

Anthony: Jack Black was not Kung Fu Panda, you know? But they had a crazy cult following even back then, and the line went around the parking lot. And people were going CRAZY to get in the store to see Tenacious D.

 

Timmons: Jack Black was the character in High Fidelity. People were coming, bringing up stuff to the table to have them sign. And this girl brought up a burned CD. He goes, “I’m not going to sign a fucking burned CD!” and he throws it across the store. I felt sorry for the girl, but it was classic. He should’ve worked at the store.

 

Clark: The singer for the Black Crowes is really tall.

 

Anthony: Black Keys on their first record. 

 

Bailey: That was a special moment.

 

Anthony: I’ve got the very first Black Keys CD signed by the Black Keys at ear X-tacy. It was like half full. 

 

Bailey: A schoolteacher that was a great customer at ear X-tacy actually brought his class to see the Black Keys. I mean, if I remember correctly, they came in and set up their own equipment and spent a lot of time out in the parking lot smoking cigarettes. 

 

Anthony: Rob Zombie, super cool. Definitely a nerd.

 

Bailey: We had such a robust schedule with our in-store performances.

 

Anthony: Nightly there would be some performance, at least an acoustic guitar. 

 

Anthony: This is the way to really get to know, interact with the artist. They were very low-key. They might not play any hits. They’re going to do it acoustic. You’re going to get something totally different from the show later that night. This isn’t a rock show with big lights and smoke machines and footage behind you. That’s what you get later on that night. When you came to see a band at ear X-tacy, you were also with people who were way into the band. 

 

Mercer: We had Del McCoury, a bluegrass musician with a gigantic bus that they would bring and try to park across the street. And I remember just standing in the middle of Bardstown Road trying to direct traffic to get this bus somewhere where it wouldn’t get hit. 

 

Anthony: I remember people getting pictures of John Mayer.

 

Timmons: He was selling records out of his car in indie stores before he got signed to Columbia.

 

Mercer: The thing I remember most, because he signed our wall in the bathroom, is that he fixed our toilet because it was broken.

 

Clark: The one that stands out is the Foo Fighters.

 

Mercer: I think that was potentially, with the exception of My Morning Jacket, the biggest.

 

Clark: The night before, somehow, I got in charge of moving a ton of the CD bins. Oh, I was so tired. We had to move all the CD bins either upstairs or in the back. They came in, they built a stage. It was insane.

 

Carney: I didn’t get in the building because it was like mayhem trying to get a foot in the door. There were just so many people lined around the block to get in there.

 

Timmons: Dave Grohl signed off that he cleaned the bathroom, but he did not clean the bathroom.

 

Clark: This kid just comes up out of the audience, man, and starts like grabbin’ the microphone and just starts rapping, and the drummer starts kicking in. It was insane. 

 

Timmons: I wish we’d had the foresight to document every in-store performance — a few thousand.

 

Pell: That was just a beautiful record store. I remember every time I walked into that space, even all the years I worked there, just being like, “Mannnnn, this is such a cool job.”

Anthony: It was Empire Records for real, man.

In 2010, amid a nationwide crash in CD sales, Timmons made several moves to try to keep the store afloat, starting with a press conference in February and ending with a move to a new location in July.

 

Mercer: People talked all the time about how much they loved the shows and how much they did for the community. But people would come in, go to the shows and not buy anything. 

 

Bailey: If we had 300 people in the store, maybe 20 of them buy the CD.

 

Mercer: They’d go to Target because it was cheaper. Or they’d buy it online.

 

Timmons: Best Buy and Circuit City — they were using music as loss leaders, so they were selling at cost or below. Couldn’t compete with that.

 

Mercer: Walmart and Target started having all these gigantic releases. They would sell them — because they wanted to bring you into the store — for $7.99 or whatever the price would be, and our cost on the album was like $10 or $11. So even to put it on sale at like $12 or $13.99, we were only making a dollar a pop. There were times we would go buy out chain stores just so we could have them cheaper. Which was crazy.

 

Timmons: Whenever the downloading and Amazon really took off, that was the turning point.

 

Mercer: People stopped buying music. Between that and iTunes, it was just this vicious cycle we couldn’t get ahead of.

 

Anthony: The heyday would be when we would do the midnight releases, and we’d have people lined up around the block, around the store. And then we just kinda stopped doing midnight releases, ’cause the superfans had already heard leaked things over the internet.

 

Swain: The times were changing. Right in front of us.

