Courtesy Wax Trax
Audio By Carbonatix
For decades, Wax Trax Records has been the anchor of Capitol Hill’s business strip with its shop at 638 East 13th Avenue. Then in April, the store spread to a second location at 200 South Broadway, on the hip stretch north of Alameda. Now Wax Trax will plant its flag at a new frontier outpost on November 21: a kiosk at Stanley Marketplace in Aurora.
“We’ve had this mobile unit called Wax Trax Attacks that’s been going around town and selling records outdoors,” explains Pete Stidman, general manager of Wax Trax and son of one of the longtime co-owners, David Stidman. “People have shopped at it even as far away as Fort Collins and Colorado Springs and here at the Santa Fe Art Walk. We’ve been going to breweries with the truck, too. But that thing needed a home for the winter.”
That home, it turns out, is Stanley Marketplace, at 2501 Dallas Street. Wax Trax held a record show in September at the quirky, hangar-like retail center and food hall that once housed the manufacturing facility of Stanley Aviation. Following the show’s success, Stidman hit it off with Stanley’s management. Together they cooked up the idea to park Wax Trax Attacks not outside, but inside.
The kiosk — which will comprise six large racks of new and used vinyl records clustered within 120 square feet of Stanley’s central community area — will stock “3,000 pounds of records,” Stidman says, in lieu of offering an exact number of vinyl LPs. The lease is for three months, more of a seasonal trial period while the weather is too cold for outdoor browsing. But there’s an option to extend that lease should everything work out well over the winter.
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It certainly won’t hurt that the holiday shopping season is about to hit. Says Stidman: “We’ll definitely have some Christmas records, the classics like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. And presents you might buy for your kid, like Miles Davis‘s Kind of Blue. Then there will be a lot of our regular stock. Some of the top sellers at the mobile unit have been Chappell Roan, Charli XCX, Bon Iver, Daft Punk, Sade and Hozier. Then for punk and metal, there’s Fugazi and Blood Incantation and stuff like that.”
One thing the kiosk won’t be offering during the holidays, however, is gift-wrapping.
“Now that would be a sight, Wax Trax employees doing gift-wrapping,” Stidman says of the store’s legendarily, um, no-nonsense sales staff. “That would be fucking funny.”