The Clayton Record Guy

Each Sunday, we're sharing a small bright spot from the previous edition of The Weekender

Joel Fitzgerald turned a free record player, a stack of somebody else’s records and a lifelong need to make things into Four Track Records, Clayton’s little traveling record shop.

Joel Fitzgerald bought his first CD from Brad Hasty for five bucks.

It was Frogstomp by Silverchair, which is honestly about as perfect of a mid-’90s first-CD story as you’re going to get. Before that, Joel mostly did what the rest of us did: stole CDs from his older brother, borrowed them from friends and hoped everybody eventually forgot who owned what.

[Fun bit of useless Clayton trivia from Dan to give you an idea of how small Clayton used to be. I didn't know Joel except to see him back in what they call "the day", but Brad Hasty was my first roommate out of high school and we once listened to Ghostface Killah's Supreme Clientele on cassette for an entire road trip to Virginia and back. The more you know!]

Music wasn’t necessarily the defining thing in the Fitzgerald house when Joel was growing up in Archer Lodge. There were hymns and Christian music. His dad played guitar, and Joel would tag along to choir practice. Then his older brother got into country music, followed by classic rock and ’90s rock, and Joel followed him right down the rabbit hole.

But if there was one thing Joel was always doing, it was making stuff.

“I was always drawing,” he told me. “I was always building things. Making things out of clay.”

He describes himself as a creative, weird kid whose parents gave him room to be exactly that. These days, Joel teaches middle school art at Clayton Middle, and if you ask him what art actually teaches kids, his answer sounds an awful lot like an explanation for everything else he does too.

“All creativity, art, it’s all problem solving,” he said. “How do I start with a blank paper, or start with what I have, and end up with what I want or what I need?”

That’s a pretty good description of Four Track Records.

Because Joel didn’t start with a record store. He started with what he had.

A Record Player and a Grip of Records

Joel’s record collection began almost accidentally in the early 2000s, when he was staying at his friend Nick’s house while Nick’s mom was having a yard sale. She gave Joel an old record player and what he describes as “a grip of records.”

Then another friend, Zach, told him he could have some of his dad’s old records under one condition: if Joel took one, he had to take all of them.

At the time, CDs were still expensive and records absolutely were not. Joel was living in Downtown Raleigh within walking distance of Record Exchange, Schoolkids and Nice Price Books, so while everybody else was dropping real money on CDs, Joel could come home with stacks of used records for next to nothing.

“Pretty soon I had like a hundred records,” he said.

And anybody who collects records knows exactly where this story goes from there.

Today, a few records in Joel’s collection mean more to him than the rest. There’s an original pressing of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, complete with the working zipper on the cover.

[Another fun fact from Dan: I gave him that record.]

There’s also an original Flex Your Head, the legendary early Dischord Records hardcore compilation. Joel doesn’t necessarily describe either as incredibly valuable. They’re just records he never really thought he’d find, and that seems to matter more to him anyway.

Ask him for his white whale and he doesn’t have some meticulously maintained Discogs want-list ready to go. Maybe an old rock-and-roll 45. Maybe a hardcore seven-inch. Maybe an original copy of The Wailers’ Catch a Firewith the Zippo-lighter cover that actually opens.

Something cool. Something with a story.

So Where Did Four Track Come From?

A few years ago, Joel’s parents owned an antique store, and his dad asked whether he’d be interested in putting together a record section inside the shop.

Joel wasn’t immediately sold on the idea. Then he started thinking about how he would do it: what records he’d carry, how he’d present them and what kind of shop he’d want it to feel like.

Suddenly, he was into it.

The antique store eventually went away, but the record-store idea didn’t.

Without a storefront of his own, Joel started thinking about what he could do instead. The answer was a pop-up, and Four Track Records was born.

The name comes from the four-track cassette recorders that became the gateway into recording music for generations of broke bands. Joel tried playing bass when he was younger, although he says he didn’t have the patience for it at the time. He has since learned guitar, but he remembers the friends who really did play. Eventually, playing songs wasn’t enough. They wanted to record them, and the four-track was the affordable way to do it.

Joel liked what that represented.

“This pop-up is about love,” he said. “Love for music, sharing the love for music, sharing music we love.”

To him, the four-track represents that point where music stops being something playing in the background and becomes something you actively participate in.

“It’s not just something you hear,” he said. “It’s a part of your life.”

That’s pretty much what Four Track has become too.

Clayton Has Some Record Nerds

Joel wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when he started setting up Four Track around Clayton. What he discovered pretty quickly was that there are a whole lot of record collectors hiding around here.

“Big time collectors,” he said, laughing.

And apparently we’re a pretty guitar-heavy town. The biggest seller is ’70s guitar rock.

But Joel says Clayton’s changing population also makes the local record-buying crowd surprisingly broad. People have moved here from all over the place, and they brought their music with them. That means Joel can find himself talking punk with one person, classic rock with the next and whatever weird thing somebody else has been hunting for after that.

Which is really his favorite part of Four Track anyway.

Yeah, he makes some extra money.

“Duh,” he said.

But mostly he gets to stand around talking about records.

“Meet people, make friends, talk about music, learn about music,” Joel said. “I love it.”

And now he has regulars. Real regulars.

