Jones’ Substack explores the years he worked at Cellophane Square, a beloved record store in Seattle, during a transformative period in American music history
The history of Seattle music hasn’t lacked coverage since the word “grunge” first stuck to the ceiling and refused to fall back to Earth. The superstars, the ’90s fashions, the anthems and classic records that emerged from the scene are forever engraved in the lexicon of American culture. But often omitted from the mythos is the fact that the musicians who made all those records were also just regular people who loved music. The record stores where they shopped often influenced their taste as much as seeing another band take the stage. There was no shortage of good record stores in the city in the 1970s through 1990s, with new and used offerings from places like Campus Music, Peaches Records, Tower Records, Golden Oldies, Puss ’n Books, and many more that catered to different styles and tastes. But the one mentioned most often in interviews is Cellophane Square, a University District used record shop that opened in 1972 and eventually expanded to three stores that included imports and new releases — and a pinball room.
Few storefronts offer better indicators of changing times than a record store. They tell of the technology of the day, the fads being pushed on the youth, and provide a general cultural pulse of what’s ruling the airwaves. And though the mere thought of a seasoned record store employee telling his life story is enough to conjure an image of a snobby hipster who could spend six hours spewing about their favorite band’s unreleased B-sides, a new Substack provides the ins and outs of one record store’s golden years — without the dreaded snark or condescension you may fear. Former Cellophane Square manager Hugh Jones is writing about his life story by focusing almost exclusively on the record store where he worked from 1975-2000. The Record Store Years is a weekly Substack about his 25 years at Cellophane Square, some detailed history of his favorite bands, and the inside scoop on some customers who eventually started their own bands and had their records grace the store’s shelves. He also takes readers on “Side Trips” about the influential Led Zeppelin fanzines he contributed to, plus much more.
With round glasses and a laid back demeanor, Hugh Jones sat surrounded by framed concert posters, collages of musicians on stage, and, unsurprisingly, a stocked record shelf during our video call. His memory is remarkable. Almost any time a band came up he could either list the date he first saw them in concert or share the first record he owned by them. His combination of a deep knowledge bank and genuine passion for music drives The Record Store Years and shapes it into a compelling document of how music intersects with our lives and sometimes shapes the world around us.
“Music is so important to people, and in many cases so emotionally important to people,” Hugh Jones said. “That’s a great thing, and I wanted to share that excitement.”
Jones’ perspective is what allows The Record Store Years to thrive: he treats the store itself as the star of the series, not himself. He’s the vehicle that carries the story, the careful observer and meticulous archivist who watches as Seattle and the record store world undergo revolutionary changes: vinyl to CDs, computers overtaking anything handwritten, Seattle transforming from a DIY artist hub to the center of the musical universe.
Jones grew up in New York City before his family moved about 50 miles north to the more rural Cold Spring when he was 10. His mom worked in the city and took the train daily, so Jones had ample opportunities to go record shopping and see music in the city. His parents loved music, too, and he was raised with the music of Broadway soundtracks and classical music, but also the folk songs of artists like Odetta and Pete Seeger. Then in second grade his older cousin took him to see The Beatles at the famed Shea Stadium concert when he was 8 years old. And though he’d heard the Fab Four on the radio prior to their US arrival, like millions of others, he was swept into the mania of everything music in the 1960s had to offer.
“When The Beatles came it was all around,” Jones said. “It was inescapable and I got hooked.”
Records quickly became the focus in his life. After Jones graduated high school, he and the same cousin took a cross-country road trip. He joined her as they went as far west as Seattle, where he had a few friends. They crossed into Canada and may have had to pay a steep fee to border agents for being caught with a controlled substance. But once back in the states and low on money, his cousin decided to go back home because she missed her boyfriend. Jones called his Seattle friends and asked if he could crash on their couch for a few nights until he found a job and a place to live. They obliged, and in July 1974 he became a resident of the Pacific Northwest. He did take another cross country trip to pick up all the records he’d left in New York, though.
“When I first came to Seattle, I definitely got the feeling that it was still the ’60s there. A lot of that attitude kind of hung on,” Jones said. “Everything was mellow, man. It was a very different vibe than the East Coast. I fell in love with Seattle. It’s still a pretty great place, but it was amazing in the ’70s. Really cheap, really liberal. I was in the U District, so there were lots of university students.”
His first job out west was with a VISTA (Volunteers In Service To America) program, which he describes as a domestic Peace Corps-type organization, that sent him to work with various non-profits. It paid $200 a month and covered his $45 rent. He then signed on to manage the 1975 Folklife Music Festival with his girlfriend, Lesley Petty, who he met in fall of 1974 and married in 1985. Once that ended, Jones applied to every record store in the U District. In October of 1975, he went to work for Cellophane Square, a store reputed for its knowledgeable staff. Cellophane Square proved to be an excellent fit where he became a multi-decade fixture, to the point that many customers assumed it was his store. As he writes in the first installment of The Record Store Years, “To this day people still occasionally introduce me as ‘. . . the guy that used to own Cellophane Square,’ but I was never even partial owner — always an hourly or salaried employee of the company. The reason that I am so identified with the store has more to do with the 25 years I put in and the fact that as a sales clerk, manager, and later marketing director I was to some degree the public face of the outfit.” The store was actually owned by Jim and Pat Panagos, with Steve Delph in the beginning, though he left early on.
