Get your groove back

Looking for that obscure album but afraid to ask your local record store guru? Fear not at Groovin High on Belmont.

By Ross Kennerly

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A middle-aged square guy walks into a music store on Pick-On-The-Middle-Aged-Square-Guy Day. He asks the hipster behind the counter if they have the song “I Just Called To Say I Love You” by Stevie Wonder.

The hipster asks the middle-aged square guy if their store looks like the kind of place that would carry that song and then tells him to go to the mall. After a few more insults involving the guy’s daughter, the middle-aged square guy tells the hipster to go to hell and storms out. When the owner of the music store asks the hipster what the guy ever did to him, he replies, “He offended me with his terrible taste.”

Of course, you say. That’s from the movie “High Fidelity.” True. But that’s beside the point — behind the comedy lies the bittersweet truth that at least once in your life, you have been the middle-aged square guy. Admit it. I do, freely: At a certain now-defunct, shall-remain-nameless place, south of the intersection of Grace and Clark St., beside a former theater that is now a music venue, I once asked a young, tattooed clerk if they carried any Phish, and was nearly smirked out of the store.

So I ask you, readers of The Real Chicago: Are you sick of these pricks?

Me too. May I present Joe Bruce, owner of Groovin High Inc., on Belmont, and one hell of a nice guy.

Sometimes, they come back

Before I learned that I couldn’t listen to streaming audio at work — too small of a bandwidth — I used to create my own “cool jazz” station on Yahoo Music, mainly because it’s impossible to rock while in Excel. So one day, I caught the tail end of this song “Alamode,” by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. I dug it, so I quickly jotted down the name of the song but missed the title of the album before Yahoo moved on.

That evening, after work, I walked into Groovin High Inc., a couple of blocks west of the Brown/Red Line stop over Belmont Ave. Joe, who is always behind the counter, pointed me to the jazz portion of the CD bins, where I started flipping through Art Blakey albums. (Joe organizes his CDs, new and used, by the album liners.) Not finding “Alamode” on any of the albums’ track lists, I asked Joe, on a lark, if he’d ever heard of the song. Right question. Immediately, he and another customer began to discuss which version of the song I was talking about, which label carried it and how Blakey had spelled the title, with or without spaces. I honestly couldn’t remember. Joe said that he thought “Alamode” was on Impulse! (a jazz label parented by Universal Music Group) and began to flip through an album catalog the size of the Lakeview Yellow Pages. Not finding it — probably due, he thought, to a misspelling — he told me he would try to find out the album title and order it for me. Then, for the interim, he suggested another comparable Blakey album, which I bought.

So that was at the end of September. Five months later — two weeks ago — I’m in Groovin High reading David Bowie liner notes when it dawns on me that I never came back.

“Hey,” I say to Joe, sheepishly, “Uh, you never happened to find that Art Blakey album, did you?”

Joe rifles through a pile of typical music-store flotsam under a cutout of John Mayer and hands it to me. No way, you’re thinking. Not only did he find it, but keeping in mind that Joe doesn’t know me from Adam, listen to this: He talked to a friend of his who, like Art Blakey, is a drummer. His friend agreed that “Alamode” was on an Impulse! album and told him the name. Joe went home and checked his collection of tens of thousands of records, and sure enough, his friend was right. So Joe ordered it for me and, when it came in, kept it behind the counter for five months, never putting it out for purchase.

“Usually I’m confident if somebody comes in, and they’re serious enough, I can tell whether or not they’ll be back,” Joe says.

Honestly, who does this? My girlfriend’s been showering at my place for three years, and I can barely find her a clean towel. But Joe’s not your stereotypical music store owner. And he wouldn’t just do this for me. He would do it for you, too, which sets him apart from what he calls “part of a tradition” of snobby music buffs that goes on for years.

“You’ve seen ‘High Fidelity?’ ” he asks me, ironically. “It’s not that far from the truth. It’s a pretty true stereotype, and I just don’t see any reason for it.

“I’m glad to see someone get excited about music, whatever it is,” he continues. “If they’re enjoying it, and it’s taking ’em there, that’s cool. You know, at some point they’ll move on to something else, but I’m so glad to see someone get excited about music. That’s really what it’s about. Whether it’s Art Blakey or the Backstreet Boys.”

 

The top 10

The top 10 things you need to know about Joe Bruce and Groovin High:

1.) Groovin High takes its name from a famous bebop collection with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, which hangs on the wall beside the counter, stickered “Not for Sale.”

2.) Joe’s been working at record stores since the late 1970s. For years — for decades — he ran a record exchange store in Rogers Park. Groovin High is the first one he’s owned.

3.) One of Joe’s all-time favorite albums is Let’s Get It On by Marvin Gaye. Out of all the music stores he’s worked in, it’s the one album everyone can agree on, regardless of their background. Second on his list is Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, which, he says satisfactorily, was just added to the Library of Congress music catalog, right behind Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life.

4.) Joe’s “guilty pleasure” album is Rod McKuen’s Beatsville. According to him, McKuen was a “cheesy poet,” a kind of “Kenny G of poetry” in the ’60s. Beatsville is a nostalgic holdover from Joe’s parents’ generation.

5.) Joe once tried to make a Top 10 “Desert Island” List — 10 albums you would want with you if you were stranded on a desert island — but ended up with a list of over 100.

6.) As I mentioned earlier, Joe’s personal collection ranges in the tens of thousands, which he keeps in the basement of his house. “Trust me, I have friends who have collections way in excess of that,” he says. “Way in excess. I have a buddy in Evanston who’s a jazz collector, over a hundred thousand. I’ve known classical guys with equivalent collections. It’s wild.”

7.) Groovin High is the one of the few remaining Lakeview record stores, and it’s not going away anytime soon. “When I first thought about doing this two-and-a-half years ago, friends said, ‘Oh man, take your records, take your CDs, go to the internet. You won’t have to pay any rent,’ ” he says. “But I would miss the contact. And I would miss a lot of customers (who) keep me up on new stuff, or turn me on to old stuff that I missed somewhere along the way.”

8.) Joe is extremely “fussy” about what music he takes in, and personally guarantees (or your money back, which happens rarely) any used album he sells you. No questions.

9.) Take Joe at his word when he says he’s excited about what you like: The Backstreet Boys’ Millenium is available for purchase. If it’s your thing, he’s got it.

10.) In the event you can’t find what you’re searching for, he will help you find it (and order it, and hold it until you return). “It keeps customers coming back and looking for stuff,” Joe says. “Somebody comes in looking for some old tune, and they’ve got a scrap of a lyric, being able to figure it out (is the best part).”

Just don’t wait as long as I did.

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