I first came to El Paso in March 2018 and it was very much a case of serendipity, I wasn’t looking for a location for a US office I had come to San Antonio for the funeral of a very close friend and colleague, Bob Booton.
I first met Bob in 1989 in Milpitas, California when I was working in the computer industry with Sun Microsystems. Silicon Valley is a transitory place and many people pass through for a few years and don’t put down roots so it lacks that sense of community I was used to living in Scotland. Despite the Linlithgow, Scotland start-up being only the third manufacturing facility Sun had opened there was not a great deal of interest in my visit to Corporate in Palo Alto and I was pretty much left to my own devices for two weeks when I wasn’t in the office.
Bob and his wife Tamsen were both from Texas, a state which prides itself on its hospitality and he was the first Sun US colleague to invite me out for lunch. That was to be the start of a 28 year friendship and when I moved with my family to Palo Alto in January 1995 for five years Bob and Tamsen became our closest friends.
At Bob’s funeral I met his best friend from high school, Van Klein and it was Van who suggested I came and visited El Paso to see where Bob had grown-up. Van’s daughter Eden knew I was a vintage vinyl record dealer and recommended I visited All That Music record store at 6800 Gateway East during my stay.
Since the resurgence in the popularity of vinyl it had become increasingly difficult to get hold of good quality collections of vintage records in Scotland. As kids started buying turntables again they told their parents and grandparents not to part with their vinyl collections but to hand them down to the next generation. I knew from my time living in Palo Alto that there was far more vintage vinyl stock available in the USA and in April 2015 I had spent Record Store Day in San Mateo in the San Francisco Bay Area which confirmed that during my visits to Amoeba Records in Berkeley and Rasputin in Mountain View.
On my first visit to All That Music I spent a few hours crate digging, going through the racks from A to Z across all genres and soon had a pile of a couple of hundred LPs that I wanted to buy, stacked in smaller piles at the end of each row of racks. I was struck by the quality and availability of vintage records across the store, far more than I had seen in the record stores in San Antonio and Austin and significantly more than I would ever expect to find in a vintage vinyl record store in the UK.
Sam Cassiano who was working in the store that day appeared at my side and asked if I wanted him to put any of the records back but I said no, I was going to buy them all. That prompted Sam to go to the back office area and get George Reynoso the owner of the store to come out and talk to me. Given the quantity of records I was buying George gave me a very good discount and we arranged to meet up for a beer later. This was to be Bob Booton’s final gift to me, my friendship and business relationship with George and his team – John Castillo, Tom Pullen, Sam Cassiano, Yamel Hernandez, Andrea Sandoval, Eddie, Angel, Jackie and Julia.
Initially I was going to return to Scotland and have George ship vinyl to me as and when I needed it. However y planned two week visit to Texas soon became three months and during my two return visits to El Paso we got talking about George’s desire to take a step back from the business and potentially retire in 2019.
(George Reynoso, right, with a lucky raffle winner on Record Store Day 2018)
As all independent record store owners know cashflow and profitability is a constant struggle and George needed an injection of capital in to the business so before I left in May to return to Scotland I made an investment in All That Music.
I did briefly consider permanently relocating to El Paso but Trump’s clampdown on all applications for permanent residency soon put paid to that. Had Obama still been President I could have applied for an entrepreneur’s visa which came with permanent residency were it to be granted, which it almost certainly would have been given I was investing in the USA and setting up my own company.
My focus then shifted to running a vintage vinyl export business out of All That Music in El Paso supplying vintage vinyl dealers in the UK and Europe but quickly realised there was more money to be made by selling directly to record buyers which is the model I now have in place. My investment in the business provided me with an office in All That Music’s backroom and a generous discount on all records that I source from them moving forward.
The availability of high quality vintage vinyl is the main reason why I decided to base the US subsidiary of Radical Independent Music in El Paso. Not only that, prices are very reasonable given that El Paso is a cheaper place to live and the cost of vintage vinyl is that bit lower than the other stores I have visited in Texas, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana. Even with freight and duty clearance costs I can still make good margins on the records I sell back in Scotland and I will be expanding my presence at vinyl record fairs to include England and mainland Europe.
El Paso is at the Western extremity of Texas – a state which is bigger than France – and rubs shoulders with its Mexican neighbours in Ciudad Juárez, the most populous city in the state of Chihuahua. The city has a population of around 700,000 and is so distant from the Texas state capital of San Antonio that many of the locals argue it more rightly belongs in New Mexico.
My only knowledge of El Paso before I visited in March 2018 were the Western movies I used to go to the cinema to watch when I was a kid and the Wells Fargo cheque book I had when I lived in Palo Alto. Having visited three times in the Spring and stayed there for four weeks this past October I have fallen for the place, it’s people, landscape, climate, vibrancy and colour. Coming from Scotland the blue skies, sunshine and temperatures of 90+ degrees F also helped!
On this trip I have learned a lot about the music scene in the city thanks to Ron Lambert, recently retired high school Science teacher and drummer with local band Twisted Hams.
Ron introduced me to Grisel Rodriguez, Chairperson of The El Paso International Music Foundation and Eric Boseman who is on the board of the Foundation. I met them both at a seminar the Foundation ran on how local musicians could more effectively use social media to promote themselves. Grisel and Eric are both musicians and Eric is also a producer and part owner of Star City Studios in El Paso.
El Paso International Music Foundation
The El Paso International Music Foundation (EPIMF) is a relatively new organisation established to empower musicians from El Paso and neighbouring cities, Juarez, Mexico and Las Cruces, New Mexico. Through education and advocacy, the Foundation’s goal is to promote the local music scene, assist artists to achieve their career goals, and facilitate attainment of affordable health care services.
Grisel, Eric and the other six board members are all doing this on a voluntary basis although discussions are underway with the city to provide funding for the Foundation which I hope they can get.
We agreed that it would be great to build links between the Foundation and similar organisations in Scotland and I will be working on that when I return from the US in mid November. I am aware of at least one band manager in Scotland who is planning a tour of the USA for one or more of his bands in 2019 and the Foundation will be a great source of information regarding local venues, booking agents and local bands who could play support.
It looks like El Paso is not only going to be a profitable location for the vintage vinyl record dealing element of my business, I can develop useful contacts for the gig promotion and band management side.
I am writing this article in El Paso at the end of a 35 day stay here and I am alfready making plans for returning in the Spring of 2019. I feel very much at home here, it’s a great city!
Radical Independent Music 
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