Remembering Pier Platters

Inspired by the mushy reminiscence that permeates so much of the internet, and acknowledging that such recollections are something that us bipeds can never seem to get enough of, I am pleased to offer what seems to be the first online photo of The Greatest Record Store That Ever Was: Hoboken New Jersey's Pier Platters. That an institution which is so frequently cited as "legendary" to summon such meager returns on Google is quite baffling, so I like to think this post will apply some much-needed spackle to a shamefully vacant corner of the internet. The photograph was taken by former Pier Platters employee Mr. Otis Ball -- former Bar/None recording artist, former leader of Otis Ball & the Chains, current leader of the Super Karaoke Fun Time Band, and all around splendid human being and proven friend to furry creatures of the greater metro area.

I really enjoyed the record shop recollections that Tracy Wilson had put together over on Lightnings Girl, but when queried via email, she was sad to report that no quality images of Pier Platters were in her stable, either. She suggested I check with Otis, and upon opening the attached jpeg his reply included, my heart skipped a beat just seeing that grimey old window again. Apparently, there is an active Pier Platters remembrance page on Facebook, but after some careful consideration, I decided I'd rather air my laundry in a forum where I can gush without the distractions of irritating thumbnail ads or virtual barfights. So be it.

I honestly can't remember much about the first time I visited Pier Platters, but I'm sure that it was the 80s, I'm sure that I was in high school, and by extension, I'm therefore sure that I had a stupid haircut. I hung out a lot with older friends who went to art school in the city, so by the time I could lie my way out of the house for a night and catch a train to Penn Station, I was able to visit a few of the city's now-mythologized music and alt-culture venues and bars like CBGBs, Mona's, the old See Hear shop, ABC no RIO, and so on. However, as a kid who was obsessed with music and who had a pretty broad-reaching definition of punk rock, my absolute favorite urban destination wasn't in Manhattan, but across the river in Hoboken.

Based on my hazy recollections, Hoboken had exactly two things going for it by the time I was old enough to have more adult experiences there, and those two things were Pier Platters and Maxwell's. During the pinnacle of my many years at WPRB, I would frequently join a carload of my fellow DJs for periodic jaunts to Pier Platters to engage in a holy act we called "Re-Rocking". The purpose of re-rocking was implied by the name: "re-" was short for "replacement", as in, we'd arrive with money that was ostensibly to be used to "replace" crucial station vinyl that had been lost, stolen, or which had been deemed too scratchy from repeated sessions beneath the studio's tonearms. (CDs had only really just begun taking hold at WPRB when I arrived in the early 90s.) Of course, none of us really minded playing PRB's battered copies of records like Double Nickels on the Dime or Swarthy Songs for Swabs, so instead we just used the designated cash to buy things that were too obscure for us to get serviced directly.

Our primary target was always the 7" bin. And when I say "bin", what I really mean is "wall". The end of the 20th century was, of course, the last golden era for that format, with singles acting as cheap calling cards for the miniscule bands my friends and I read about in fanzines like Jersey Beat, Slug & Lettuce, This Zine Sucks, Factsheet Five, etc. (And then later on, we all wrote about the next generation of those same kinds of bands in mags like Green Means Go!, Number Two, Sound Views, and Inward Monitor.) If you were into checking out singles (and everybody was), Pier Platters was like waking up in record store nirvana. Their offerings and prices far outshined those of the shops across the river like Venus or Midnite Records, and were much less likely to adhere to just a few of the more popular underground genres. Bearing in mind that I was too young and too distracted to bother distinguishing the DC harcore of Soulside from either the breezy pop of Flying Saucer, or the wild art-noise of Vertical Slit, I was more than happy to leap into the fray with just about anything that seemed cool and weird. And joyously, pretty much everything seems cool and weird when you're in your early 20s.

Another detail that set Pier Platters a universe away from any modern comparison is the fact that you could smoke there. While shopping. I remember once accidentally losing the cherry from my Parliament (yecch!!) while perusing the used LPs, and worrying that I would A) burn the place down, and B) be hunted down and killed by the notoriously cranky owner, Bill Ryan (whom I got to know in later years and is in truth a sweetheart among men.) Nevertheless, a thin film of nicotine seemed to cover everything in the shop, and the smell of smoke lingered with those of shrink wrap, greasy Chinese takeout, a faint whiff of patchouli, and that particular musty scent that is exclusive to rooms that are filled with old records.