When Jones arrived in Seattle the city was still a hard place for smaller bands to justify touring through, a change after growing up near the Big Apple where every band dreams of playing. The best way to follow a band was to be a voracious listener and record buyer. As words like “prog” and “punk” rock entered the discussion, the notion of what a song could be was stretched into new dimensions in the late ’70s. Artists were taking music in unheard of directions, and those records were in demand. Cellophane Square was a destination for people hoping to be exposed to new musical territory. The store served as a home and a haven for music-obsessed teens, Jones included, but also those who wanted to keep up with the radical new sounds filtering into the store. Many of those teens then turned around and formed bands of their own and cite Cellophane Square as a formative influence.
Kim Warnick, bassist and vocalist for the Fastbacks and Visqueen, fondly recalled her days of shopping at Cellophane Square and the effect it had on expanding her musical world as a teenager. Her circle of friends — which included her future Fastbacks bandmates Kurt Bloch and Lulu Gargiulo, along with Scott Dittman and Al Bloch, who formed The Cheaters with the latter’s brother Kurt — would head to the store as often as possible to see what was new, cheap, or recommended.
Related: Nothing Was Learned: The Making of The Fastbacks’ For WHAT Reason! (2024)
“Cellophane Square was everything anybody that loved rock ’n’ roll music wanted to get to,” Warnick said. “It was the holy grail, and the people who worked there were the best people, and they were our mentors, and we got to know them because we were there every fucking day. Hugh Jones, and all of Cellophane Square, they are huge in our stories, both The Cheaters and Fastbacks.”
Al Bloch (The Cheaters, The Bad Scene, Wenis, The Deans, Concrete Blonde) adds further testimony: “When we were 13, 14, Hugh Jones managed Cellophane Square, and that was where Kurt and I were all the time, buying records and learning about bands, even before punk rock. We’d go there and buy the latest hard rock records or British imports. And Hugh, he just strikes me as always being there. He was a huge Led Zeppelin fan. So we would just talk to him about any band and he would know about it. So he was hugely important to our formative years.”
Jones’ reverence for all kinds of music occasionally leads The Record Store Years out of the record shop, including historical context and loads of info about Led Zeppelin and stories about seeing classic bands like Rockpile. But the majority of the story remains inside the store. The job obviously came with downsides like having to deal with shady promo men and difficult customers. But the perks were pretty great, like having first access to any items customers sold, with storage in back for items employees were holding but couldn’t yet afford. The Record Store Years fondly recalls the “hippie capitalism” that made the store a draw for customers and employees alike: the mystery bags, the heaps of bootlegs (which led to an FBI raid), their policy to purchase every record customers sold, and the window displays of rare collector’s items — or Cellophane employee and Young Fresh Fellow Scott McCaughey’s conspiracy web display that linked every artist he could find named Barry. Jones also organized the lone concert the store promoted that featured Henry Boy, The Cheaters, and Kim Warnick’s first band, The Radios. It lost more than $600.
Jones was never a professional writer, but he wrote record reviews for the influential alt-weekly The Rocket and landed a few pieces in the Seattle Weekly. His greatest achievement in print was with the Led Zeppelin fanzine Proximity. A 16-year-old named Juli LeCompte had seen his contributions to another Zeppelin zine called Pure Blues, so she found him at Cellophane Square and asked if he’d be interested in starting their own newsprint fanzine. Jones agreed, but only on the condition that he didn’t have to use his name at first. As Nick Patrix, he wrote about bootlegs and the Yardbirds, and contributed some rare photos. LeCompte found a market for the zine and shipped it to readers across the country.
A combination of influences told Jones it was time to write about Cellophane Square. While telling a story at a party, a friend and former coworker casually mentioned he should write a memoir. In 2017 he began writing chronologically with a loose idea for a book in mind, but after tackling a large chunk, he stepped away for a while. “I got busy with some other stuff and I kind of put it aside, like, well, I’ll think about this later. All along in the back of my mind, it was like, I have to get this out there. I really want to publish it in some way.” His wife, Lesley, started telling him about Substack and how much she enjoyed reading various blogs on the platform. He appreciated Kareem Abdul-Jabar’s page for its blend of politics and culture, and he realized the freedom Substack allowed writers. “Substack became the obvious outlet.” From there the form of weekly stories with Side Trips about bands and other related history became the format he would follow.
Unpleasant days accumulate through any career, but so far Jones has only encountered good memories. “All the stuff I’ve written about so far is a party in my mind,” he said. He knows there are darker moments approaching from when his responsibilities grew and his enjoyment shrank. As of yet, he has not penned anything about the days he recalls less fondly, citing not writer’s block, but trepidation.
