Welcome to the Cavern.
The inventory changes, the walls change, the weird stuff disappears, then something else walks through the door.
Come dig.
Music
You came in for one record. You're leaving with three you'd forgotten.
Half of what happens here is exposure. Something is playing in the room and you stop, because you have not heard it in twenty years, or you have never heard it at all.
The shop has always carried what other stores don't — weird hip-hop, punk and metal that never made the wall anywhere else. That is the part Cameron came here for in the first place, years before he was behind the counter.
Ask what's on. Ask what's good. You will get an actual answer, and it will not be the record that came out on Friday.
Movies
Renting a movie used to be an event.
The drive-in. Blockbuster night — the whole family in the car once a week, popcorn going on the stove or in the microwave before you left. One tape. One film. That was the evening.
And sometimes you walked in and every copy of the thing you wanted was already gone. You did not stream it instead. You picked something else, or you waited a week, and the waiting was part of it.
Cameron pushed movies here harder than the store ever had, because the people who worked here before him were music people more than film people. The wall reflects that.
Audio Video Equipment
The gear was for making things, not only playing them.
High fidelity meant something. It sounded better, and you sat down and listened properly instead of having it on behind something else. The console was furniture. An album side was the unit of time, not a track.
But the part people forget is that the equipment was creative. It was not a delivery system, it was an instrument.
- Tape to tape. Play on one deck, record on the other. The mixtape you made at home, in real time, with your finger on the button.
- Reel to reel, for anyone who wanted to take it further than that.
- The 100- and 200-disc changer. Programming a run — disc one track five, into disc six track nine, into disc seventy-four track one.
Collectibles
The thing around the thing.
The poster from the show you actually went to. The stub you kept. Comics, tour programs, flags on the wall of a room you no longer live in.
Songbooks and printed lyrics belong here too. Before you could look the words up in four seconds, you learned them off the sleeve, and you learned them wrong for years until somebody corrected you.
Video games sit in this section as well — a format, same as any other, not a novelty.
Oddities
Things that make you stop walking.
Grandfather clocks. Vintage typewriters. An old neon sign. Picnic baskets. Lawn ornaments. A tarantula. A hermit crab.
Some of it is not for sale. It just lives here.
Clothing
A rack you dig through, not a merch table.
Band shirts you have to go through hanger by hanger, because the good one is never at the front.
Ties, hats, leather, wallets, chains, gloves. Holiday sweaters, in the way that holiday sweaters are either a joke or entirely sincere and it is never clear which.
Live Events
There is a stage in the middle of it.
Bands play here. Karaoke happens here. Record releases and meet-ups happen here. Sometimes a trip to the Cavern turns into a show.
You never know what you're going to find at Media Cavern.
Check back often.
The room itself
Have a look around.
Photographs of the store, filtered by what you want to see. This is what the place looks like — it is not a list of what is in stock.
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