vipkelvin1 [EDITOR'S NOTE: Kelvin Anderson announced last week that he is going to close V.I.P. Records after nearly 33 years in business, citing sinking sales and rising debt---and finally surrendering to the realities he saw coming when this story was first published in January 2009.]

 

 

 

I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees.
I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees.
Asked the lord above for mercy, save me if you please.
                           –“Crossroads,” by Robert Johnson, 1936

It’s nearly 9 o’clock on what could be just about any morning, and Kelvin Anderson is standing at the intersection of Martin Luther King Avenue and Pacific Coast Highway, where another day appears to be unfolding according to plan. He’s got a sandwich in one hand, Polish-and-egg, fresh from the drive-thru at Fabulous Burgers, a couple blocks away. He’s got a set of keys in the other; they go to the doors of World Famous V.I.P. Records, which he’ll be opening any minute.

Anderson’s been starting his days—all seven of them, most weeks–more or less this same way for getting very close to 30 years. He marks the official birth of V.I.P. Records as January 15, 1979. That’s the date he bought the business—price: $55,000, the value of the merchandise in stock—from his older brother, Cletus, who had opened it six months before as a Long Beach branch of the original V.I.P. Records he’d founded in Los Angeles in 1967.

“All that seems like a long time ago,” says Anderson, starting to let go a heavy breath, but stopping it short. “And then again, it doesn’t.”

Either way, all that hardly seems like a plan, anymore. By now, the thousands of mornings of fast-food breakfasts and early openings at his little corner store in the heart of Long Beach simply add up to the bulk of Kelvin Anderson’s 54-year life. And everybody who’s ever had one of those—a life, that is—knows it almost never turns out the way you plan.

“I always hoped I could get a situation, like at Interscope or Def Jam, to help blow up young artists who had something,” Anderson acknowledges, and there’s still some dreaminess in his voice—although maybe that’s just southernness, the  accent that still lifts and lowers everything he says, getting on to four decades since he left Mississippi. “The record companies used to bring me in for listening parties, to meetings, conventions—invite me up to L.A., fly me back to New York, down to Atlanta—to get my opinions about the records they were thinking about putting out. I was always close to getting something, and then it would never happen.”

Those were the 1990s, when the popular-music industry had Long Beach in its crosshairs. Local hip-hop artists like Snoop Dogg, Warren G., Nate Dogg, Tha Dogg Pound and Domino climbed to the top of the international sales charts with a particular mixture of hard-core lyrics, old-school samples and low-riding base lines that created a sound and a time that may forever be remembered as the G-Funk Era.

Those days were born from a special relationship between Anderson and the Long Beach artists. It began when they were just little kids tagging along with their parents, who flocked to his neighborhood record for LPs and 8-track tapes. It grew when those kids became teenagers who adopted the shop as a hangout, flipping endlessly through the racks of vinyl and cassettes.

Ultimately, all those days came down to one day—it could have been any day; nobody has ever pinpointed it—when Anderson made a decision that transformed the Long Beach intersection of MLK and PCH into the most black-magically musical crossroads since another Mississippian, bluesman Robert Johnson, went down to the junction of Highways 61 and 49. Myth has it that Johnson sold his soul to the devil there, in exchange for mastery of the blues guitar. But it’s a fact that Anderson cleared out the Gospel music section of V.I.P. Records to build a recording studio for those kids.

“My thing was, hey, if I can keep these kids off the street that’ll be a good thing,” explains Anderson, who stocked the room with two turntables, a tape deck and an SB-1200 drum machine. “Back then, the only places they had to hang out were King Park or the street. I figured it was safer in the back of my record store. These kids were interested in rapping, interested in being DJs, interested in producing. I just bought some equipment and put it back there.”

It was a good plan, but this being life, Anderson had no idea how it was going to turn out.

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No matter how many times it’s told, the story still sounds like a show-biz fairy tale: the way a demo tape Snoop recorded at V.I.P.—Super-Duper Snooper, it was called—was carried to a bachelor party by Warren G., who played it for his half-brother, Dr. Dre, who was suddenly on his own after leaving the gangsta-rap supergroup N.W.A. and subsequently saw Snoop as the perfect complement for his first solo album, The Chronic, which earned Snoop an album of his own, Doggystyle, which brought a production crew to V.I.P Records to shoot the famous video, “What’s My Name?” on the rooftop, complete with a giant, red doghouse.

vipsnooponroof450x308 “When Snoop did that first video on roof, it really blew everything up,” Anderson says, lifted by the memory again. “From that point on, people always wanted to know what was happening in Long Beach. The city had such a name. You could walk up, tell people you were from Long Beach and get in. There was something special about that time.”

All these years later, the spirits of musical legend still provide the vibe at World Famous V.I.P. Records. Not just Snoop and the handful—like Nate and Warren and Daz—who reached real stardom after him, but others like Tray Deee, Lil ½ Dead, Soopafly, Radio, DJ Slice, The Twinz and The Dove Shack. And lots of the friends they invited, too.—Dre, Cube, Quik, E-40, Too Short.

It’s easy to imagine them riffling through the records, although the old racks are now stocked with CDs. Anyone can stand where they recorded all their tapes, although it’s the store’s Gospel music section again; the studio was dismantled after a water main ruptured and flooded the place 10 years ago, never rebuilt inasmuch as the kids were gone by then and most everybody can record on their laptops now, anyway. Framed photos and news clippings hang on the walls. “World Famous” wasn’t part of V.I.P. Records’ official name in the early days, but nobody considered it hyperbolic when Anderson added the words later. They still shouldn’t.