 

Bailey: We tried to get into the digital music game with a platform that several of the other independent record stores in the nation were also trying to get a part of. It was just like the smallest fish in the biggest sea possible, and it just didn’t make a whole lot of sense, so we pulled the plug on that before too long.

 

Mercer: The store made it 26 years, so it was so hard at that point for everybody — John especially — to wrap our heads around how to change it to meet the times, based on the store we had.

 

Timmons: I never really, truly saw it. Just because I knew that the store was going to be around forever — couldn’t go away. There’s no way the store could go away. 

 

McKnight: I don’t think any of us really thought there would be a day when we wouldn’t have ear X-Tacy. I think we were just young and idealistic and optimistic enough to think something would happen, something would save it.

 

Timmons: I was wrong, but I firmly believed that.

 

Mercer: We were known for the fact that you could come into the store and essentially find anything you needed. And if you couldn’t find it, we would find it for you. We were forever getting one-off import pieces or just super-hard-to-find titles. 

 

Bailey: A lot of especially independent record labels saw that record stores were hurting, so they would make limited-edition records like picture discs or colored vinyl that would exclusively be available at indie stores. That really helped kind of keep ear X-tacy afloat for a while. 

 

Mercer: We were so far in debt for so long because we kept ordering things to make sure we did have what we needed. 

 

Timmons: That was my goal: have a store where anybody who’s into music can find something they like.

 

Mercer: But people just weren’t buying it, so then you’d sit on this inventory, and we were spending more than we were making.

“How are we going to pay our staff?” That was a constant issue all the time. I just feel like I had an ulcer, worried that we wouldn’t be able to pay the staff. 

 

Timmons: I made the announcement that we really needed help (or) we were going to go out of business.

 

Mercer: He did that press conference. I vividly remember that day. 

 

Facing a bank of microphones and several reporters, surrounded by fans and staff, a visibly emotional Timmons said, “The only thing that will truly save this business is your continued support and your business. Off the top of my head, if every one of the 19,000 people on our ‘Save ear X-tacy’ Facebook page came in here and spent a dollar a day for a month, the store could live for a few more years. It’s that simple. I’m not asking for a bailout; I’m not asking for a handout. I’m asking for that proverbial hand up.” 

 

Swain: The press conference day was really hectic. 

 

Kaelin: There was media and Jim James was there and a ton of other local musicians showed up to it.

 

Swain: I hated the store being in trouble. It sucked. It totally sucked.

 

Timmons: People really rallied around for a while. 

 

Mercer: For, I don’t know, a month or two the sales started pouring in. I mean, everybody that could come to buy anything, they would. Because they wanted to save it and they wanted to help.

 

Kaelin: I remember buying a bunch of stuff because I felt guilty.

 

Hallahan: When John started communicating that the business was struggling, I was making a point to go there and buy as much as I could as often as I could.

 

Timmons: That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done — asking for help.

 

Kaelin: I hadn’t owned a CD player in years, so I was buying T-shirts and anything to make sure they had some sort of profit. 

 

Mercer: And that lasted for a little bit but then it stopped again. And you can’t really ask for help again, you know? 

 

Timmons: I was pretty naive. People are going to do what they’re going to do.

 

Mercer: Heine Bros.’, we had talked to them about creating this hybrid coffee shop/record store to combine forces. Panera was actually looking at that spot well before we left and I think had approached John to have some sort of hybrid bagel/music shop, which had its benefits because we’d have corporate backing, and they didn’t have anything like that. But that wasn’t who we were or what we wanted to do. 

 

Timmons: After that, it was apparent we had to downsize.

 

Swain: It was a time of helplessness. 

 

Mercer: We had been looking for a while under the radar, just to see if there was any other space we could get that was cheaper. 

 

Timmons: I’d signed multiple five-year leases (at 1534 Bardstown) with a graduated increase in rent. 

 

Mercer: The rent at that place was absurd, and I’m amazed he paid it as long as he did.

 

Timmons: Over the years my rent went like this (upward gesture) and business kind of went like that (gradual downward motion). 

 

Mercer: We were asking for help from the community while also trying to change our business model and figure out what was what. (John) and I had looked at a handful of places in trying to stay close to where we were but make sense and kind of give it a separate indie feel. Where we ended up really didn’t have that, but we were running out of options. 

 

Swain: I think he maybe even took some of us over to the Douglass Loop store to look at it one time before he pulled the trigger. 

 

Timmons: I was not happy about downsizing.

