frozen cache: a pic-triggered recollection that merely scratches the surface

. . . continued from the aforementioned 10—Day Room (since cassette demos 1997 . . .

	Things can come back sometimes in roundabout ways or simply remain hidden, waiting for rediscovery in momentary junctures. Recently unearthed snaps did the remembering for me, affirming what’d seemed like a dream: 

Nearly thirty years ago, Chicago Store in Tucson AZ was conveniently located just blocks from my frequented downtown hotel & stumbling distance from an all-night restaurant that surged intoxicatingly at barroom curfews with slurred orders of pickled noshings. 

	My first time in the music shop, I was accompanied by local musicians I knew who were given special access to the place, including the off-limits storeroom loft. 

This legendary downtown location & its equally-original family of owners are collective phenomena of character among musical locals — some friends’ tales go back at least forty years. I’ll resist relating any second-hand stories but to say that one involved a kidnapped parrot — sort of a shop mascot, normally perched near the cash register. 

upstairs downstairs

	The main sales floor, open to rank and file shoppers, was thick with narrow aisles of mostly used instruments of every kind — all with various degrees of dust — from bajo sextos to P.A.s & smoke machines, to tubas, accordions & violins — complete with a workshop in the back for repairs. Electric & acoustic string instruments were sometimes cramped in sideways display — so tightly, that when pulling one out, the guitar would slightly strum itself against the next or knock against a neighboring tarnished sax or partially-strung cello. 

Various incidental accoutrements that ran the musical gamut were scattered throughout the property, some of which I exhumed & still have from multiple pilgrimages there over those years:

Vox Repeat Percussion Tremolo Effect V809

relegated to mere artwork for sentimental reasons

four tubes, a Jensen 12 & your choice of guitar or accordian inputs, either producing the scrappy tone of a pissed-off teenager

An overall must, somewhat like a closet of old clothing & shoes, was sensed by smell as well as touch of the seemingly static collection, from famous to no-names, jumbled in a fluorescent-lit labyrinth. 

	Introduced to the owners by the locals, I was eventually allowed guest entry, alone, to the sacred second floor via a shifty staircase to an even dustier level with suspiciously creaky floorboards & chaotic mounds of complete or disassembled instruments, rolling into each other like dunes of various broken disciplines. 

guitar/accordian spillover

evidently, Ray was a repeat customer

hoops, amps, suitcase organs, homemade cellos & horn bells

Jenga

	After a show, states-away & decades later, I met an ex-server from that nearby all-night diner who said they vaguely remembered taking my after-hours counter order once, long ago. I said that I probably had their tater tots — they were famous there. The server agreed that they were great. I asked if I seemed drunk that night. They said they didn’t know because they usually were, too. 

I don’t remember the outcome of the parrot incident.

unexplored hulls waiting for their day