Bob Koch
Just last Friday, I was in Resale Records and bought a record based on a recommendation from owner Eric Teisberg, as I have many times before: The Revolt of Emily Young, a “rock novella” written by songwriters Buzz Cason and Pepper Martin, and performed by a (presumably) studio group called Foxx. When I asked him about it, he said it “was not awful for ‘60s bullshit. You should buy this one.”
As usual, he was right on: The album is exactly the sort of sunshine pop/psych weirdness I greatly enjoy.
It is still a shock, and probably will be for some time to come, to consider I will never get his advice again. Teisberg, proprietor of the much-loved Eken Park neighborhood record store, died Oct. 1. As a longtime regular customer through the store’s many ups and downs, I will never forget the first time I went to Resale Records.
The backstory: My first year of college, at UW-Richland, I became friends with a history professor who started the semester by playing a pile of 45s, talking generally about their historical significance. Mostly, I think he just wanted to play some 45s. I struck up a conversation with him after class about what he had played, and we started trading records back and forth.
I started driving to Madison to meet up with the prof and go record hunting around town, which is how I ended up at Resale. I don’t remember my first impressions of the exterior. (The building was once on the cover of Isthmus as part of a story about Madison eyesores — which was a contentious point on my next visit). But I do remember my impressions of what I found inside: record nerd Valhalla.
At the time, Teisberg still kept thousands of 45s in stock, stashed all around the store. We arrived probably an hour before closing, and I remember frantically digging and ending up with a big pile of ’60s garage and pop 45s I had been on the hunt for. Magically, they were all 75 cents each, rather than some sort of collector’s prices. Of course, this was the early ’90s, when records were a “dead” format, so that wasn’t that unusual. Still, for a kid from a small town with one thrift store open only a few hours a week, this was a huge score. I remember the proprietor asking how I knew what this music was, and being surprised someone so young was buying a bunch of old singles.
I eventually moved to Madison and started attending the Saturday sessions at Resale. On most weekends, a group of about 10 regulars — and many more on special occasions — gathered to check out the new arrivals, drink some BYOB, engage in some friendly bickering and spin discs. Partly show and tell, and partly a “top this, sucker” nerd-off, we were guaranteed to hear something awesome we didn’t know. Often the night would end up extending beyond closing time. We’d take the edge off the day’s beers by eating bar food at Wonder’s Pub or the Villa Tap and double down on the fuzziness by adding more drinks to it.
Over the years, many of the Saturday regulars gradually drifted away — or passed away — though occasionally a group of old-schoolers would still hold court. This community of regulars that Teisberg facilitated, intentionally or not, is why the continued existence of Resale Records was so important. Frankly, I would not venture a guess about whether or not he had any real motives in that direction. I just know he loved music — and the sort of colorful characters populating the work of one of his favorite writers, newspaperman and short story author Damon Runyon.
In Runyon style, Teisberg nicknamed many of the the store’s regulars: Jeff the Bus Driver, Nick the Cop, The Doc, Uncle Bill, Uncle Dave, The General, Beatle Bob (if memory serves, there were two), Alternate Universe Bob, Young Bob, The Couple. (There was also a Runyonesque cast of record-hunting nemeses, but that’s a whole different tale.)
Where else but at one of those Saturday afternoons at Resale was a 20-something-year-old garage rock kid going to discuss music with a septuagenarian lover of female vocalists? Or cross paths with the enigmatic Bob Kuntz, who later lost his life in an attack on the Capitol Square after he lost his job and became homeless?
The Saturday sessions mixed together people who usually might not have a chance to interact, and gave us a chance to share the music we were excited about. We were spreading that knowledge around, rather than just collecting it and listening at home. I learned more there by listening to the longtime collectors talk about what they knew, and the records they brought in, than I will ever learn elsewhere.
Teisberg was a music lover who always wanted to know what was in the grooves of any piece of vinyl he had not encountered before. But his sarcastic side also came out; he enjoyed making fun of the records that did not measure up to his standards. Despite his often skeptical opinion about what was good or not, he introduced me to much music over the years that I would not have heard otherwise. Just one example that comes to mind are the amazing 1930s recordings by the Boswell Sisters.
Losing Teisberg, and (one would assume) the shop he maintained for almost four decades, is a real blow to many of the people in Madison’s record-collecting community.
Thank you, Eric. You will be more missed than you would ever have admitted.
