A sign of the two very different worlds he now does business in, Dave Hoenack was sorting through download codes for the new Ben Weaver album Monday when a customer approached the store counter and asked for help with an old-school 7-inch single.
"I need one of those … things," the guy requested of Hoenack, who produced a small bin of adapters that fit 7-inch records onto turntables.
Owners of Hymie's Vintage Records since 2009, Dave and his wife, Laura Hoenack, know the ins and outs of selling (and playing) records in their nationally renowned record shop on E. Lake Street in Minneapolis' Longfellow neighborhood. Now they're working on learning on how to sell records everywhere else in the world.
The Hoenacks are launching a record label this week, also called Hymie's Records. They hope to leverage the store's good reputation, resources and good ol' brick-and-mortar location to gain more attention for some of their favorite artists.
Their first two releases are by acoustic, Americana-flavored Twin Cities artists that have performed for Record Store Day and other events at the store, Ben Weaver and Brian Laidlaw, who will play Friday's launch party at the Cedar Cultural Center. It was Laidlaw who first urged the Hoenacks to follow through on the idea for their record company, and it was Weaver who gave it some urgency.
"Ben had gotten to a point where the idea of putting out another record seemed really shaky, and that just seemed like something we needed to make happen," Dave Hoenack recalled.
After two critically acclaimed but largely overlooked albums for Chicago alt-country label Bloodshot Records — "full of weary determination and aphoristic clarity," per the New York Times — Weaver pours the same kind of stark poetry and open-wound gravity into his record for Hymie's, titled "I Would Rather Be a Buffalo."
The songs on the all-acoustic, nine-song vinyl collection were recorded in a barn and are heavily inspired by animals — wild, domestic and alive or dead, with Weaver himself among the weary and woolly throngs in the goosebumps-inducing highlight "Ramblin' Bones." The Oregon native weaves between banjo and acoustic guitar with minimal accompaniment from Michael Lewis (Alpha Consumer, Bon Iver) on upright bass.