 

Hallahan: When the news was released that that place was closing, I had to go try to make my peace to it. I just remember it feeling like a vigil of sorts. Could see a lot of ghosts there in the parking lot of friends I’ve lost on this crazy journey. 

 

Swain: We weren’t even closed very long, I don’t think.

 

Timmons: A day or two.

 

Swain: I can remember wrapping up some bins — putting shrink wrap on whole bins of CDs and LPs. I think we had some moving people who were taking care of stuff, but we did a lot of work, too.

 

Mercer: The store we moved into, I think, was one third the size of the other one.

 

Swain: I was excited about it. Because…if we can keep going and not have to close the store, then I’m all for it. 

 

Bailey: There was a part of me that was just happy to not only still have a job but for ear X-tacy, more importantly, to still have a chance at surviving.

 

Mercer: I still don’t think (after) all these years that that was the right spot, but that wasn’t my decision. 

 

Swain: Obviously the location wasn’t as cool. And I knew that was going to be an issue. But at the time I was hopeful that it could still work out.

 

Bailey: It was just so different from the 1534 Bardstown location that I was concerned. It didn’t have much personality.

 

Mercer: As silly as it sounds, we wanted it to look very much like the other store as much as we could. It certainly didn’t have that curb appeal, because it was a strip mall, for lack of a better term. But we looked and looked to see if we could find that red tile, the speckled red tile on the floor. And so we did that.

 

Bailey: We started hanging posters on the walls and posters from the ceilings and getting our merchandising hung. And that’s when it started to feel more and more like a record store.

 

Mercer: We also specifically had a stage built, which was really nice. It was a built-in stage, rather than having to move the record bins every time.

 

Bailey: We got a lot of good use out of that stage. And we tried to rebrand it as “ear X-tacy Live.”

 

Swain: We had a couple really big in-stores there. Like Hanson was there. The Hanson fans — I don’t know if you’re familiar with the world of Hanson fandom? Yeah. It’s wild, dude. It’s wild.

 

Mercer: It was fun to create a new place, but if you ask me, the writing was on the wall at that point. 

 

Timmons: That was a nice attempt, but it just couldn’t compete with what the big store was at its prime.

 

McKnight: It didn’t feel like the old store or the store before that.

 

Bailey: We could sense the ship was sinking.

 

Swain: I started to get worried. Just from the decrease in traffic coming in. That was kind of all you really need to know to know we were in trouble.

 

Mercer: I would get invoices in, of the stuff we bought that day, and we didn’t sell nearly — I mean, you could see the totals. It used to be a million-dollar store per year (in ’05 or ’06), and it was nowhere near that.

(Just a little over a year after opening in the new location) I was taking a few days off, went to Chicago to visit a friend of mine who used to work at the store. And I actually got the call at that point that we had to close that weekend. And so I came home.

 

Anthony: Panic.

 

Mercer: People were just devastated. 

 

Anthony: What are we going to do now? 

 

Mercer: There’s no way to sugarcoat it.

 

Anthony: We had a vigil in the parking lot with just the diehards, just to have something kind of symbolic. We took votive candles and made a music note. It was still kind of tongue-in-cheek; we knew it was silly. But you know, a lot of us were losing our jobs. And it was our life for a long time. There’s always that party aspect of it too — kind of a last hurrah. 

 

Timmons: That’s a black period, man. 

 

Mercer: You could see it on John. Even just his demeanor. I mean, it was eating him alive. 

 

Hallahan: I hated seeing John so broken up about it because it was a dream of his to have a store like that, and for years and years he made that dream happen. And I just hated that the dream had to come to an end for him.

 

Mercer: (John) had to step away for a little bit because he couldn’t deal with it. It was just too much.

 

Timmons: The last few days I don’t remember. I was not there the day the store actually closed. Physically, I could not be there.

 

Mercer: I had to call the staff. I remember sitting on my couch and going through the numbers one-by-one to call and be like, “Hey. I’m really sorry.”

 

Swain: She basically told me not to come in.

 

Mercer: It was just a weird few days. Because…we just didn’t open the next day. But we didn’t really say anything yet. And so there was so much speculation.

We basically had to file for bankruptcy. We had a team come in and tell us what we needed to do and how we needed to liquidate to be able to close out as many accounts as we could. 

 

Swain: At that point, also, I was the local music person. I actually had to come in several more times to sort of deal with local artists and labels who still had accounts open.

 

Mercer: We owed, at that point, so much money to local artists.

 

Swain: I would have known we owed people money and how much we owed them, but I wouldn’t have known how much money the store had to be able to pay them. That sucked. For a lot of people. 

