The Great Communicator I used to be.
I remember when the old Purple East was on Fulton, near Park Congregational Church. It had the cool head shop that we couldn't get into, the piercing shop upstairs, the incense & blacklight posters, and the huge bean bag you'd jump onto from the balcony.
Across the street, was the first incarnation of Scavenger Hunt. It was really small but had some cool stuff. Then they moved to Ionia Street. For a pretty long time there, I didn't go there because they didn't have very much good stuff and it was way overpriced. A little before they moved to Divison, they started carrying really cool shit for pretty cheap. And Stafford worked there, he is awesome. When he wasn't painting Andy Warhol by numbers or building snow forts, he was showing me Deerhoof and talking about the Shins.
Since we weren't old enough to drive or tough enough to take the city bus, Colter and I would go to record stores in Kentwood. Actually, these stores were pretty much it for record stores in the entire region, they just happened to be in our hometown. Vinyl Solution was on 28th Street in an oddly-shaped shopping center. We'd look around at CDs in the daytime in their huge collection, and at t-shirts. At night on the weekends in 9th grade, we went to a show every weekend. Thunder Chicken, Alien Genocide, the Bounty Hunters, etc. Saw lots of fun punk, ska, and rap-core shows there. We used to hang out in the parking lot with Christine, Nick, and Lindsey and smoke cloves and cigarettes.
Radio Kilroy was another suburban record store. In the same strip center as Off the Wall and Mos Eisley, it used to be a pretty cool place for the Kentwood. The place smelled like an indie record store should, and had a decent array of used punk rock CDs. I bought so many CDs, t-shirts, and stickers here.
Everyone comment and list some memories about good old G.R.