Saturday afternoon, around 4 p.m., I was cc'd on the following tweet: "Good Records is moving to Garland Rd. Great job, people of Dallas, for officially ruining everything great on Greenville Ave," wrote Lee Cothran. Say what now? I texted co-owner Chris Penn for confirmation, and sure enough.
"Yep. March 11th. Steve Earle first instore new spot." Then came another: "Time to reset the chakras."
Shortly after that a text thread turned into a phone call. But, yes. It's true.
Good Records, which turned 19 last month, is moving to its third location, this time to Garland Road -- 9026 Garland Road, to be exact, in the space currently occupied by its offshoot boutique and event space The Good Pagoda. Which also happens to be next door to the always-packed Lounge Here, whose co-owner is Julie Doyle, co-founder and member and manager of Polyphonic Spree, which is fronted by her husband Tim DeLaughter, who, along with Doyle and Penn owns Good Records.
I believe that in the biz, or in some biz, they call this ... synergy.
"It's time to go," DeLaughter said Sunday night. "Time to go."
And it will take almost no time at all: The moving sale kicks off today (March 4), culminates in a garage sale Sunday (March 10) and the new store makes its formal bow March 11 with a 6 p.m. in-store performance by Steve Earle, who last played Good in 2017.
Lee Cothran was right in that tweet. Lower Greenville, especially its recent-years makeover, does have something to do with Good's move 14 years after relocating from its original home on Good Latimer Expressway. DeLaughter and Penn said in separate interviews over the weekend that parking's a problem -- at least, the perception that there's no parking -- and business could be better. God knows that end of the street has claimed its victims in recent months, among them Pint & Quarts, The Blind Butcher and Dude, Sweet Chocolate.
"And the building next to us, the wall fell down," Penn said. "So the timing was right. We love that spot [on Greenville]. But it's a big spot. It's time to get reinvigorated, get excited. When you do something for so long you get stuck in a rut. Like when we moved off Good Latimer, because of the DART light rail -- it was when we needed it to happen."
The original Good Latimer location, a block from what's now the train station, was my go-to record shop after it opened in 2000, because it was only a few blocks from my old offices on Commerce Street. But all of my best memories of Good Records come from the Greenville location, like taking my then 4-year-old son to the Old 97's in-store in May 2008, one of his first-ever concerts; or getting to play parking-lot DJ during a Record Store Day; or that night in October 2015 when Alice Cooper got the band back together.
The list of artists who have played the Greenville location -- Live from the Astroturf -- is staggering: former Spree guitarist St. Vincent, TV on the Radio, Dawes, MC 900 Ft Jesus, Rodney Crowell, Grimes, Erykah Badu, Sarah Jaffe, Grandaddy, Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, even John Waite of the Babys, whose "Midnight Rendezvous" resurrected some very strange-feeling junior-high memories.
That's a fraction of a fraction of the in-stores and doesn't even include that time Beto O'Rourke stopped by for a campaign rally. And there will be one more: Saturday evening Eric Pulido of Midlake will take the 'Turf as E.B. the Younger. But it's fitting that Good Records ends its run on Greenville with last Saturday's special guest, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, who Penn had been trying to book for more than a decade.
"That's a good exclamation point on Greenville Avenue for me," Penn said.
Penn and DeLaughter made the same point separately: "Good Records is a destination," each man said, and most of their customers don't live near Greenville -- not anymore, anyway. They have moved to Little Forest Hills, DeLaughter said, or Lake Highlands or somewhere else in East Dallas. And so it's time, too, for the store to move with them.
"It's something new and different," DeLaughter said. "It'll be a rebirth, like when we moved from Good Latimer to Greenville."
"When we started Good Records, it was to turn people on to things, and I love that interaction," Penn said. "I want people to come in and have a musical conversation with us. They walk in and walk out with something they didn't know they needed. You can't get that from Amazon or Spotify."
