Burger with Relish

Cedar City » On a recent sunny afternoon, Mark Hollingshead brought his two young sons to a 2,100-square-foot store to buy music. Luckily for Groovacious Records, the store they entered wasn't Walmart or another retail chain.

Groovacious Records, nestled next to Evans Hairstyling College and behind the Best Western Town & Country Inn, is set to celebrate its 10 year anniversary as an independent record store next year. The green-brick building might seem out of place in Cedar City, a hamlet with fewer than 30,000 people, but to Tim and Lisa Cretsinger's customers, the store is indispensable.

"I don't like any of the music they sell at Walmart," said Chas Hollingshead, 17, as he purchased CDs by Iron & Wine and Elliott Smith. "At Walmart, they have Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. Here, they have everything else."

"Walmart is just three aisles of stuff," said Chas' brother, Sam Hollingshead, 12, who bought two Coldplay albums.

"We could go to Walmart and get them cheaper," said Mark, 46. "But [the Cretsingers] do a lot for the community and they improve the quality of life here. Look at it. It's fun to come in and hang out. It reminds me of record stores from the 1970s."

Yes, look at it.

Every square inch of the store, including the ceiling, has a purpose, whether it's to sell albums, merchandise, incense, music magazines, T-shirts that say "I Love Vinyl," an "Appetite for Destruction" clock, sew-on Green Day patches, an Avenged Sevenfold barstool, Freddie Mercury action figures, or Neil Young and Pink Floyd mobiles hanging from the rafters.
"It's a simple life," said Lisa. "We don't see crackheads around here."

That was part of the reason the couple moved from Oregon nearly a decade ago to set up shop in a former dancehall that still has rubber cushioning underneath the plywood floor.
Tim, now with white windswept hair and a trimmed, yet bushy beard, owned two Groovacious Records stores in Keizer, a sister town of the state capital, Salem, with roughly the same population as Cedar City. The first store opened in 1992, and Lisa was an employee whom Tim courted.

But Keizer was becoming a place they no longer wanted to live, Tim said. Rent was expensive and increasing, their neighborhood of mom-and-pop stores was being eroded by corporate stores and homeless drug users, and the weather was rainy and cold. "I was sick nine months out of the year because of the air and mold and bugs," Lisa said.

The two wanted to open a record store somewhere else, and reflected back to a long weekend they had spent visiting Utah's national parks. Although they didn't know a soul in Cedar City, they remembered the laid-back lifestyle they witnessed.

It took a year to box up the stores' inventory, and then required a semi and three U-Hauls to pack everything.

The new Groovacious Records opened in October 2000 with two employees: Tim and Lisa. They're still the only employees of the record store, which might be why the couple has only taken one weeklong vacation since 1992.

Although the two know more about music than anyone else you would ever meet -- Tim's favorite music to play in his store includes Tinted Windows, Janet Robin and Grizzly Bear -- they still do business the old-fashioned way. Every album title sold is recorded on a yellow legal pad Tim keeps next to the register. An old computer is also on the counter, but Tim admitted that the only reason they keep it is so that their cat, Mr. Waits, has a monitor to sleep on.
Over the years, the two have become vital members of the local arts community. At regular in-store concerts, a crowd gathers near the back of the store on comfortable couches that sit next to a small performance stage.

For a time, the couple hosted a local radio show. Until this year, when the two were unable to find sponsorships because of the financial downturn, they ran Groovefest every summer, a free music festival featuring national draws on the bill with local acts. The Cretsingers even created their own record label, Groovacious Platters, to help launch local musicians.

One musician signed to the Cretsingers' label is Steven Swift, a Cedar City-based singer-songwriter. "Walmart is an evil word in this building," Swift said. "How many stores of these [like Groovacious] do we have anymore? The person behind the counter is interested in finding something I'm interested in."

And that is why customers keep coming in between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m., six days a week.
Jon Hately, 54, visited the store recently to talk music with Tim and wound up buying three DVDs: "Harvey," "Thunderball" and the B-movie "Robinson Crusoe on Mars."

"[Tim] helps jog my memory," Hately said. "He's personable, and he cares."

"There's a loyalty to this place," Mark Hollingshead agreed.

The main reason Groovacious has stayed in business, despite the shuttering of other independent retailers locally and nationally, isn't just loyal customers, or the fact that the Cretsingers also stock Demi Lovato albums for mainstream tastes. It's because the couple has never taken out a loan. Every single piece of merchandise in the store is owned, free and clear, by the Cretsingers.

The only person they are beholden to is the owner of their building, who they say is a decent person who keeps rent reasonable.

"We'll be here for a while because we don't know what else to do," Lisa Cretsinger said. "There's nowhere else I'd rather be. I like being here, in my store, with Tim, listening to music."

Groovacious Records
Where » 173 N. 100 West, Cedar City
Phone » 435-867-9800
Open » Monday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Online » www.groovacious.com