Aug. 11, 1973: Record retailer Charlie Cavage

 

Before Record Theatre, Buffalo already had a major homegrown chain of record shops. 

Aug. 11, 1973

Engineering an Independent Record Business 

WALKING THROUGH the University Plaza parking lot in gray pants and a white short-sleeved shirt, the oldest and biggest independent record dealer in Buffalo looks more like what he went to the University of Buffalo to become – a civil engineer.

          “I was working for the railroad and I wanted to make as much as my boss did,” Carl (Charlie) Cavage says. “I knew it would take me 20 years to do it through seniority, so it was quicker to go to school. When I came back, I was his boss.”

          Cavage, who’s 50, and his blonde wife, Betty, have just come in from the opening of the new quarters for their Seneca Mall branches – one for cards, one for records, an accommodation to the fact that record buyers and card buyers don’t mix.

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WHAT STARTED as a single Cavage store selling phonographs and 78 rpm records at Kensington and Eggert some 26 years ago has grown into seven stores, a warehouse and a rack-jobbing operation that services most of the area’s college bookstore record departments.

          The Buffalo area accounts for 2.5 percent of all record sales and Cavage estimates that he sells one-one thousandth of all records bought in the nation.

          “If we sell a thousand of something,” he says, “we can figure it’s a million-seller.”

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FRIENDS URGED Cavage into business for himself, offering to help start a tire store. Cavage, however, saw no excitement where the rubber meets the road. But records looked like a coming thing and he thought they’d be fun too.

          Of the 20 or so independent record shops that flourished here then, Cavage’s is the only survivor. The rest went down before or during the first revolution in music retailing – the discount department store and rack-jobbing blitz that hit this area in the late ‘50s.

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THESE DAYS independent record stores here maintain themselves by offering what the discount trade ignores. Ruda’s on Broadway and Audrey & Del’s on the East Side thrive by serving specialized tastes in addition to popular demands.

          Others, like the University Plaza’s Record Runner, the Record Bin in Kenmore or the Sample Record Shop on Hertel, hang in by cultivating neighborhood trade and having special sales or hard-to-get items.

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ALL HAVE TO compete with the giant Transcontinent Record Sales-Buffalo One-Stop wholesale distributing complex, which not only wholesales records to them and most of the rest of upstate New York, but also has an extensive rack-jobbing operation which fills the bins of the major discount department stores.

          Cavage, taciturn as his wife is bubbly, sits somewhere in between the smaller stores and the wholesalers, with a mom-and-pop operation (all five of his children have worked for him) that’s gone big-time through adaptability.

          “Up until about 15 years ago,” he says, “there was a manufacturer’s list price and almost everybody sold at list. Then the mass merchandisers came along and cut the prices. We stayed at list price until 1960, then we had to go discount.”

          He made a similar adaptation in the late ‘60s when underground rock began to boom, ridding his stores of their generalized stock and concentrating heavily on rock. It paid off.

          “Now at the Main Place store alone,” he says, “we’re doing just about what we did with all four stores we had 10 years ago.”

          In Buffalo’s rock ‘n roll heydays in the ‘50s, Cavage says he was able to make a record a hit just by selecting it as his “Cavage Hit of the Week,” a single which could be gotten for 50 cents and six Squirt bottle caps.

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“THE RECORDS would cost me 60 cents and I’d sell them for 50 cents. Squirt helped out a bit at first. I’d have record companies bidding for the hit, but I’d pick one version and go with that.”

          Occasionally it backfired when he’d get a better wholesale deal from a company. The most memorable case was picking Tab Hunter’s atrocious version of “Young Love” over Sonny James’ classic.

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“I’D GO TO THE DEEJAYS and they’d play the record for a week or two and work up interest in these things,” he says. “You can’t do that any more. Now it’s all cut and dried.”

          Cavage, who until recently made daily deliveries to all seven stores himself, prides himself on being able to get new releases to the public a day to a week sooner than the rack-jobbers.

          “Sometimes,” Mrs. Cavage says, “he’ll be out waiting on the loading dock, waiting for a shipment to come in so he could get it out to the stores.”

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ANOTHER WAY Cavage has had to adapt is in flexible discount pricing, which keeps his stores competitive with the rack-jobbers and his University Plaza rival, the Record Runner.

          “This store is the most demanding,” he says of the University branch. “The kids up here really know their music.”

