Music can be a way of life.
It can define your morning routine and your life style, or your career.
In the case of 'Big John' Ritson, it’s all of the above.
And then some.
'Big John', as local vinyl record aficionados will appreciate, has immersed himself with all aspects of vinyl records during his time operating three different record store locations in Barrie.
At one point or another since 1987, they were downtown and offered music fans an option before, during and after the dawn of the internet and music streaming the way we know it today.
But for Ritson, it’s always been about the music, although that may have not necessarily have been his first love.
His second shop was located in a basement scenario near Five Points that was halfway between — in the day — Sam the Record Man, which later burned down, on Dunlop Street East and Records on Wheels, which was a bit east of there.
“I offered a slightly different product, but there was a lot of overlap, too,” he says from his home near Queen’s Park, with vinyl albums scattered in every corner and on table tops. “I had a lot of alternative: the punk, new wave and the ‘indie’ stuff, but I also had a lot of the older more classic stuff.
“If the new, say, Steve Winwood came out or the new George Harrison or whatever, I wouldn’t necessarily stock up on 40 of them. They (Sam or Records on Wheels) would do that; that would be their domain.
“I would stick to the stuff the teenagers wanted. They were my best customers in those days, before the advent of the internet into the mid-90s. They had the highest disposable income,” he says flashing a smile. “They’d spend every penny. If it wasn’t on partying, it was on music.”
The term ‘used’ albums might be a bit of misnomer when it comes to what Ritson was offering customers.
“If it’s really beat up, that means it’s been really previously enjoyed,” he says. “It’s hard to find a Beatles album from that era that’s in good shape because people played the heck out of them, or a Monkees album. It’s really tough to find one that’s in great shape. It’s a real gem; something to be cherished.”
Ritson moved from that basement location in 1995 to the current location of BJ’s Records and Nostalgia on Clapperton Street and stayed there until 2005, when he sold it.
“I had outgrown the basement. I kept getting more and more stock. Growth was really big in those days, the mid-'90s. It was before the internet and people caught on to that ‘record store’ in the basement,” he says. “I grew my spot. People were bringing in their collections all the time. I didn’t have to leave the store to buy stock; people just brought it to me. It got to the point where it was piled up to the ceiling; it was crazy.”
Fans of vinyl, like Ritson, cling to the medium.
“The record companies tried to kill vinyl by introducing CDs. They were being greedy,” he says. “You could make a CD for 25 cents and sell if for 20 bucks. But, of course, once digital downloading took over, then the chickens came home to roost and the record companies realized that they were going to get crucified themselves because of digital downloading.”
There was always a segment of the music-playing public who realized that this is what the record companies were doing, he adds.
“It’s hard to kill something that’s been around over 100 years,” he says, alluding to Thomas Edison, who invented the phonograph in the 1870s that wasn’t even originally meant for recording music.
“Like a lot of inventions, that wasn’t what the original intention was.”
After touching “tens of thousands” of albums over the years, he says tunes are still very close to his heart.
“Where would we be without music. I think music should be an essential component of your daily existence (although) not everybody would agree with me; some people don’t care much for music,” Ritson says before offering up a quote from out of the blue about Shakespeare’s need for music
“When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind oppress, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.”
But it’s not just about the music — celtic to cajun to bluegrass to blues to funk to soul to traditional Irish or African music to Motown, to name just a few — for this bard; he has other interests as well.
It might surprise some vinyl geeks to know that the tall (hence the name 'Big John') music man — the genres of music he is knowledgable of is nothing short of vast — was once an urban planner.
He taught it for a short while at Sir Sanford Fleming College and also worked for the Ministry of Municipal Affairs in Toronto in charge of subdivision approvals and land severances in northern communities, such as the Parry Sound district.
He says idealism is what attracted him to urban planning.
“I wanted to change the world and make it more liveable,” Ritson says, adding he doesn’t see that happening anytime soon, despite best intentions. “Human beings’ greatest juggernauts is their inability to think long term and propensity to make the same mistakes again and again and again.
“There are some good planners in Barrie and planners have great ideas, just like artists have great ideas. But the reality is you have to play the political game. Planners are subservient to economic and political apparatus. Developers and people with big money make all the decisions where the development will go.
“It’s all about economics; it’s nothing about improving the social fabric of the community and protecting the environment; it’s about making a quick buck and running with it.”
When he’s not buying, selling or trading albums — something he’s been constantly doing even after selling the downtown shop — Ritson finds time to volunteer at the Salvation Army. He also has a moving company to help financially strapped folks move into new digs.
Later this summer, he plans to be dipping a paddle into a Northwest Territories river and getting closer to Mother Earth.
“In order for us to get wise, we need to understand that we are just one of how many millions of species of living creatures on this planet,” he says. “The idea that we give to ourselves some special status or uniqueness that makes us different from protozoa or amoebas or snails or squirrels is a mistake. In order to make us a bit better, human instinct has to some how merge with human conscience.
“I don’t see that happening too quickly. It may one day,” Ritson adds. “We are evolving slowly in many ways. We have social programs and social safety nets which we didn’t have 5,000 years ago so there’s a long way to go. Democracy, the way it is now, is basically two wolves and a sheep arguing about what to have for lunch. It’s not a very fair system.”
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