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To many, closure of Potsdam's Northern Music and Video marks 'end of an era'

Posted 11/10/14

By CRAIG FREILICH POTSDAM -- When Northern Music and Video announced it was going out of business last weekend, people were shocked and saddened. “Very sad,” and “end of an era” were common …

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To many, closure of Potsdam's Northern Music and Video marks 'end of an era'

Posted

By CRAIG FREILICH

POTSDAM -- When Northern Music and Video announced it was going out of business last weekend, people were shocked and saddened.

“Very sad,” and “end of an era” were common comments, and “a big hole” expressed the concern for the downtown Potsdam core, where Northern Music has held an anchor position for decades.

The store closed Friday, and will reopen Thursday for a sale intended to clear out the space before Christmas.

“We always had a business that survived most everything – a recession where we’d be down for a year, a year-and-a-half, and then we’d bounce back,” said Wally Siebel, who cofounded the business with Alex Vangellow in 1975.

“In this last recession, sales started going down and never came back.”

Siebel said sales were off by 35 percent in the last five years, and were showing no sign of recovering.

“Ask Sears, Ponderosa, Office Max in Massena” what the retail environment has been like, Siebel said, reflecting on recent announcements that those businesses would be closing, too.

The end of Northern Music and Video is in startling contrast to the business they built over the decades.

Siebel, a Crane School graduate, and Vangellow, a Clarkson alumnus and lover of music, began their careers in retail music at Bronen’s, a music shop on Main Street. In 1975, the two broke away and opened Northern Music across Main Street in the Prosh building, selling instruments, vinyl LPs, sheet music and much more.

Within a few years they had moved to a larger space Market Street where a shoe store had been, and then a few years later, when the National Army store next door closed, they took that space, broke down the wall between the spaces, and opened their video showroom.

Over the years, their business supplying and repairing instruments for public school students grew and became a strong part of their work.

When they opened the TV showroom and added “and Video” to their name, they expanded not only into TV sales, but also into more lines of consumer electronics. Service of those devices then became a draw for customers.

Business boomed in the era before the legal drinking age in New York was raised to 21, when people could wander downtown on a Friday or Saturday night and sample music from half a dozen or more bands in bars on Market, Elm and Maple streets. The pool of talented musicians not only at Crane but at the other schools in the region, and the thousands of consumers of instruments, recorded music, and accessories, continued to make the business thrive.

The store helped launch many musicians who have made it to the national stage, including Grace Potter from St. Lawrence University whose Nocturnals are well known around the country. Potsdam boys David Gibbs, brothers Steve and Phil Hurley, and Paul Brouwer founded Gigolo Aunts, before Gibbs went on to collaborate in the creation of the musical “Rock of Ages. Jason Sutter played for Smashmouth, and Chris Cornell played for Marilyn Manson.

Composer, arranger and musician Bob Christianson wrote, arranged and executive-produced the PBS Special, “A Christmas Carol – The Concert.” The Emmy nominee has been working in music in New York for decades.

Paul Meyers of Potsdam is an internationally revered jazz guitarist. Todd Hobin and Doug Moncrief have been making music emanating from Central New York and spreading around the country.

All were friends and customers of Northern Music, and that list is only a small representation of the people and music that have been through and come from the store on Market Street.

So how do they account for the drop in sales?

The Great Recession took its toll on everyone, not just Northern Music. Siebel says Walmart was not that much of a factor, since, he said, their product lines were different and did not compete much with each other.

A big difference came along with the World Wide Web, he said.

One of the store’s strengths had always been the attention they gave to customers.

“What we offered for so many years – advice and information – was very much affected by online shopping.” Instead of customers coming into the store to find out about products they were looking to buy, they were going online and finding out what they wanted to know, and that did not translate into store traffic.

And music sales on the Web crushed CD sales.

In the last few years, Siebel and Vangellow had pulled back some, leaving much of the day-to-day operation to senior employees Chris Smutz and Jeremy and Allison Carney, “and they made a name for themselves.

“Expenses stayed the same. We paid the bills, staff, suppliers, but there was nothing left at the end,” Siebel said of the recent situation.

He said they tried cutting expenses, even forgoing employee raises for the last couple of years, trying to weather the downturn.

“We had a great run. The employees we had were friends and party buddies. We worked hard, played hard. They were Northern Music. They made it.

“The community was good to us, and we were good to the community.”

Over the years the store supported not only a thriving music scene, but also other community activities.

They were big supporters of the annual Potsdam Summer Festival, sponsoring the Market Street Main Stage and arranging for the dozens of musical acts that played for the festival each year.

And there was the International Invitational Flotational, a “contest” to see what group could build a creative raft that would float a few hundred yards down the Raquette River, all to raise money for local organizations.

“It’s tough to say goodbye. It’s not a lot of fun, but there are not a whole lot of alternatives at this point,” Siebel said.

“We’re getting emails from all over the country. A lot of memories. Good memories.”