Nostalgia is a powerful thing. It has the innate ability to transport through time and space and to conjure up feelings we scarcely recall we had in us. But there it is, tucked away down deep, awoken by a sight, sound or smell. 

For many, music is a great binder, a changer and binder, an agent of togetherness. The vinyl record, for example, was the touchstone of a place and time that signalled the boom in musical innovation; the dawn of blues, the rise in heavy metal, birth of hip hop and emergence of the country music star.

No longer is the vinyl record a figment of the past. No, the record is in, baby, and those in the know, know best that if you need that rare find or can’t miss hot product, you go to Flip Side. 

Flip Side Music

Founded by Doug and Melisa Jones, lifelong music lovers and wax-heads (vinyl lovers), Flip Side Music + More has grown from hidden gem to firmly established pillar in Newfoundland and Labrador’s vinyl renaissance. 

“When I was growing up, there was vinyl at Woolco, Zellers … Fred’s had two locations, Tony’s in Mount Pearl was on the go. So there were a lot of places at one time that kind of dwindled off,” recalled Doug in a sitdown with The Herald. 

“We grew up with records. There’s a picture of me on the Flip Side page. I think I’m probably two years old with a McCartney record held upside down in my dad’s office. Beatles records all over the floor. I grew up with it, and I kind of left it when I moved to the mainland for a few years.”

Returning to the island years later, Doug would meet his soon to be life-partner in Melisa, bonding over – you guessed it – a mutual love of vinyl. 

“There was a Sunday flea market (in Ontario) and I started picking up records again. Meanwhile, here at home, I had all my stuff in storage, so I moved back and continued on and then we met (gesturing to Melisa),” Doug shared.

“We both owned our original record collection,” Melisa adds, with Doug laughing that, “Our first date was actually vinyl related. It had to do with Houses of the Holy (from the iconic Led Zeppelin).”

The rest, as they say, is written in music history. The pair wed, had children, and laid-down roots on the island, but their mutual love of music, and the ever-alluring vinyl, remained strong.

“When our kids got a bit older, we started buying records again. Doug kind of got really good at finding hard to get stuff,” Melisa explained. 

“We started out and he’d say, ‘Well, I’m ordering from this site, do you guys want to go in on it?’ Like on some local groups to kind of split shipping. And then it kind of evolved from there.”

“When you’re ordering from Europe or Japan or wherever else it’s a high cost. So we threw in a few (records) and then would sell those to offset the shipping,” Doug adds. “And then we kind of decided, well, let’s try and bring in some new stuff. And to do that you need a GST number, a business number. So we said ‘Well, let’s give it a shot and invest a little bit of money and see where it goes.’” 

Adds Melisa, “We already run another business, a bigger business as our day job. So it wasn’t a huge learning curve for us. Retail’s different with inventories, but actually going through the processes of dealing with business stuff, it’s not a stretch.”

The Record Business

Developing their own record-slinging business came out of a necessity to find that ever-rare collector’s find and hidden gem as anything else, the couple explained.

“We couldn’t really find some of the titles we were looking for locally. Like I said before, I grew up with Fred’s and it’s a wonderful spot, but it doesn’t really have some stuff that you would be looking for outside of what they carry. So hard rock, metal, hip hop, even a bit of jazz and stuff,” Doug admits. “We just started bringing stuff in, reggae as well. So yeah, that’s kind where it started. And here we are, four years later.”

For the record, vinyl is back in a big way, long since overtaking CDs as the most in-demand form of physical media. 

In Newfoundland and Labrador, vinyl is massively popular once again, and Flip Side has capitalized on that boom, much to the delight of their patrons.

The couple went one-step further in their vinyl love, kick-starting the now must-attend Record Fair NL in St. John’s, a record-lover’s dream-day jam-packed with vendors carrying everything from the latest-and-greatest-stuff-on-wax to rare finds and golden oldies. 

What started as a, ‘let’s see where it goes’ proposition, has evolved into a bi-annual exercise in a provincial love of vinyl.

