I’ve known people who are ambivalent about their parents. They talk of them with an antiseptic bluntness as if observing their own childhoods from afar, as if they merely occupied a room in a stranger’s house while growing up. Don’t judge someone until you’ve slept a night in their cradle, I guess, but I’ve never understood such behavior. I’m not one of those people, and Jason Keller isn’t one of these people.
Jason is the son of Neal Keller, founder of Bridgeport’s Let’s Boogie Records and Tapes. The record store has been in the same location on South Halsted Street since it opened in 1976, the same year Jason arrived in the world. Neighboring businesses have gone and come and gone again, but Let’s Boogie has remained. But as new and renovated shops begin to populate the area’s empty storefronts once more, Jason isn’t about to have his father’s stalwart icon thought of as an artifact.
“Let’s Boogie Records is not a museum,” he told me. “It’s not an homage to the past. My ideal and my interest in Let’s Boogie today and 2021 into 2022 is to put this great collection into the hands of people who will use it, and enjoy it and build memories the same way that my dad did over the past 45 years.”
Sometimes the dreams of a parent pull like Coleridge’s albatross at the neck of their offspring. There is an obligation to carry on the legacy. I don’t get that feeling about Jason Keller, himself the parent of two daughters. He keeps his father’s store open out of love, reverence and the belief that building a community through music is more relevant than ever.
Open only on Saturdays, Let’s Boogie has no employees. It’s run by Jason with his brother-in-law Phil and a handful of volunteering friends - just Lucinda, Frank, Keri, and Jordon - who all share Jason’s love of the store and find comfort in its ambiance. Ever a family business, Jason’s sister Sarah is in charge of the window displays. It’s not the kind of place where your order is ready before you walk in the door, and it doesn’t offer free Wi-Fi. In fact, Let’s Boogie doesn’t have Wi-Fi at all. And it’s all the better for it.
Let’s Boogie is free of the hectic pace one encounters everywhere else now, where the internet pushes us to go always faster but somehow with less time. Jason likes the idea of it being a spot for enjoyment. One can spend an hour just browsing for something new to them, or strike up a conversation after catching a glimpse of the stash the person next to them has been meticulously compiling. It’s a place to hang out and the thought of selling something seems secondary. Still, every penny of profit goes to supporting Jason’s parents in their retirement, so I felt a little guilty having spent a mere three dollars on a near-mint copy of Jimmy Walker: Dyn-o-mite! (It really does sound better on vinyl).
For Bridgeporters the record store is is a hallmark of the neighborhood, but to Jason Keller it is much more. It is a tether to his father Neal. Jason’s “day job” is in bank regulation and community development, and he’s raising his family in the suburbs. So I asked, as tactfully as possible, about the long-term future of Let’s Boogie. He’d been pricing a Lightnin’ Hopkins LP but put it down on the glass countertop and looked out the window at something far off.
“You know, I think a lot about Don McLean, about the day the music died. And I don't know when the music will die here. We're trying to prolong the music. And because this has been such a staple in our family, and the idea of being here on Saturdays and meeting people and continuing my dad's legacy - we want to keep it going as long as we can.”
Last week, Jason shared his father’s memories about Let’s Boogie.
Catch Mospratt Street Fridays between 6:20 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. Central Time on Lumpen Radio or 105.5 FM on your radio dial. Episodes are released on our podcast, where you can listen to every episode, later the same night.