The store had a great run until the mid-90s, when the escalating rents and ongoing gentrification of Hoboken really started squeezing out the quirky businesses that didn't cater to the town's yuppie droves. Maxwell's went through a disastrous period under different owners, and the Live Tonight and Lovesexy music venues both shut down for good. Worsening matters was the chain record store that opened up across the street from Pier Platters. I remember it appearing quite suddenly, and that it remained there defiantly like some erect middle finger of corporate culture. I distinctly recall being in Pier Platters on one particular night, and anxiously wondering why my friend Dorian, who worked there, was sitting behind the counter and crying softly into the receiver of the store's telephone. She sat on a stool, her body framed in the background by a wall of collector-priced 45s. They were mostly Sub Pop or Amphetamine Reptile singles, and unlike the store's everyday stock, these were wrapped daintily in plastic sleeves and could only be had for double-digit prices. As I pretended to flip through cheaper records on labels like Estrus, Homestead, and Kill Rock Stars, Dorian quietly placed the receiver back in its cradle, wiped the runny mascara from her eyes, and attempted to regain her composure.

"Are you OK?", I asked. "Is everything alright?"

"I just found out that Bill's closing the store", she sobbed, and the trembling words made my heart sink like a barrel of toxic waste in the nearby Hudson River.

The store did close a few weeks later, and the process leading up to it was worse than an Irish wake. The "20% off all vinyl" sign that's visible in the above picture leads me to believe the photo was snapped shortly after the inevitable was made public, but as the final day of business grew closer, the discount got bigger and bigger. It hurt so badly to do it, but we (and by "we" I mean "everybody") had such a bad record jones, we couldn't help but show up every day after work to turn more of our paychecks into steeply discounted vinyl. I think by the point that the sign read "80% off", I'd grown so disgusted with myself that I just stopped going until I knew the place had been closed down for good. I felt like I'd been picking loose change from the pocket of an injured friend, and only then calling for an ambulance. I was disgusting.

I was worse than disgusting. I was a record collector. Thank god the shuttering of Pier Platters coincided with my developing a taste for Maker's Mark, or else who knows what I might have started spending my money on.

But I digress. I can't say that Pier Platters itself was too much of an anomaly, since up until the mid-90s, most urban areas probably had at least one great record store that was similarly loose and inviting to the freaks and weirdos who inhabit the fringes of any good art scene. I don't buy records anymore, partly because money is too scarce, but also because the existing venues for the hunt just don't measure up to Pier Platters. Besides, I'm no good for the high-end collector's realm, as most of the music I really like tends to fall towards the grotty and unfashionable end of the spectrum anyway. Not to turn this into any more of an old man diatribe than it's already become, but as it has been widely observed by people who use far more maudlin language than I, MP3s just aren't as much fun. Believe me, I've got thousands of 'em, and it's not their lack of physical substance that leaves me cold, but the lack of any social element in acquiring them. In some sick way, I think of my voyages to Pier Platters with the same kind of mental vocabulary I use when remembering live shows I attended, parties with strangers at the SVA dorms, or the irrational roadtrips my friends and I would frequently embark upon. In one sense, buying records was just mere shopping, but in another, it was a social component of my teens and 20s that nothing in later life has ever really stepped up to replace. I'd be lying if I said I didn't really, really miss it, and I guess that's why I still like talking about it once in a while.

Comments

[lex dexter]

oh buddy, you're killing me. _killing_ me.

i first visited Pier Platters right before i turned 13. i bought come's _eleven; eleven_ and the grifters' _one sock missing_. i'd seen those two bands a week or so before (with wider at Maxwell's - we've had this conversation), and was so happy to know i was fated to spend my child-of-divorce-y weekends in a town where i could find those tantalizing albs.

a coupla weeks previously i'd met Otis at a Dinosaur after party, and upon hearing that he worked for Pier Platters, asked "Do you have Come?"

"What, on my BEDSHEETS?" he replied, and a chorus of the kinda people that went to Dinosaur after-parties laughed their asses off at the pre-pubescent in the Sears flannel and black Chucks.

so began a coupla tough years of being horrified to go into the place, but going on weekly pilgrimages anyfuckingway. things got better when Tracy and Dorian started working there. they knew my step-brother and my girlfriend's brothers' bands, and they gave us ridiculous discounts and ridiculous-er suggestions, and seemed to intuit that we were horrified and in need of something big-sisterly.

but really, it was the inventory that still lingers in my mind. i long for Pier Platters in the night. i've never loved/will never love a single record store in the same way. fuck all of this "thinking about the place reminds me of a special period in my life." au contraire, thinking about the place makes me wish that i could bury myself in the inventory. jeezus cripes.

[Ken Katkin]

When I first started going to Pier Platters in 1983, the back room (unheated) contained not merely a dollar bin, but actually also a $0.75 cent bin and a $0.50 cent bin and a $0.25 cent bin and even a $0.10 cent bin. And pretty much everything in those bins was indie stuff (mostly unknowns), not major-label crapola. In 1984, I took a friend from Chicago into the store with me. He recommended that I pick up a platter that was in the $0.10 cent bin by a Chicago band I'd never heard of: Big Black. The platter was "Bulldozer," their first release. I still have that copy, which still sports a big handwritten "10" on an affixed price-sticker. On higher-priced items, smaller price-stickers with the words "Pier Platters" pre-preprinted in tiny letters were used. The prices were printed onto those stickers on some kind of cash-register-tape printer (or maybe they were just typed on).