“The first one was a gamble,” Melisa admits. “That very first one, we had no idea what to expect in regards to patron numbers and that kind of thing. It was at the Legion and the first one we automatically knew we had to go bigger. Anyone who was at first one, you couldn’t move. It was shoulder to shoulder.”

“When we first tried it, it kind of came from an idea of a local vinyl group that wanted to do a get-together,” adds Doug. 

“We kind of said, ‘Well, let’s expand on that a little bit and we’ll reserve the small room and the big room at the Legion and we’ll see what the interest is’. So I think it was probably within 24 hours we said, ‘Yeah, OK, we need the big room.’ We’ll try it. We’ll charge a buck to get in to cover the cost and do it DIY and do it right. I mean, I grew up playing in punk rock bands and you go rent a hall, rent a PA, put the show off and away you go. That’s kind of been our philosophy for the record fair.”

Record Fair NL: May 15^th

With the next installment of the Record Fair NL scheduled for May 15th at their long-time home at the St. John’s Farmers’ Market, and with Flip Side’s business booming with both local and international buyers, we pose the perhaps obvious question: why vinyl?

“It’s not a fad anymore, right? You can’t deny it. So I think part of it is a nostalgia factor, for sure,” says Doug. 

“Part of it, for us personally, everybody’s life is pretty hectic. And if you can come home, drop the needle, just sit for 22 minutes per side and not really have to think about anything else. There’s immense value in that. And then you’ve got the gearheads who love their turntables and cartridges and sound setups, and they’re really into it. And then there’s other people who just like to hang out with their kids and share music with their friends.”

For more on Flip Side Music + More visit flipsidenl.com. For all things concerning Record Fair NL visit the official event Facebook page.

A few years ago, I brushed against a fur coat that was hanging in a closet. In an instant I was transported back to my childhood home and the soft dry smell of my mom’s fur coat. It was seal skin. I don’t know how she could have afforded it. That closet encounter with a fur coat was a full half century after she had died. Aromas can do that. They have a power.

Tastes from the Past

Over the holidays our Christmas table was graced with boiled turnips and parsnips, potatoes and cabbage and some other things. They were all on the table and I haven’t had that meal in a very long while. There was salt beef as well. 

It was a jumble of tastes from the past that reminded me immediately of another time and a Sunday dinner long ago. 

I have to tell you the truth here. It wasn’t very good. Now I know a lot of Newfoundlanders won’t like the tone of this piece. They see the past, however bad it might have been, as having some kind of virtue in itself. They get all misty eyed over the things that were.

It’s as if you can’t be a loyal native son of good old Terra Nova if you don’t eat seal flippers or cabbage or  turnips or parsnips. 

Now I must break the news to you that I don’t like any of those things because they are from a period in my life where we, as a family, didn’t have enough. Our food choices were driven by economy. We ate vegetables that would grow easily. Root crops. It was about “getting by.”

‘Cooked Dinner’

I mean to put it another way; nobody actually LIKES parsnips do they? I ate them only because there would be no jelly and cream for dessert if I didn’t.

By the way, Grandmother used to called “turnips” by a different name. It was “turmits.”

I always thought it was Irish, but I can’t find that in print so maybe it was just her. The only form in which I could even look at “turmits” was as “colcannon.”

colcannon

Remember that? It was a kind of hash of turnip, cabbage, potato, carrots and parsnip  that was mashed up with butter  and fried the next day after “a cooked dinner.” It’s related I think “to bubble and squeak” in England and Ireland although colcannon comes from Northern Ireland I am told.

There was my true tale of ”cooked dinner.” No more till next year and in the Spring, I don’t want any flippers.

They were actually called Caribou exercise books. They were made of dirt cheap paper that had the arithmetic “times tables” on the back. You couldn’t use a pen on them because the paper just made any ink blot. Now these weren’t ballpoint ink pens because, and you will gasp in amazement, ballpoint pens hadn’t been invented when I started school. 

