Music Millennium, Vinyl Records, and Record Store Day with Terry Currier

Dec 12

Music used to require a little more effort.

You had to hear something on the radio, read about it in a magazine, ask the person behind the counter at a record store, take a chance on an album cover, or trust that the person with better taste than you was not just making things up.

Now your phone has basically every song ever recorded. Convenient? Absolutely. Less romantic? Unfortunately, also yes.

In this episode of Maxwell’s Kitchen, I talk with Terry Currier, owner of Music Millennium in Portland, Oregon, about record stores, vinyl, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, Napster, streaming, Record Store Day, Keep Portland Weird, and what it feels like to spend a lifetime helping people find music.

Terry started working in record stores as a teenager in the 1970s. He was 17, making $2.25 an hour, buying records with basically every dollar he had, and very reasonably deciding that being an assistant manager at a record store sounded better than going to college.

Hard to argue with the logic.

In This Episode

This conversation moves through several eras of music history. We talk about what record stores were like in the 1970s, when vinyl was king, 8-tracks were clunky but useful in cars, and cassettes were just starting to become a real format.

Terry explains how the Walkman changed portable music, how Music Millennium brought in import records from Europe, and why some European and Japanese vinyl pressings were considered better than American pressings.

We also get into the CD boom, MTV, Thriller, major labels pushing vinyl out of stores, the strange wasteland years when new vinyl became hard to find, and why Music Millennium kept vinyl alive even when a lot of the industry had moved on.

Then comes the digital earthquake: Napster, iTunes, iPods, free music, fewer young people going into record stores, and thousands of record stores closing across the country.

Pretty chill decade for anyone trying to sell physical music.

Music Millennium and Portland Music

A huge part of this episode is about Music Millennium itself. Terry talks about discovering the store, eventually working there, helping bring it back from serious financial trouble, and building it into one of Portland’s most important music institutions.

We also talk about the live performances at Music Millennium, including Joe Strummer, Soundgarden, Randy Newman, Steve Earle, Toots and the Maytals, Portugal. The Man, and thousands of other appearances over the years.

The store was not just a place to buy music. It was a place to discover music, argue about music, hear music, meet people who cared too much about music, and maybe walk out with something you had no idea existed 20 minutes earlier.

That is a very different thing than asking an algorithm for “chill dinner vibes.”

Record Store Day and the Return of Vinyl

Terry also talks about helping launch Record Store Day, which started as a way to remind people that independent record stores were still alive.

At the time, vinyl was not the obvious future. It was more like the stubborn format that refused to die because a certain kind of person still wanted the full experience.

The jacket. The liner notes. The side breaks. The ritual. The thing you can actually hold.

Vinyl makes you participate a little. You have to pull the record out, put it on the turntable, sit down, listen, flip it over, and maybe stare at the artwork like it is going to reveal some kind of secret.

Sometimes it does.

Napster, Spotify, and the New Radio

We also talk about how digital music changed everything. Napster made music feel free. iPods made huge libraries portable. Spotify turned access into the default. For a lot of people, streaming became the new radio.

That is not all bad.

Terry makes the point that people can still discover something on Spotify and then go buy the record if it means enough to them. That is the part that matters.

A song can be convenient. An album can be an object. Those are not the same experience.

Portland Music History

This episode also gets into Portland music history, especially the 80s and 90s.

Terry talks about the Mayor’s Ball, local clubs, La Luna, Pine Street Theater, X-Ray Cafe, Satyricon, Elliott Smith, Everclear, the Dandy Warhols, Soundgarden, Quarterflash, Seafood Mama, and the kind of scene where a record store was part of the whole ecosystem.

Bands played. People showed up. Record stores mattered.

You could feel a city’s music culture in real time, not just read about it later when someone made a documentary and everyone pretended they knew it was important all along.

Why Physical Music Still Matters

The best part of this conversation is how much Terry still loves music as an actual experience.

Not just content. Not just background noise. Not just something playing while you fold laundry and forget what song you are on.

Music as a time machine. Music as memory. Music as a thing you bought, opened, listened to, read, shared, protected, carried around, and connected to some specific version of yourself.

That is harder to do when everything lives inside the same black rectangle you also use to check email, look at maps, order socks, and ruin your attention span.