On Tuesday morning, it was now a full day after Vintage Vinyl released word that Lew Prince was leaving the two-man ownership of the store, which he’d overseen with Tom “Papa” Ray, for over a third of a century. Checking in with emails and calls, he said, drove home the point that “I’m out of work. I don’t have a job.”
While the finality of that was just sinking in today, it was leavened by a certain practicality; already, before a noon meeting with an attorney, Prince has kicked out a job application. At first blush, that may seem an unusual late-career move for someone who’d built up a name-brand business in St. Louis. To Prince, though, it was always just a matter of “when,” not “if.”
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“When I turned 50,” he recalled, “I figured it was time to move on. You know, we don’t move quickly, either of us. It had sort of mooshed around for a while. But once my kids got out of college and my house was paid for, it was time for the next thing.
“I don’t know how you live a life without a job,” he said. “I don’t know how you structure a life. I’m just sort of old-fashioned about work.”
Though a bit of word began to bubble up about the change late last week, the owners wanted to keep things close to the vest as they worked through a couple weeks of meetings with lawyers and accountants. The goal, they said, was to make sure that employees at the Loop’s linchpin music retailer would feel that a real plan was in place. Instead of allowing the news to bleed out, they decided to keep things under wraps until an official press release yesterday.
“It’s weird,” Prince said. “Tom and I never, ever sought publicity for us, just for what was good for the business. So it was ‘Until we get this done, let’s leave it between us.’ I think stability is really important to the people that work there, and announcing it was really important. You wonder, ‘What could happen?’ That kind of thing affects everyone you work with, and while we do a really open-management type of thing, we accepted that this kind of decision has to be worked out well in advance.
“Various store managers have been picking up pieces of [my] job for the last five, six, seven years,” he added. “In the last two years, I’d been putting out fires and doing long-term planning. Leon Red is going to do a lot of that planning now. And it’s going to be very orderly. I’ve been working at this for year, setting up the company for this.”
In its 30-plus years, Vintage Vinyl, like all music retailers, has adapted. The changes in the way people enjoy and purchase music is well-documented. But Prince suggested that the constant tumult of the industry wasn’t in any way the root of his decision.
“The company is pretty sturdy,” he said. “Yeah, the industry is changing, but the world is changing. As the Holy Modal Rounders said, ‘If the next thing doesn’t happen, the universe crumbles.’ Simple law of physics, man.”
Assuming a universe that’s not crumbling, Prince says that “I really have the skills to run or be second-in-command at a modest-sized non-for-profit. or a community-oriented organization. I’m thinking of looking for something along those lines. I’ve taught, and my writing has appeared in many newspapers around the country, so I may do some more writing. I planned on working on a ballot initiative for 2016 around the issue of a fair minimum wage. I’ve got more tricks up my sleeve.
“I just popped open my email and there’s a lot of incredibly sweet, kind feedback,” he concluded. “It’s very gratifying. While it’s ultimately a commercial venture, this company does have an ethics-centred, values-centered base. I think a lot of people have picked up on that. That makes me feel we’ve done it right. We’ve transmitted those values so far, while still able to persist as a business.”
