Recycled Sounds owner Stuart Kolnick restocks records at his shop at 9th and O in Lincoln on Feb. 6, 2012.
by Casey Welsch | photos by Dawn Thorfinnson
The intersection of Lincoln’s 9th and O isn’t the prettiest corner in town. There’s an overpass, two parking garages, an interesting but crumbling apartment building and an old bar/venue, and little else. A large lot — the remnant of a burned-down porno shop — sits empty between two of the buildings. Recycled Sounds owner Stuart Kolnick has a theory as to why the store's gone.
“It’s the Kansas City mafia,” he says, sitting behind the cluttered counter of his beloved record store. “That shop was a front for the mob.”
Recycled Sounds is one of Lincoln’s longest surviving and most well known record shops. But nestled between Knickerbockers and the scene of the blaze, the generic, brick-and-mortar business is easy to overlook.
It may not look like much on the outside, but once you walk through the front door, everything changes. Cassette tapes cover one wall of the long, narrow building. More posters than you’ve probably seen in your life cover the other. The front of the shop is crowded with CDs and magazines and an odd assortment of signed collectibles. Record racks take up the entire floor, running all the way to the back wall. This is a music nerd’s heaven.
Behind the counter stands Kolnick, with his trademark mustache, a Pearl Jam T-shirt and an entirely utilitarian fanny pack. Two girls are at the counter, purchasing a poster. Kolnick regales them with his knowledge for as long as they’re willing to stand there and listen to him.
Recycled Sounds is Kolnick’s shop, and it has been for a long time, so you’d better listen to what he has to say. Kolnick opened Recycled Sounds way back in 1992. It was in the Haymarket at that time. The current building is his third location, and he’s been there since 2002. In all that time, he’s seen the music business take just as many turns as his shop.
“It always keeps changing,” he says. “Back in the '90s, I had an equal amount of CDs and records and posters, and that was modern.”
Today, the aged wood floors of Recycled Sounds hold thousands of records and tapes and posters, almost all of them links to music’s past. This particular shop is one of the most well-stocked music vendors in the area, attracting business from all over the country.
“I’ve got more posters than anyone else in a 1,000-mile radius,” Kolnick says, and one look at the corner behind the jazz records provides support for that statement. Hundreds of posters from every conceivable band cover the wall, the floor and what little shelf space could be spared.
The entire store is like this. Anywhere you look — high, low or otherwise — there’s music. The smell of aging cardboard and permanent marker is pervasive, and everything looks gloriously second-hand.
This is Kolnick’s life. This shop is his dream.
“This all just kind of happened,” he says. “When I was younger, I always wanted, but never had the chance, to work in a record shop. But after seeing these shops that only carried a bunch of generic CDs, I decided to open my own shop to sell more interesting things.”
Recycled Sounds has plenty of interesting pieces. Kolnick has a signed copy of just about any band or album you can think of. His most valuable piece hangs framed behind the counter: an original, mint-condition, signed, rare Nirvana 12-inch, imported from who knows where. If you have to ask how much it’s worth, you can’t afford it.
But really, none of this is anything you couldn’t find at any other vintage record shop or online. Recycled Sounds has something else to make it special. It has a reputation. Or rather, Kolnick has a reputation.
“I always ask people what they do when they listen to an album. Because there’s listening to an album, and there’s playing an album."
“He’s a smart guy with lots to say,” says Collin Sullivan, who worked at Recycled Sounds as a student in 2006. “Sometimes it’s really interesting.”
“Sometimes there wasn’t much to do, so we’d just get to talking instead of working,” he says. "… It’s a good atmosphere, being with a talker like that.”
Kolnick is apt to share his knowledge. He'll tell you about Tom Waits and Led Zeppelin and The Cramps and why all of their records are difficult to find today, reiterating the ECON 101 laws of supply and demand. Then he starts to talk about the art of listening.
“I always ask people what they do when they listen to an album,” Kolnick says. “Because there’s listening to an album, and there’s playing an album. When you put on a record, you listen to it. You interact with it. You look at the cover art and read the lyrics while the songs play. You read who wrote the songs and you learn something about what you’re actively listening to because you care about music.
“When people put on a CD, they push play and go clean or cook or read or something else. The music becomes background noise. They’re just playing music. They don’t care if it sounds good or bad, because it’s just filling the background. That’s the difference between people who care about music or not.”
Kolnick takes the '80s dance record he had been using to illustrate his point and puts it on the turntable. Electropop fills the shop.
It’s a slow day at the shop. There are no customers at the time, but Kolnick doesn’t look concerned. He does a lot of business online and had customers on every coast and in between. Many of them are serious collectors, many more just like the warm crackle of vinyl.
“If you’ve never heard a record before in your life, you can tell the difference in sound when you do, so people demand them,” Kolnick says. “These collectors, depending on how long they’ve been at it, either have everything or need everything, so I’m buying and selling all the time.”
You have to spend money to make money, and Kolnick is constantly bringing in new stock to push right back out the door, and the people carrying the records away are changing.
“More people aged 15-25 have turntables now than people aged 30-40,” Kolnick says, “and they’re the ones who only had vinyl to buy.”
The younger demographic and a renewed national interest in vinyl may speak to the tastes of the what Kolnick sells the most of. The most popular records he sells are the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Misfits and, not surprising for the area, Bright Eyes.
“Younger people are starting to want older vinyl,” Kolnick says. “They have modern albums and artists they like, sure, but the older stuff is fresh to a lot of them. The strangeness is the appeal and that’s why you go to a record store: to hear and hear about music you wouldn’t otherwise have access to.”
Recycled Sounds is indeed one of those places where you’ll hear anything but what you know. And Kolnick will make sure you come to know what he’s talking about.
“The place definitely has a kind of ‘High Fidelity’ vibe,” Sullivan says. “You go in and you just kind of expect the people there to be really knowledgeable, if not a little pretentious. But Stu isn’t pretentious at all, he just talks a lot.”
Recycled Sounds has all the right things going for a record store, it seems, and Kolnick isn’t even too worried about the decline in the music industry.
“If I like something, I want to own it,” Kolnick says. “I want to be able to hold it in my hand. All this cloud music and MP3s, you don’t own them. That’s just sound, and I think people know that. CD sales are down 50 percent and record sales are up 200 percent nationwide.”
Casey Welsch is a Hear Nebraska contributor. He once slept face down on a record player, proving his devotion. Reach Casey at caseywelsch@hearnebraska.org.