“We’ve never stopped getting phone calls from all over the world,” says Anderson. “We still get tourists—Americans, but also from Europe, Japan and Australia—who want to see where all that history happened.”

Visitors still try to invoke that magic.

“I’m constantly getting asked if I’ll let them up on the roof—offering to pay me so they can take pictures of themselves by the sign where Snoop shot that video,” says Anderson, laughing and shaking his head, which is the way he always answers them. He’s had an artist air-brush the sign on a wall inside, so people can take photos there. They do. “I still feel V.I.P. Records is the most-popular record store in the world.”

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But the World Famous V.I.P. Records is still just a record store. These days, almost by definition, that means it’s dying.

“It would be great to stay in business, but the signs of the times don’t look like that’s going to be the case,” Anderson says stoically. “We do still sell quite a bit of music, but not enough to sustain our costs of survival.”

It seems almost impossible to imagine Long Beach without V.I.P. Records—almost, because the city has proven it can somehow soldier on without some of its most-iconic businesses. It seems quite likely that V.I.P. could be this year’s Acres of Books.

rickywarrenkelvin “V.I.P. Records is an icon for our community—for our city—from the West Coast to the East Coast,” says Sixth District city councilmember Dee Andrews, reciting a line that has come to sound like a death sentence. “I remember standing on the corner of MLK and PCH and some people wanted me to take a picture of them with the V.I.P. sign. It turned out they were from England—so it’s international.”

Anderson has already had discussions with city officials, inquiring about what possible assistance might be available. “If not mistaken, I think the city gave a $500,000 loan to remodel Legends bar in Belmont Shore,” he says—not at all mistakenly. “See, so maybe something like that.”

Meanwhile, the word is spreading in other circles. Snoop Dogg has dropped by V.I.P. Records to see what he can do—maybe a benefit concert or something. Warren G. has called to say he’d be up for such a show. Anderson can’t help but get a little giddy fantasizing about what kind of production might be possible if every artist that ever sharpened their skills in V.I.P.’s back room did the same.

“There are all kinds of artists—I mean, big and famous artists—who have come up to me over the years and told me they used to hang out here until I kicked ‘em out at closing time,” says Anderson. “DJ Quik told me one day, ‘I got the fever for wanting to do what I do right in the back of your store.’ Now, I never even knew he was one of the kids that was back there.”

But Anderson realizes a benefit concert would be only a temporary solution for a problem that has been building for a long time.

“By now, my plans were to be working four days a week, be off three days,” Anderson says with a joke’s-on-me smile. “But 2002 is when the wheels started falling off. 2003 was bad. ’4 was worse. I had to let people go because I couldn’t afford to pay ‘em. So it’s a seven-day-a-week business for me.”

That wouldn’t be so bad, if business were good.

“The music-sales model doesn’t make sense for the local retailer, anymore,” says Anderson. “Technology has changed. People’s habits have changed. I got a niece with an I-pod with hundreds of songs on it, and I don’t think she paid for one of ‘em. Even the record companies are showing less and less interest in the physical sale. So if we’re gonna make it, we gotta rethink everything—still sell music, but somehow expand our services.”

For now, Anderson has been capitalizing on the popularity of the V.I.P Records name, stocking a wide variety of t-shirts, sweatshirts and trinkets embossed with the image of the store’s distinctive sign. He’s also made a small killing with Barack Obama memorabilia. “Barack’s already been a part of my economic stimulus package,” he chuckles. V.I.P. will also transcribe your vinyl albums to CD, your VHS movies to DVD and offers DJ services for parties and weddings, too. His son, 23-year-old Kelvin, Jr., helps out.

“A few months ago we weren’t sure we weren’t going to make it to our 30th anniversary,” says Anderson. “But we got here. Barely.”

Anderson had intended a celebration. Maybe a concert, perhaps a party. Now he’s thinking he may just go to dinner—after work, of course.

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It’s only mid-morning, but on days like today—which is shaping up as the latest of a lot of slow ones—all the history at V.I.P. Records can begin to feel like so many tired, old ghosts. But that’s not the past that’s haunting Anderson, not exactly.

“Right now, I’m feeling like I did it all backwards, like I did it all wrong,” he says somberly. “I got friends who all these years were working eight hours a day for some company. Now they’re getting ready to retire with all their benefits. Now they’re looking at business opportunities they can do. But me, I’m a prisoner of all this.”

Hearing himself say that seems to sadden Anderson. He’s quiet for awhile, looking around the record store. Yet as he slowly surveys the nearly empty World Famous V.I.P. Records, something in that comparison strikes him as funny, and his lips twist into a small smile.

“It’s kinda like trying to change health insurance companies with a pre-existing condition,” he says. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere–I’m stuck at Kaiser!”

Not long afterward, three teenaged guys come into the store, and Anderson excuses himself to serve his customers. Over in a corner, the kids mimic a beat they heard somewhere—maybe on the radio, perhaps at a party. Anderson responds almost immediately, and whatever he’s told them makes them smile. A few minutes later, they leave V.I.P. with a bag containing a CD.

“I definitely have a special ear for music,” Anderson says, bashful-proud, after they’ve gone. “I can’t write a song, play an instrument. I can’t even dance. But I can tell you when you got something. A lot of times when I first I hear a song I already know how many I’m going to sell and who I’m going to sell it to. Because I know who comes in here.”