          A brand new album will hit his store at regular discount prices, then as interest in it rises, the price drops to $3 or $3.50 and stays there as long as the record’s hot and others are discounting.

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AFTER THE RUSH is over, the album reverts to standard prices and if leftover copies sit around the stores unsold for three or four months, back they go to the manufacturer, who clips the corners and sends them back as cut-outs to fill the $1 and $2 bargain bins.

          Cavage, having swept classical, jazz and folk albums from his shelves to make room for rock, now is expanding his stores to bring them back in again “to appeal to more people.”

          As for his own tastes, Charlie Cavage favors big-band jazz and Chuck Mangione.

          “That thing by Deodato,” he says, “I like that. I like something that has a melody and it has a beat and it doesn’t kill ya.” 

The box/sidebar: 

Shop for Bargain Discs 

          Buying record albums is a lot like buying groceries – if you want to pick up the bargains, and who doesn’t, you’ve got to shop around.

          Happily, runaway inflation hasn’t hit the record bins the way it’s hit the food counters. The last major increase came a couple years back when manufacturers’ suggested retain prices went to $5.98 from $4.98.

          But who pays $5.98 for a $5.98 album anyway? The record merchants are out for volume just like that friendly car dealer out where the freeways meet and albums are as discountable as deodorants and lawn furniture.

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DISCOUNTERS ROUTINELY slice $1 or more from the price and virtually all the $5.98 goodies can be found anywhere for between $4.12 and $4.95. But they can be had for less than that by anyone industrious enough to drive around and dig for them.

          And there can be real cheapies among the current hits. Some, what the discounters call loss leaders, are marked down so far they sell below cost. The hope is, of course, that you’ll buy something else to help balance the ledgers.

          A survey this week of half a dozen randomly-chosen record stores turned up these prices on five major albums:

          Carole King, “Fantasy” – $3.77, $3.80, $3.98 and $3.99.

          Jethro Tull, “A Passion Play” – $2.99, $3.33, $3.60, $3.98 and $3.99.

          Deep Purple, “Made in Japan” (two-record set) – $5.99, $6.50, $7.14, $7.54 and $7.76.

          Bette Midler, “The Divine Miss M” – $3.57, $3.80, $3.98 and $4.57.

          Yes, “Yessongs” (three-record set) – $7.14, $7.57, $8.50 and $9.14.

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DESPITE COMPLAINTS to the contrary, record prices in the Buffalo area are generally on a par with or slightly lower than prices in New York City and Cleveland, though retailers here pay roughly $2.85 to $3.35 per album.

          “When we run sales on a $5.98 album for $2.94, we lose,” reports one local rack-jobber who services record departments at discount department stores.

          “The stores want a lot of specials like that because they generate a lot of traffic. But we get them from, say, Warner Bros. at $2.88 and by the time we sticker them and send them to the store, we’re losing money.”

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IN THE PHOTO: Charlie Cavage with sales clerk Chris Kauhl at Cavage’s University Plaza store.

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FOOTNOTE: Starting from his original location in the Cleve-Hill Plaza in 1947, Charlie Cavage eventually built a chain of 28 stores, stretching from Buffalo to Syracuse. He sold the business to Camelot Music in 1994 and died in 2005.

          His British-born wife Betty was a reporter in The Buffalo News women’s department when I got there in 1968, but was full-time in the business when this was written. A widow with five children, she married Charlie, whose first wife had died a couple years earlier, in 1967. The five kids who worked in the shops were hers.

          I fondly recall the Cavages Hit of the Week, although as a kid in Fredonia I wasn’t close enough to Cavages stores or fond enough of Squirt to take advantage of the 50-cent offer. However, Charlie may have had an influence on my record-buying, which was where most of my paper route money went in those days.

My retailer of choice in Fredonia was a lot like the original Cavages stores – a card shop on West Main Street called Willsey’s Gift Center. The weekly Hot 100 list, freshly ripped from Billboard magazine, was prominently posted in the music department.

The daughter of the owner, Carol Willsey, was two classes ahead of me at Fredonia High School and married the hippest cat in town – Boots Bell, the cowboy-shod, moustachioed deejay at the village’s radio station, WBUZ. Boots, a Korean War veteran with a Purple Heart who was born Ralph Bellito in Cleveland, went on to renown at WHOT in Youngstown, Ohio. He became such a big deal there that he got to introduce The Beatles at their Pittsburgh concert in 1964.