Pier Platters was magic, no doubt about it. During the years I lived in Hoboken (1987-1990), I would stop in just about every day on my way home from the PATH station. Most exciting of all were the days when tix for sure-to-sell-out Maxwell's shows were quietly put on sale at Pier Platters, advertised only in the window of the First Street (used record) store and nowhere else. I don't know how anyone could have lived anywhere other than Hoboken in those years. And Pier Platters was what made Hoboken Hoboken.

[Jim Testa]

This is so weird... two weeks ago I got a "hi, how ya been?" email from Todd Hess, and now Lupica and Ken Katkin re-enter my consciousness.

When I think of Pier Platters, I remember red-headed Suzanne, Sonic Youth muse and Das Damen confidante, and of course the sainted but cranky Bill Ryan. I wonder if the store might have lasted a little longer if Bill had been just a tad more accommodating to the local skatepunks he chased out of the store when they asked for Blink-182 records?

[mike]

Late breaking graphics credit: The scan of the old Pier Platters business card comes courtesy of my buddy Brian Musikoff. Thanks Brian! Another detail I didn't address in the original post is how for a while, there were actually TWO Pier Platters locations, one that sold vinyl on Newark St., and an all-CD shop one block over on 1st St. The fastest route between the two stores was through this weird alley that runs north-south through most of Hoboken. It's a cobblestone alley, used to be really grimey and gross -- lots of trash bags and shady characters about (though given Hoboken's trajectory, there's probably a wine bar and day spa there now.) For years, I always referred to that alley as the "Cinderella Backstreet" -- inspired by the Peter Laughner song of the same title that Forced Exposure released on 7", and which I distinctly remember buying at... Where else? Pier Platters.

[mike]

Mike, hope you don't mind that I used the store photo as the profile pic on my Facebook PP group. I've been waiting for an excuse to take that horrible ReMax photo off...

[R:M:B]

Hey Mike, absolutely -- please use the pic! I'm sure Otis will be happy, too. I actually didn't realize that you were the one who'd started the Facebook group!

[henry]

I think my first pilgrimage there was may 1982, on the anniversary of ian curtis' death, and I bought my first collector's item there, chris bell's i am the cosmos, which i still treasure.

[lightning's girl]

Seriously - I don't think I have ever had a girl idol that ever matched the super coolness of Suzanne. Good lord that woman was the very definition of hip. I remember the day she came into Pier with a bag of clothes that she and Kim Gordon were giving away. Best day on the job ever. Even if I couldn't fit into like 98% of it, ha!

All kidding aside - Pier was the first place I drove to the day I got my drivers license. It was about 40 minutes away but worth every minute of the commute.

The week I graduated from high school I moved to Hoboken - and for two reason only. Pier Platters and Maxwells.

The staff there - the records there - the customers who became friends and show buddies...changed my life for the better. Amen for the WFMU record fair where I have a 50/50 chance of crossing paths again with all those wonderful people.

xoxo
Tracy AKA Lightning's Girl

PS: My kingdom for a Pier Platters record tote bag!

[Mike]

I'm another one who still likes to tell people about Pier Platters, and what an excellent record store it was. I lived in Colorado while they were open, and discovered the store while on a trip to NYC. It was dream-like in inventory. At every turn, there was something I wanted to purchase, and I did. After I returned home, I used to call them on the phone whenever I heard about a new record I wanted. They always had a copy, and they were always willing to hold it for me while I mailed them money (pre-Paypal, pre-internet, that was cool of them). I remember that at one point they also had a catalog for mail-order, and there was never any problem with that service. They were always prompt and honest. And, especially compared to the stupid attitudes of clerks at lesser record stores, they were nice. I only managed to go back to NYC/NJ one more time while Pier Platters was still there. But I still remember those visits and mail-orders I had there. Mike's original post manages to articulate the same formative impressions this place made on me at a similar time in my own life. I'm going on another trip to NYC next week, and I know I'll be thinking of this place...

[Pento]

I had ordered from them (to Colorado) and on a trip to Manhattan they were the only cool store I knew about in the NYC area (having already visited Bleeker and St Marks and found nothing). I called them up and said "hey, I'm from out of town - how do I get there". They told me how close it was to the PATH so I waited til that night (so I could also visit Maxwell's). Hoboken then was very sketchy then, even walking the short distance from the PATH, so when I found out how far it was to Maxwells I scratched that idea. Since people were dicks at the stores in Colo I really liked PP. In my mind it's linked to my similar journey to the one in Silver Springs MD.