“From the mid-to-late ’80s until the early ’90s, I got really burned out and kind of overwhelmed with my duties,” he said. “I was regional manager, so the bulk of my time was spent kind of putting out fires in the three different stores, dealing with management issues, and it got very stressful. So that’s a hard stretch for me to write about.”
Then, alongside grunge, the seismic changes hit the store: CDs, computers, and corporations. Handwritten pull sheets were out, barcodes were in. Cellophane Square became a Billboard Soundscan store, meaning sales were counted towards the Billboard charts. They began to carry new and Top-10 albums. The higher-priced CDs displaced collectible and used records in the store’s prime floor space, and vinyl was relegated to the margins.
“CDs became the thing,” Jones said. “And it’s so funny now looking back. At the time it seemed like CDs were it. This is how we’re going to be listening to music from now on. Hindsight is 20-20, but I wish that we hadn’t embraced that so fully and kind of left the records behind. We always kept some records in stock, but we reduced it down hugely, like most stores did. And then the great irony of the universe is now records cost considerably more than CDs.”
He eventually shifted laterally from manager to marketing director, a move that helped him regain his love for the job. So while Seattle was the center of the musical universe, Jones was organizing in-store performances, working with artists, and not dealing with store personnel issues anymore. “The grunge years arrived, or, basically exploded into the early ’90s, and things got a lot more interesting again.” One such story to come involves a 1998 in-store album release performance by The Melvins that drew a crowd well over capacity and required help from the police and the tallest member of Nirvana to keep the peace. Despite the craziness, he insists “it was the end-all-be-all of our in-stores.”
But, of course, the dotcoms arrived and one from Portland purchased Cellophane Square. Initially, Jones enjoyed the perks of traditional healthcare and a pay raise, but the cultural change forced him out.
“I decided to leave because things were obviously going up in flames. So far I haven’t thrown anybody under the bus, but those fuckers that bought Cellophane Square are going to get a piece of my mind,” Jones said with a laugh.
Hugh Jones gave his notice in December of 2000 and worked his last day on January 8, 2001. Cellophane Square closed its final location in 2009 — perhaps coincidentally, but telling in retrospect, just months after a Swedish startup launched a new “streaming service” called Spotify — after 37 years in business.
Following his 25 years at Cellophane Square, Jones was reluctant to work in retail again. He spent a few months at an art supply store and became an eBay seller, but wasn’t satisfied. When a friend’s mom needed some work done on her deck, he fixed the railing and realized he enjoyed it and was good at it. Afterall, he had provided the stores with a bunch of woodworking and various repairs whenever needed. After doing a few more small jobs, he got a contractor’s license and launched a 20-year second career as a contractor focusing on remodels.
“I started in my 40s so it kind of wore out my body, but I liked doing it,” Jones said. “The advantage of that was that it was my own company, and I’m enough of a self-motivated person that it worked out for me. I remember thinking, ‘I should’ve done this sooner!’”
Now retired, Jones still lives in Seattle with Lesley. He has two kids who are both music lovers. “I’m afraid they both grew up thinking it was normal to have 4,000 records on shelves in the living room,” Hugh said. His daughter, Audrey, married a heavy metal drummer, and his son, Rhys, is preparing his first garage record. Hugh has also played in various bands over the years with Della Street, The Penningtones, The Moonspinners, and with Christy McWilson. He’s also played in the Nick Lowe cover band The Lowe Beats with two Young Fresh Fellows (McCaughey and Jim Sangster), John Ramberg (The Tripwires, Stumpy Joe), and Graham Black (The Model Rockets), as well as with The Squirrels, and The Picketts.
With vinyl’s resurgence in popularity, The Record Store Years serves as a great read for lifelong collectors, but also those who are just grabbing their first LPs. Either camp will benefit from Jones describing why some of those old sleeves have corners cut off or holes punched in them. His way of explaining the ins and outs of a life spent in a record store is written as an invitation to go along on the journey with him, and the cameos of people bursting through those doors have so far made the story informative, entertaining, and sometimes outright hilarious.
“For a long time nobody was really paying a lot of attention to records. And now that everybody is, those stories to me, and obviously some other people, become all the more interesting,” Jones said. “I don’t want it to be too much just about me because I think it has a wider interest if I’m talking about things like the record business. I’m just trying to get everything I can remember about the experience that I think would be interesting to other people.”
Jones has the next few months of posts planned and written, but beyond that, he has some ripe topics to revisit. What happens inside a hometown record store when a local band starts being treated like the American Beatles? What were the discussions like that prioritized CDs over vinyl? How do you walk away from a dream job after 25 years when most customers assume you own the place? The Record Store Years is a great example of a writer who understands that our lives stretch so far beyond ourselves. Hugh Jones was situated in a prime position to experience a crucial moment in American music history, and, thankfully, he has the records, photos, and memory to guide us through it all.
— Additional reporting by Brett Wright
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