 

Mercer: It felt like in those two weeks our name was getting tarnished a little bit. And I took personal offense to that, too. Because I didn’t want to be the one to close the store.

 

Swain: The employees had an opportunity to come in and get our stuff. And if we wanted to grab any memorabilia or anything, we could do that. I took a velvet Elvis.

 

Mercer: We ended up having a liquidation sale. We were closed for a few weeks while we got some stuff ready. And then we got to see our customers again. 

 

James: I bought one of my favorite records of all time there, Where Dreams Come True by Eddie Dunstedter.

 

Wilde: One of the last times that I went to ear X-tacy was to purchase the last CD that I think I (ever) purchased, which was the Billy Bragg and Wilco Mermaid Avenue collection.

 

Pell: They closed on Halloween 2011. I knew it was coming, and John posted on Facebook. 

 

Wilde: It’s one of those things — you never know when the last time you’re gonna be somewhere or see someone is. It doesn’t necessarily occur to you at the time.

 

Kaelin: I was living in Scotland. I couldn’t say goodbye. 

 

Pell: My husband and I were giving out Halloween candy, and we were sitting outside, and I saw the post on Facebook. I had to go inside and cry, and pull myself together, then go back out and give out more candy.

 

Bailey: In those weeks after the store finally shut down to the public, John and I were in there cleaning up, having appointments with 1-800-GOT-JUNK to come pick up old fixtures, donating things to other record stores that are still in Louisville.

 

Anthony: End of an era, 100 percent. 

Mercer (now co-owner of Bluegrass Doulas): It was all I talked about for a solid year.

 

Clark (now manufacturing worker, guitarist for the band Jaxon Lee Swain, frontman of the band Graffiti): It was weird. Just kinda interviewed for different jobs. 

 

Mercer: Finding an actual decent-paying job with benefits didn’t happen for a long time. 

 

Swain (now frontman of the band Jaxon Lee Swain, vice president of SonaBLAST! Records): I had a couple of small under-the-table jobs for a bit.

 

Bailey (now vendor liaison for the Flea Off Market, marketing coordinator for SonaBLAST! Records and founder of the blog LouisvilleMusicCulture): I ended up going back to college and finishing my degree (in anthropology).

 

Clark: I finished my associate (degree) in arts and my associate (degree) in science.

 

Mercer: A lot of the staff had that problem. Part of the reason they worked there, separate from the fact they loved the store, was because it was so flexible, so they could go on tour for a few months, or they could go work another job or they could come back. To find something with those hours that would work around them as much as humanly possible was really hard to do. 

 

McKnight: It was just magical. This magical place. For somebody where music was kind of the main driver in your lives, that was your mecca.

 

Mercer: I lived for that place. I had planned to raise my babies in the back room.

 

Zopp (now district manager and training and operations manager for Half Price Books in Austin, Texas): That portion of my life was very technicolor. It was very real and in-the-moment, and I lived every second of it.

 

Mercer: There’s a piece of me that, if John called tomorrow and was like, “Let’s do this again,” I’d do it in a heartbeat.

 

Timmons (now WFPK’s weekday 9 a.m.-to-noon host): I have people ask me all the time, “Are you going to open up a store?” It’s like, “Um, hell no?”

 

Hallahan: John and that staff and those buildings had given me such a beautiful backdrop to my early teens and 20s. 

 

Mercer: We heard stories all the time about “I met my husband there” or “This was my moment where I fell in love with this band” or “This store saved my life.” Everybody had a story about the store.

 

Timmons: I still don’t fully grasp that. I really appreciate the fact that people have so many great memories.

 

Anthony (DJ, owner of Matt Anthony’s Record Shop, host of WFPK’s ‘Friday Night Sound Clash’ and ‘The Jazz Pulse’): Everything’s different now. I mean, there’s a bunch of shops. They’re all owner-run. That’s the only way to do it.

 

As of October 2021, there are five stores that sell records along the same Bardstown Road corridor where ear X-tacy used to be — Matt Anthony’s Record Shop, Surface Noise, Book & Music Exchange, the Great Escape and Cardinal Record Co. Another called Highland Records closed at the end of 2019, and Funhouse Records closed in 2020. Better Days Records East moved from Bardstown Road to Barret Avenue at the end of 2020, just down the street from Underground Sounds and now Fat Rabbit. Meanwhile, Guestroom Records rules the roost on Frankfort Avenue.

 

Bailey: They’re all relatively small and have a really well-curated selection.

