I miss Newbury Comics in Harvard
Square. It’s still there; but, I miss how it used to be. As a high school
student at Cambridge Rindge & Latin, Newbury Comics was an integral part of
my developing identity, what the Germans used to call Bildung. From ’99-’01 the browsing and shopping I did there opened
my virgin mind to a wealth of culture and entertainment I may otherwise not
have known.
Back then there was also Tower
Records, where you could listen to new CDs before purchase, or sort through the
bin of audio cassettes 3/$10; HMV, with their vast selection, including the
classical section, in a room behind glass doors where the old maestri could be
heard in peace while you sorted through the incredible collection,
incomprehensible to an impulsive teenage metalhead; used record shops like
Second Coming…
but Newbury Comics was cool. Even then you could tell it was
not-as-cool as it used to be, as the vestigial punk and goth scenes in Harvard
Square had already become atavistic, but N.C. still had spiked gauntlets and
other miscellania targeted to that leather-and-clothespin crowd. Before I
started smoking pot I could invest the earnings from my part-time library job
in Pink Floyd posters and Metallica t-shirts. And then of course there was the music.
I recently tried to do some
Christmas shopping there, but literally couldn’t find anything I was searching for. I even had an employee try to look up
the CDs I wanted in their database, but absolutely Ø were available in any of
their locations in the whole Boston area.
Helloween – Keeper of
the Seven Keys, pt. 1?
No.
King
Crimson – Lizard? (The 2nd year in a row I tried to find
this for my Dad.)
Nope.
Kurtis Blow;
Blind Willie McTell –
anything?
Nada.
(They did
have several other blues musicians whose
name started with Blind. Not helpful.)
Granted my tastes are not Top 40, or
even Top 400. But that’s the point – half of these were albums I first saw in
this very store twenty years ago. The kids now can stream anything, of course – but nothing can replace the look and smell of those lyric booklets indicating
who played each guitar solo, enumerating the countless thank-you’s and
shout-outs that were all basically meaningless except Trey Azagthoth’s thanks
to Jimi Hendrix and Beethoven on Morbid Angel’s Domination.
Then there were the books I bought
there – Hell’s Angels, still the best
Hunter S. Thompson I’ve ever read, about his time hanging out with the biker
gang and the time Allen Ginsberg stopped them from fighting a bunch of hippies,
and how they finally beat the shit out of Thompson at the end of the book – Acid Dreams, about MK-Ultra and other horrible
CIA experiments that were a waste of perfectly fine drugs. And all the videos;
the 2-packs of classical cassette tapes for $1.99 that introduced me to
composers like Bach, Mozart, Chopin and Gershwin…but even then they had the
bobbing-heads, action figures and Kiss dolls that, along with pot-leaf socks,
seem to account for more of their sales than CDs nowadays. They do have lots of records now, as well,
one positive change – and I think it’s great that vinyl is coming back, but all
these newly-pressed LPs run $20-$30 when you used to be able to find great used
records in Harvard Square for eight bucks.
I guess they still sell a lot of the
stuff I mentioned nostalgically. But now as an adult with far less free time
than I had then, when I take a moment, reading the Holy Bible, contemplating
what this new generation needs, along with my prayers to Jesus & Mary that
we all find peace and enlightenment, I can’t help also hoping that at least a
few of Cambridge’s kids today will experience something like the wonder I did
on purchasing my first Deicide album.
The more things remain the same, the
more they change.
