Charlie Edwards’s parents used to play a game called Quaker. Object: whoever stays quiet the longest wins. Edwards always lost. He was told, “If you don’t quit talking so much you’ll go deaf.” He heard this more often as his taste in music veered to increasingly loud rock ‘n’ roll, and now his story has become the name of a new record store: The Quaker Goes Deaf.
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Edwards traces his musical development to the late 1960s. “I sent my mom out to buy “Haunted House,’ and she came back with “House of the Rising Sun.’ It was the best mistake she ever made.” He later became a bit of a legend in Champaign-Urbana. He worked at the store Record Swap, hosted a radio show on WEFT, and in 1980 started the popular “new wave night” at Chester Street dance club. Eventually Edwards moved to Chicago and worked for Reckless on Broadway for six years.
Edwards’s partner Swindle hopes to enlarge their audience by having a Web page on the Internet. “We’re going for a narrow slice of the market,” Swindle says. “We can increase our customer base in alternative music through the Internet.” The page includes the store’s top ten picks of the week, event listings, photos of the store and staff, and comics by Swindle and Keir. In the works are a map of how to get to the store, sound clips from CDs, and a direct-order catalog. The page will also provide access to other Web sites, including the Underground Music Archives.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nathan Mandell.