 

Anthony: There’s no mega-shops anymore because you can’t. You just can’t stock that much.

 

Thanks to pandemic-depressed commercial real estate prices, Better Days was recently able to move his Highlands location to a 5,500-square-foot space on Barret Avenue. Owner Ben Jones  estimates it houses up to 30,000 records and 20,000 CDs — a size and scale practically unheard of for a record store in 2021.

 

Ben Jones (owner of Better Days Records): “Thank God I found a place — fair, beautiful, and I can show my wares again. One of the best decisions I think I ever made. But it could only happen with the world stopped. I will never get that chance again, so I had to pounce on it.”

 

Bailey: Maybe if we had switched our focus moreso to vinyl at an earlier stage than we did, that might have helped keep ear X-tacy afloat.

 

Johnson (now DJ, owner of online record store Dinks Records since 2019): If John had been able to hold on just a little bit longer in that location, there’s a good chance ear X-tacy could still be around. 

 

Timmons: Since the resurgence of vinyl, people ask me all the time, “Now’s a good time?” It’s not a good time. The industry still sucks.

 

Carney: The vinyl resurgence is nice and all, but no artist can make a living based on their vinyl record sales alone.

 

Timmons: You could never duplicate what that store was, what it had. It would just be a disappointment to people. No matter what we did. Even going back into that space. Couldn’t get the staff that we had. 

 

Johnson: Look, stores open and stores close all the time. I think that year John closed, I want to say there were 100-plus mom-and-pop stores across the nation that went under.

 

Timmons: Profit margin has never been good in music. It’s tough staying in business.

 

Jones: If I want to give my secret away, I’ll give it away. If you’re not selling used products of any kind, you should not stay in business. Because the industry does not allow you to make enough profit off of a new piece of anything.

 

Carney: It’s just a decline of the value of music in our culture, in our society. I think that is what killed that record store.

 

Anthony: There’s a bunch of us that could never quit it.

 

Mercer: That was kind of an identity for us. 

 

Anthony: They’ve moved on to record shows, online pages, online retail shops. There’s a bunch of the record hustlers that continued in that similar vein. 

 

Bailey: I started up a music blog around that same time, just trying to stay in touch with the local and regional artists I’d had the privilege of working with over the years.

 

Johnson: The good thing is, look, Matt started his own thing. You got Guestroom. Yes, we lost ear X-tacy, a Louisville institution, but you know what? There’s some other people out there that want to sell music that are just as passionate as John was, too, who are doing their own thing as well. That’s the best thing I see that came out of that situation. 

 

Jones: I wanted for me, for Louisville, and my community to have a great new and used record store, and we are still standing for that reason. It has nothing to do with price wars or who was cool and who was not.

 

Timmons: The store closing actually made it easier for a lot of stores to open up. 

 

Anthony: My thought process with opening my own shop (about a year after ear X-tacy closed), was, “I’m going to continue what I’m doing at ear X-tacy. Just not with everybody else.” Like, I’m still going to sell books and records. I was buying the vinyl — buying a bunch of jazz, buying a bunch of hip-hop. Getting graphic novels, comics. This is what I did at ear X-tacy; I’m that guy. I’m obsessed with records and vinyl. Always. I was so excited to crack a record yesterday. I got two new records. I got to open them and put them on. 

The skeleton of my store continues to be ear X-tacy. It’s the bones of ear X-tacy. My poster rack, my vinyl rack, my book racks. It’s all ear X-tacy. 

 

Johnson: If I could do the overhead and have a storefront? That’s a dream. But it’s just not in the cards. It’s too expensive. I make money now (selling records online); I don’t lose any money. If I had overhead, I’d either break even or I’d be losing money.

 

Timmons: Unless you shopped there, unless you experienced it, you don’t really know.

 

Hallahan: I look back on that stuff and just think about how important places like ear X-tacy were for human interaction. 

 

James: I miss ear X-tacy so much and connecting with people in person.

 

Kaelin: I miss ear X-tacy, but I also totally love Spotify. And you can quote me on that. I get bitter at (Spotify) all the time, because I make shit money on there and I get a lot of streams, and it’s very annoying. At the same time, the level of convenience and the new stuff I discover and the fact that I can just tell Alexa to just put on an obscure record from whatever is so awesome. So as a consumer, I totally love it. As a musician, I hate it.

 

Hallahan: There’s something about the tangible connection to those albums — to be able to touch them, to be able to flip through like it’s a library. It’s a sense of discovery, it’s a sense of wonder. It’s something that you don’t quite get flipping through a screen. There’s something about the smell, and it pleases all the senses. That’s so important.

