When local brick-and-mortar record store Permanent Records celebrated its five-year anniversary in 2011, the Reader‘s Miles Raymer laid out the forces that had been arrayed against cofounders Lance Barresi and Liz Tooley when they opened the Ukrainian Village shop in October 2006: not only were physical record stores dropping like flies, but Reckless Records seemed to have Chicago’s small market cornered. But Barresi and Tooley, who’d just moved here from Missouri, didn’t just persevere but thrived—and since then they’ve launched two more Permanent locations in Los Angeles, where they’ve lived since 2011.
Dave McCune: It’s kinda mind-blowing. When Lance and Liz started the shop, there were a lot of stores in the decline. They just had this huge vision for things. I’ve been here for over seven and a half of those years and have been coming in since they opened—I lived over here—so I got to watch the evolution of the shop from both sides of the counter. It’s really exciting and invigorating for somebody—like, this is my life and this is how I make my living, and it’s also something deeply personal. It kinda makes things feel really solidified. I’m confident we can do another ten years. It’s very exciting and even humbling in some ways.
Permanent has always been heavily involved with the local music scene. Everybody here has always gone to shows, and there’s events we’ll have at the store that aren’t all that dissimilar to that kind of thing. It feels like you’re at the ground level—over the years, just watching different bands expand and grow in different ways, and come and go. That’s been pretty exciting. With all the used-record buying and everything, we’re traveling far and wide to make sure that people in Chicago have a place to come in and be like, “Wow, I’ve never seen this record in person before.” Or just even load up on all the essentials—that stuff’s always here. I’ve walked into plenty of other record stores, just out buying and stuff—not even necessarily in Chicago—and sometimes you don’t even see some of the staples. Anybody walking in here is gonna be able to find something, no matter what genre of music they’re tapping into, and you can always share and expand anybody’s knowledge. There’s people that’ll come in here with very surface-level interest, not even aware of similar things that they might like that are lesser known, and it’s an opportunity to turn people onto all kinds of new things—and in many different directions.
What plans do you have for the future of Permanent? What are you thinking about in terms of what’s next for the shop?
