Record shop owner stockpiles forgotten music
M“He has an ingrained need to preserve the music, to not let it disappear off into obscurity,”
“By the time I was 12, I had about 5,000 records.”
INNEAPOLIS— When Scott Holthus listens to a swing record, plucked from one of the many piles of 78s in his south Minneapolis shop, he starts by closing his eyes. Nodding his head. Tapping his toe.
By the song’s end, he’s conducting.
“I always wanted to be a bandleader,” Holthus says, his hands waving in the air, his fingers anticipating every cymbal crash.
Holthus, 54, has spent decades collecting, cataloging and selling this music— big band and Billie Holiday, country western and Bing Crosby—in its original form: records that spin at 78 revolutions per minute. He also collects, restores and sells the machines that play them: spring-driven phonographs with stately finishes and names like Edison, Brunswick, Victor.
His shop, Vintage Music Co., which smells of spray varnish and dust, is one of the last record stores in the country to stock solely 78s. Vinyl is popular these days, of course, in its wider LP or 45 rpm format. But Holthus, nostalgic even as a kid, has never been driven by trends.
“I’m not malleable,” he said. “I should be able to bend with the times ... and I just can’t do it.”
Instead, he keeps alive records and players that others have given up on.
“He has an ingrained need to preserve the music, to not let it disappear off into obscurity,” says Mike Nickolaus, the shop’s righthand man, “so that 100 years from now, hopefully someone can actually still hear it.”