 

McKnight: ear X-tacy was the gateway drug to so much culture and so much music.

 

Bucayu (now owner of Self Destruct Records): I think with the way that a lot of bands broke out of Louisville, I think ear X-tacy had a huge part. Because most everybody hung out there and bought music there. 

 

Jones: Everybody wants to feel like ear X-tacy was the greatest, and I want to be like, “No, it wasn’t — it’s not going; it can’t be the greatest.” It was a great one but not the greatest. You can’t keep wanting things that are not around.

 

Hallahan: That was a nationally acclaimed store. Everywhere we went on tour, people were just like, “Oh, my gosh, you’re from the town that has ear X-tacy in it.” It was talked about in the same breath as the Kentucky Derby.

 

Pell: I feel so lucky to have been the age I was at the time I was. I feel like I hit the jackpot with being here and being part of it of it and getting to work at ear X-tacy. 

 

Kaelin: Getting somebody there to approve your record? Went so long for local sales. And to put your record on the listening rack was huge for all the local artists. That’s the one thing I guess it’s hard to do online now. It’s hard to know that a person actually listened to this and said, “Yes, it’s good.”

 

Carney: Unwrapping your own record out of the cellophane? It’s like, “Oh, my god, I made a real record.” And then you put it on, it’s like, “Holy shit.” So getting it into the record store was kind of similar. Just the feeling of accomplishment.

 

Hallahan: (John’s) kindness played such a role in how Louisville bands were recognized in that era. He was so good to local bands. He always had a local-band section that he’d sign on consignment. He was constantly talking you up when he was at conventions. 

 

Kaelin: I made thousands of dollars selling CDs at ear X-tacy. 

 

McKnight: John had this massive piece of real estate across the street — this big, big billboard. John gave that to me, every single year, for not just a month but two months. He would give me the whole thing for Forecastle. That was such a huge, huge, huge vehicle for us. At the time we had no money, no resources, no anything. 

 

Timmons: To me (the store) feels like a failure. It had its success. I wish it could still be here. But it can’t. I miss it. I miss shopping in a place like that.

 

Clark: I owe a lot to John. That’s all I have to say, dude. Just everything.

 

Hallahan: He just did so many good things for people. He was more than — way more than — a record store owner. Just like that store was more than a record store. 

 

Bucayu: There’s ear X-tacy in everybody for the past 30-some-odd years. It was a part of everybody’s growing up or their evolution or whatever.

 

Timmons: The fact that it has affected as many people as it has — that still hasn’t quite sunk in.

 

Hallahan: There’s a reason why people still sneak in and paint “ear X-tacy.” I’m telling you, if that’s not a measure of love for that institution, I don’t know what is.

 

Timmons: The real story behind (the name ear X-tacy): There’s an artist by the name of Ry Cooder. He had an album called Chicken Skin Music. What that is is when you hear something, and it affects you to where your hair stands up on your arm — it’s a feeling.

 

Kaelin: I remember the first time that the words to (John Prine’s) “Hello in There” actually resonated with me. I must have been around five and my grandmother had just died. “She sits and stares through the back door screen.” I was worried that other people were going to ignore my grandpa because he was old. I still start sobbing when that song comes on.

 

James: The first song I ever heard in my life was “Leader of the Band” (by Dan Fogelberg). It made me cry, and my mom took me out and bought me the 45.

 

McKnight: My dad had one of the first McIntosh amplifiers in the U.S. I remember buying Nirvana’s Nevermind at ear X-tacy and then taking it back to my parents’ house and just cranking up this massive subwoofer that my dad had — this huge surround sound. I’ll never forget cranking that up, to this day, and hearing Dave Grohl’s drums. I’d never heard power like that in music ever. And it just blew my mind.

 

Timmons: The big turning point for me was seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. That’s kind of a touchstone for folks of my generation. That just kind of directed me. It’s like, “I want to have something to do with music; I don’t know what it is.”

 

Wilde: “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M. — undeniable vulnerability.

 

Timmons: I still love music and always will. 

 

Hallahan: The first album my daughter ever heard as an infant was Velvet Underground’s Loaded. I bought that there, and I pulled it out to play it for her, and there’s the ear X-tacy sticker on it. Whether John knew it or not, he set my daughter on a path of loving music.

 

Timmons: The power of music. 

 

Hallahan: The power of that place — it had a purpose at the beginning, and it ended up being just so much more. 

 

Timmons: I call that ear ecstasy.