People give him want lists. He knows some customers well enough that when they walk up, he can just hand them a record or point them toward a section he knows they’ll want to dig through. Sometimes he’ll see something while buying records and immediately know who needs it.

He has customers’ phone numbers. He texts them when something comes in.

“It’s cool to have friends that are customers,” Joel said, “and it’s cool to have customers that become friends.”

At some point, a pop-up record table became a tiny community of its own.

Ladies and gentlemen, Clayton’s Record Guy.

Okay, But What Should I Buy?

Joel is probably the exact kind of person you want running a record shop if you’re somebody who likes music but finds record collecting intimidating.

Walk up to his table and tell him you have no idea where to begin, and he isn’t going to start explaining matrix numbers and first pressings until you regret approaching him. His advice is much simpler:

Buy something you like.

“You don’t want to start off spending a ton of money on something really rare,” he said.

If you have a little extra money, grab a nice pressing of a favorite album. Maybe 180-gram vinyl. Maybe colored vinyl. Something that feels special. Or buy a handful of inexpensive used classics that aren’t particularly rare or expensive but are loaded with songs you already know you’ll want to hear again.

Creedence Clearwater Revival is high on Joel’s list. His wife, Carla, votes for Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Joel also recommends things like Marshall Tucker Band, Steve Miller’s greatest hits and Bob Marley’s live records — the kind of stuff you can put on almost anytime and enjoy.

He also thinks classic-rock fans should spend some time digging into the music that influenced the bands they already love.

But there is one enormously popular classic-rock band Joel will apparently not be recommending to you anytime soon.

The Eagles. [Hard agree.]

“I know a lot of people love them,” he said. “They’re obviously talented, there’s gotta be something to them to make so many people love them, but I don’t know man. Not for me.”

See?

You can trust him.

Wildcat Comix

Maybe the best part of Four Track is that Joel isn’t always the only Fitzgerald running a pop-up.

His son Zeke has been making Wildcat Comix for the past couple of years and will sometimes set up alongside his dad, selling his own handmade comics.

Joel loves watching him have a good night, when people stop, look at something Zeke made, connect with it and actually hand him money for this thing that started as an idea in his head.

For an art teacher — and a dad — that’s about as good as it gets.

But Joel also appreciates the nights when it doesn’t go that way.

Sometimes Four Track has a slow night. Sometimes Wildcat Comix does too. And suddenly the pop-up becomes a lesson you can’t really manufacture in a classroom.

“It’s also tough when he has a slow night,” Joel said. “But then that leads to real conversations.”

Joel gets slow nights too. He has to rethink things, try something different, figure out what worked and what didn’t, and remind himself not to get discouraged.

Which brings us right back to his definition of creativity.

Start with what you have. Figure out where you want to go. Problem solve your way there.

The Fitzgerald house seems to have plenty of that.

Joel says his daughter Evie experiences music on an entirely different level from almost anybody he knows.

“She’s constantly singing.”

Their son Waylon is creative in another direction altogether. He’s a builder, a problem solver and an optimizer. Right now that shows up in video games, and he practices drums and percussion with his grandfather, but Joel is curious to see what outlet eventually clicks.

As a parent, Joel says the goal isn’t really to decide any of that for them.

“You want them to grow up to the best of themselves,” he said. “And part of that is to give them space to be themselves. Give them opportunities to find out who they are and what they like.”

Which sounds suspiciously like something an art teacher would say.

One Record

So naturally I asked Joel the most unfair question you can ask a record collector.

Desert island. One record.

He cheated and picked two. Which, if you know Joel, is Classic Joel. 

The first is Pearl Jam’s Yield. If this is potentially the last music he ever hears, Joel wants something meaningful to him, something beautiful and something with enough different moods to live with for a while.

Fair enough.

But if he’s really stranded there for the long haul, he’s taking The Clash’s Sandinista! — mostly because it’s really damn long.

There are so many styles and so many different things happening across that record that Joel figures he might even eventually learn to love the songs he doesn’t particularly like now.

Also fair.

And if you’re sitting at home tonight wondering what record you should put on from beginning to end, phone somewhere across the room, Joel’s current answer is Modest Mouse’s The Lonesome Crowded West.

“That’s something you can get lost in, man.”

There are worse ways to spend an evening.

Side A Isn’t Over Yet

Joel would love for Four Track Records to become an actual record store someday.

Maybe that happens soon. Maybe it happens when he retires. Maybe it doesn’t happen at all.

He doesn’t know.

For now, Four Track is exactly what he figured out how to make with what he had: a table, some crates, a bunch of records, a pop-up tent, sometimes a kid beside him selling comics, and a steady stream of people who stop long enough to flip through the stacks and inevitably start talking about music.

That’s a pretty good little record store if you ask me.

You don’t necessarily need four walls and a permanent address. Sometimes you just need somebody who knows what you like, remembers what you’ve been looking for and sees a record in a stack somewhere and thinks, Oh, I know who needs this.

Clayton’s got a guy for that now.

His name is Joel Fitzgerald.

You can catch Joel and Four Track Records this Friday night on Main Street from around 6–9pm outside Odd One Out for Last Friday in Clayton. He also does regular Vinyl Nights at La Di Da Wine Shop. Stop by, flip through some records and explain to him why High Fidelity is obviously the greatest record-store movie of all time and not Empire Records.

Follow 4Track Records on Instagram for more updates on where he'll be popping up.

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