Ball taps the charge into the gray cash register, hitting the keys deliberately, before reading out the cost. He is ringing up a young woman who can’t be older than 25, who sets ten incense sticks on the glass surface. At that store, within a month or two I was manager.”īall now stands behind the counter wearing light blue jeans with a worn hole in the left knee and a green flannel casuallydraped over his black t-shirt with the Trax on Wax logo. “I never filled out an application for a company that I worked for over twenty years. The store manager, John Lewis, hired him on the spot. “He said ‘I guarantee you’ll have a job right from the start.’ And it was true,” he says. He took the summer off from working one year, and found himself at a party, where he ran into an old friend who encouraged him to come work at Towson’s Record and Tape Traders. He, like Gebler, found his interest in records early on, milling around vinyl shops as a teenager. He has been working at Trax on Wax for five years. His store manager, Jeff Ball, has been working in the vinyl industry, selling records or working in the entertainment section of department stores since 1986. We get a lot of high school and college kids now and they come back on a regular basis, and it’s really cool to see them grow up,” he says. Then as the years progressed, there’s been a lot of younger people who are digging the store which is cool too. “When I first opened up, it was a bunch of old people like me, and so the people would come in and talk about their first concert. Trax on Wax has now been open for nine years. Silk tapestries and woven blankets hang from the ceiling alongside t-shirts with sayings like “Rocknroll Motherf&*er.” Next to the counter, there is a listening station, complete with a shiny leather stool and a pair of worn gray headphones plugged into a record player. I thought to myself ‘well this is what I’m gonna do with the rest of my life,’ and I knew it! My day is still exactly the same day as when I was 15,” he says. “The first day I went in and, I was still in high school. Gebler has an effortless way of talking, the kind of ease that only comes with years of experience. I don’t play anything, they just put me behind the congas,” he says. “Back in the day, I got to go out on the stage and play with him. In the past, he was oftentimes invited out on stage to “just jam out” with artists like Bob Seger at Merriweather Post Pavilion. We were instructed not to look her in the eye but then when we met her she was like ‘oh those guys, they do that all the time’ so she was really cool,” he says. “I met Tina Turner and she was huge at the time. Gebler now sports whiskery white stubble, but the look in his pale blue eyes is the same as in the photo. One photo from around 1987 shows a young Gebler with a ginger beard next to Tina Turner. A Picture is Worth a Thousand WordsĮach of the photos has a story behind it. Some are slightly tilted, and others are faded, but they all show the same thing: Gebler, with a slight smile on his face, standing next to an artist (oftentimes holding their own record proudly). Right when customers enter the store, they are greeted by rows of photographs of Gebler with icons like Tina Turner, all in the same style of thin black frames. The shop is packed with records in blue and green crates and wooden shelves, birds made of vinyl crafted by a local artist, bowls made of warped records, and anything else related to the vinyl industry. His white scarf is tied in a loose knot around his neck and his black shirt underneath has the logo for the shop emboldened across the front, as he carefully wraps records in bubble wrap. He stands behind the counter, brown fedora perched jauntily on his head with thin silver hoops in each ear. The owner, Gary Gebler, has been selling records since he was 15 years old. The light smell of incense hangs in the air of the store, emanating from bottles stacked neatly on the display shelves. Tucked between a dive bar and a pretty pink beauty parlor lies Catonsville’s resident vinyl store: Trax on Wax. Enjoy this peek inside one of the most interesting spots in neighboring Catonsville (AKA, “Music City Maryland”), as told and photographed by UMBC editorial intern Anjali DasSarma ’21.
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