A Symbol of Hope

My desk had an inkwell, although we really worked in lead pencil. The new scribbler though, despite all its deficiencies, was a symbol. It was a symbol of hope and the idea of a fresh start, a new beginning. 

By the end of the first month it would be messed up. By the end of another it would be rotten with soup and Pepsi stains. At the beginning of the school year though the scribbler was brand new and inviting. So it is now that we stare down the calendar year and the road ahead in hope. I’m an optimist by nature. I look with enthusiasm at the opportunity.

Dad would tell me I had to try and “forge ahead.” That sounds sensible to me. It wasn’t an instruction or dictum to conquer the world. It was really just advice. “Forge ahead.”

 I think I can do that. The world is still broken, but I can handle it. Here a vax, there a vax, everywhere a vax-vax. That’s not the end of the world.  A couple of jabs and the fact we were mostly an island can carry us a very long way. 

Cut back

I do hope we do well economically this year. Everybody and his brother can see we need to cut back and I don’t see that happening yet. You know, ferries running empty, schools with a handful of students.  

I’ll know more when we see our next budget, which will really be the government response to the Greene Report. I do hope as well we see an end to a situation where it’s easier to stay home and do nothing than go to work in the morning. In school we used to joke, “My father did nuttin’ and my grandfather did nuttin’ so I should be able to do nuttin.”

There’s our challenge and I think we might be up to it. We will open the pages to our new scribbler. It’s all clear and inviting. 

Write well. We might succeed this year. It might be that our time has come. Try and forge ahead.  

Corey Lynch admits that Megahit Video was created almost by accident. As all good yarns should, Lynch begins his with these endearing words; “Well, that’s a funny story….”

The VHS-store-within-a-basement concept happened as Lynch and his wife were renovating a wet-bar in their home. 

“I had begun building this movie-themed bar and as I was showing people, all of a sudden everybody started eating up all this nostalgia. Many people want Montreal Canadiens or Bruins, things like that. I don’t like sports, but I do love movies. So I knew I wanted to have something that looked like an old video store. So we went from there,” he began. 

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Gum ball machine (free ‘rental’ with a black one, of course) popcorn popper and cardboard cutouts of mega stars – it’s all there – and Lynch, in his Megahit manager/employee shirt is there to greet enthusiastic “customers.” So, is it real?

“The fact is, while it began not real, it very much is real now. And we’re going to make every effort to turn it into something that people can enjoy online and hopefully come in person at times, although it is in my house,” he added with a chuckle.

A Personal Collection

Real store or not, what’s authentic are many of the movies, most taken from his own collection. 

“Almost everything in the store is absolutely real. I’ve made a few things to round it out, such as we have new releases there so obviously those are not real. But other than that, everything in the store is absolutely vintage and absolutely real. It comes from my own personal collection, curated over decades,” he shared proudly.

Looking to get some attention to his passion project, Lynch created his own version of a Herald cover, featuring himself, naturally! He laughed, sharing how his own father, after seeing it online, headed over to congratulate him.

“I did that absolutely with my meager Photoshop skills, but I really want to get the word out because of course, you need people participating for this to be fun. I can think of no more iconic symbol of making it in Newfoundland than getting on the cover of The Herald. So I thought if I made a fake one and put it out there – I mean, I thought it was very, very obviously fake, but my dad didn’t know. He showed up at the house and he looked at me and said, ‘Oh, you’re famous now! Got to get a copy of that Herald!’”

Telling his father the truth, Lynch added, was “heartbreaking.”

“The Newfoundland Herald is iconic. We’ve been reading it for years and I just thought it was a cute way to, again, make this as real as it can be, because ultimately I realize this is not a real VHS store, but it’s as real as anything anybody else has these days and we want to treat it as such. So we just wanted to get the word out and generate interest. And that Herald cover certainly worked because I got lots of attention.” 

