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    When I was in High School, me and my friends all listened to the same music. We moved through life to the same soundtrack of that epic, melodramatic production titled Adolescence. God was the playwright and we were his chosen cast, often straying — defiantly and at the puzzlement and frustration of He and our parents — from His intended script.

    This was the mid-nineties, and for whatever reason — again, the soundtrack was chosen by the producer, we were just the cast — we were obsessed with the music and sub-culture of the sixties and seventies. We wore tie-dyed shirts, sported Grateful Dead stickers on our cars, and had dreadful haircuts of various “styles”. We sat around my parent’s back porch on sticky Summer afternoons, constantly lamenting about why God had cursed us to exist in the year of 1993 instead of 1969. We had missed out on Woodstock. We were drinking apple juice out of sippy-cups and watching Scooby-Doo while The Band was performing The Last Waltz. We were stuck on the corner of North Hills and Poplar Springs Drive instead of the corner of Haight and Ashbury. Poor, pitiful us. What was the point of even living?

    Oh, how we clung to every piece, every scrap, every idea of that time period. The piece we clung to, craved, and depended on the most was the music.

    We all bought our music at the same place. It was before iPods(yes, I am guilty), when, if a person wanted to purchase and enjoy the fruits of a musical artist’s labor, he had but one option: the local record store. It just so happened that our local record store was across the street from our High School.

    The Music Emporium was our shrine, our temple. Through its doors one found a true emporium of music from every genre, including, much to our bliss, all of the music from the time period that we were “supposed” to have lived in. Its ceilings and walls were covered in photographs of our idols; from Jerry Garcia to Al Green, Willie Nelson to Marvin Gaye. Row after row of vinyl albums and cassette tapes, arranged in homemade, perfectly aged wooden bins. Vinyl would eventually turn into cassette tapes, cassette tapes into the compact disc.

    Through the sale of music, the Music Emporium provided an ample supply of links to the lifestyle in which we tried so hard to emulate. Through music, we could kind of transport ourselves to another place. The only problem was that the music, while certainly “alive” in its life-giving capability, was not a real, living person. You could listen to the music, but the music could not listen to you. Enter the owner of the Music Emporium, Art Matthews.

    Art was — and we were absolutely sure of this — the only real, living hippie in our small town. He sported a long, gray ponytail and an even longer beard. He knew and loved music.

    Every day Art would man the register at his music store. Most days after school I would go there, sometimes to buy music, but mainly just to be in the guy’s presence, to “learn.” You see, not only was Art the only living hippie we knew on a personal basis — a fact that, by itself, was enough to make him an object of awe and utter amazement to us —  and an endless wealth of musical knowledge. Not only was he our direct, living link to the past.

    It turned out that Art’s strongest attribute would indeed dwarf these seemingly all-important other ones. The guy took an interest in us kids. He looked you in the eye and talked  to you. He asked you how you were doing, and not in that quick, superficial way that we all do when and if we even address our youth at all. When you answered he would listen. And yes, it was an added bonus to get to hear all of those first-hand stories from The Golden Age. He always, without fail, provided smiles and laughter.

    No, this is NOT an obituary for Art Matthews, thank God. He is alive and well and — thanks again — has not changed one single bit in the time that I have known him.

    However, after forty years, we did have to say goodbye to the Music Emporium last Saturday, if only in a physical sense. Gone is a shrine from my youth, a haven for restless teenagers in a sea of angst and robot-like iPods that can’t ask you how you are doing or tell you about the time “it” got to hang out with Merle Haggard or about the time “it” witnessed that face-melting guitar solo from Duane Allman. “It” can’t do that because “it” is a computer… I digress…

    Why is it that those teenage years– that relatively tiny, three or four years out of the average lifespan of seventy-or-so — stay with us for the remainder of our lives? Even now, with two children of my own, those years and their memories are ever-present, a continuous, soft daydream of afternoons and country roads and very real innocence. That innocence, that wonderful time, had a soundtrack. Art Matthews and the Music Emporium gave us that soundtrack and much, much more. Thank you, Art.