We ask if he’s surprised by the attention. Yes and no, he answered honestly.

“There’s a real sense of people trying to connect to their past and connect to almost better times. And everyone’s looking for that. It’s been a rough couple of years, so the more everybody started talking about how much the video store meant to them and the experience and the memories, it just started to grow. Of course, it goes beyond that. And I realized I was actually on to something and perhaps this could really, really create good feelings online and have people share this Friday night event and shake off some of the negative practices and replace them with a little nostalgia.” 

Lynch’s wife is from Korea, and he shared that’s she’s been trying to understand the entire buzz he’s created. Just prior to our chat, she asked Lynch what it was about his posting of the mock Herald cover that generated so much interest in Megahit.

‘Supports Local’

“I answered, ‘I don’t know how to tell you other than I always thought of it as the TV guide, but now it’s kind of like a social magazine about Newfoundland. It’s about the people who live here. It supports local.’ And she understood, and that’s the way I feel about The Herald. It’s been here for 75 years and I can’t think of anything that’s been as regularly produced as long that does so much for the community and I find that inspiring. Part of me thinks that’s what I want to be with Megahit – something where we can talk and share and have fun right in our homes. I have guests lined up to come out and talk about their past and their favourite movies and I want to be as much a part of the community as The Newfoundland Herald.” 

We ask Lynch what his favourite movie is. “Oh, gosh. I will tell you the difference between best and favourite. I always like to say that my favourite movie of all time is Big Trouble in Little China. It’s a movie that I saw when I was younger and has been with me and I will watch it any time it is on.

“In terms of the best movie, that would be a hard one. I might say the best movie I’ve ever seen is John Carpenter’s original Halloween. I could talk about Halloween for an hour. I’m sure I watched it every day for a year when I was younger.” 

Well, that’s terrifying, we tease. He laughed. “I’m having so much fun. After the last couple of years, building that sense of community now with Megahit, I can’t believe how excited it’s made me. Of course, I have a full time job so I’m as busy as anyone else, but this has created a lot of excitement and made me really want to help it grow and ultimately help create that community behind it that will then help Megahit run itself.”

Lynch said the buzz he’s created is “contagious.” 

“That’s the thing that I’m most excited about now. At the beginning I thought, ‘well, it’s just me’ but now I notice people are starting to tag their friends or looking at Batman vs. Superman and then adding their comment to something else that someone has posted about a movie they love or don’t love. And that’s really what I want to build. I just want to be in the spirit of community and fun going forward. So the excitement is real. And when anybody asks, this is very, very real.” 

 What’s next for Megahit? 

“What we want to do is have fun. Of course, this is our house and my wife reminds me we are not going to run an actual store from the house, but I think there’s every opportunity to invite local people over once in a while to have a look, because I will tell you, we were shooting a fake commercial yesterday – like a vintage video store commercial, essentially. The excitement around that from everybody in the room was palpable.”

Back in the day, everyone of a certain age recalls heading to their neighbourhood video store to grab their VHS movie for the night or the weekend. “People get a little upset that they actually didn’t have VHS players, although I do have extra if anyone needs one.”

‘The Place to Be’

This whole experience has been extra special for Lynch for a few reasons, not least of all because he used to work at Blockbuster Video back in the day.

“This is an authentic experience because I worked at Blockbuster Video. When you worked at Blockbuster Video on Friday nights, it was the place to be. There was a buzz. There was an excitement. If you wanted a certain movie and it wasn’t there, we’d check the return box for you. Sometimes we found it and even taking home a bad movie, you still watched it because that’s the movie you had. But ultimately the experience of going to the shop and picking up your snacks and then going home together with your friends, your family. That’s what I’m going for.”

Creating Megahit for others to enjoy has brought back all those warm and fuzzy feelings. “I hadn’t expected it to feel like that. It’s been a little emotional because it really does feel like the video store used to feel. And that got me really excited.”

For more, follow Corey Lynch on social media. (facebook.com/megahitvideo)