(Read: ~8 minutes)
There’s a song played every once in a while on country music stations heralding the coming together of two people with little to offer except themselves. The singer declares their bond in a Kris Kristofferson-like tune with a Janice Joplin drawl.
I woke up this morning, with nowhere to be,
except here.
The clock says noon, you’re waking up,
and I’m still near.
Honey, before this goes any further,
let me be clear.
You can smoke my cigarettes,
if I can drink your beer.
Connie Nelson, no relation to Willie or Ricky, wrote the song while a student at the university and recorded it in the garage-turned music recording studio of a friend. On a lark, she sent a few copies to local radio stations. Sentimental DJs instantly loved the upbeat homage to their favorite downtrodden ballads and endlessly played the tune. Stations around the country followed suit and the single wound up reaching number three on the country charts nationally. The ballad catapulted Connie into instant, if fleeting, stardom and garnered her an invite to Nashville and the chance to receive an award for Best New Country Female Artist of the Year.
She lost the contest and never wrote another hit song, becoming a one-hit wonder who reached the pinnacle of fame at the tender age of 21. Those might be the glory days for most folks, except Connie took off from there professionally. In my opinion, her business acumen vastly outshines the brief music career. She made a smart move early on by leveraging her fleeting notoriety and money to buy the old apartment building where she lived in a forgotten part of Charlottesville on the wrong side of the tracks. Then she leveraged the building to buy additional properties around town, ultimately flipping or renting dozens of units. Within a few years, she turned into a local real estate mogul with a growing list of investors. Since then, she’s also profited from bars, restaurants, mysticism and now, cryptocurrency, all in off-the-radar Charlottesville.
Nestled in the valley of two small mountain ranges, the city appears like an oasis from the barren, forced conformity typically found across Virginia. Connie felt at ease and welcome in the off-beat city when she got to school. When she received her first substantial royalty check, she not only chose to stay, but to buy in. There’s no doubt Connie collected a good chunk of rent from her burgeoning rental housing empire each month, but she still had an itch for the music business she needed to scratch. The chance came when she bought an old building situated along The Corner, a business district lined with bars and shops edging the university. Legend says she bought the hundred-year-old structure just to save the iconic, yet failing record shop occupying the ground floor. She revitalized Wahooz Records with a hip vibe, hiring attractive people and stocking the shelves with an eclectic inventory worthy of a college town. Orange and blue lettering on the wall and hanging from the ceiling identified genres and special interests including rock, rap, jazz, classical, punk, indie and imports. Merchandise for sale covered every available inch of territory inside the shop, band t-shirts, posters, carousels of kitschy crap no one needs.
To bring attention to Wahooz, Connie came up with all kinds of promotions and events designed to torture and embarrass college kids in exchange for music, food and cash prizes. Once, she hosted the university’s Greek system in a talent contest, the kids singing songs and acting out skits on a stage built in a parking lot near The Corner. One fraternity made the mistake of sending their unprepared pledges to perform in front of a couple thousand people gathered for the event, including the university’s dean overseeing Greek life. After passing a plastic bottle of cheap tequila, the pledges went to work preparing for their act in the record shop’s bathroom.
Meanwhile, out on the stage, a group of spunky sorority sisters performed their tightly choreographed act, singing customized lyrics over the Frankie Valli hit December, 1963. The original version recounts the magical winter night a hypnotic woman mesmerizes a young man and the funny feeling he had when she walked in the room. But ultimately, he laments the night ends much too soon when she disappears into the dark before he ever learns her name. The sisters filled the stage and updated the lyrics to be about their sorority. “Oh, what a house! Gamma Delta here at UVA … Gamma D! … Gamma D! … what a lady, what a house …” The giggling gaggle of sorority sisters left the stage to a resounding round of applause, hoots and catcalls from the audience.
The fraternity pledges followed up. Walking on stage, one waved the Jolly Roger while the others lined up, dropped their drawers and mooned the assembled audience, including the dean. The message sharpied in black letters across their fraternal buttcheeks, WE ARE ASSHOLES, left everyone in shocked silence. Everyone except Connie, who laughed her ass off in the soundbooth. Oh, what a night!
Stunts like these helped Connie create profitable buzz, and in a short time, she built Wahooz into a local attraction. Over the years, she’s shown a remarkable ability to recognize and seize opportunity. While everybody else zeroes in on my way or no way, she plays the angles from whichever side makes the most sense at the time.
For example, the upper floors of the building on the corner contained a sleazy hotel catering to loners, traveling salesmen and cheating wives. To test the market, Connie made some minor renovations and listed a few units month-to-month. Gaston answered a listing in the classifieds; he wanted the seediness factor of the hotel, hoping people left their neighbors alone to do what they wanted. Connie told him to come inside the record shop and she’d show him around the vacant apartment.
After a brief introduction, she headed towards the stairs to the hotel. Walking up the narrow passage, Gaston joked about peeling paint and the possibility of getting lead poisoning. Connie stopped in the middle of the staircase and turned around to face him. “If you dislike the accommodations already, we can turn around now and save time,” she scolded. “I’m too busy to screw around.” “No, sorry, just thinking out loud,” he responded, flustered by her no-nonsense attitude. “You probably shouldn’t,” she snapped, then turned and continued up the stairs. Watching her walk up the stairs, Gaston started to think he liked the landlady.
“Not a lot to the place,” she said, opening the door to the room on the second floor. “Kitchenette with microwave and mini fridge. En suite. No housekeeping services. View of a brick wall and an alley where drunk college kids like to piss and throw up around 2 a.m.” “Perfect. I’ll take it.” “Really? And you’re a doctor over at the medical school?” “Yeah. Sort of. I study, uh, psychology.” “Then why do you want to stay here?” “I hate long commutes,” Gaston joked. “And the flexibility of renting on a monthly basis is appealing.” “Planning to leave already?” “We’ll see,” Gaston replied.
Connie talked to friends about her new tenant afterwards, saying he seemed odd, and she hoped to see him again. Gaston did his part, making a point to stop in at the record shop several times over the next few weeks to visit with Connie, buying whatever music she recommended. She invited him to dinner on the Corner after growing tired of waiting for him to ask her out.
She chose a greasy spoon famous for serving hamburgers topped with a fried egg and sat at the counter. Connie jumped right into what she felt defined her, business. “I make money with the real estate,” she told Gaston. “Running the record shop is fun. Don’t get me wrong. It takes work getting folks in there to buy crap. It’s fun though. I’m hands on.”
Gaston asked her what she meant.
“Right now, the sales numbers are down. We get really great margins on used stuff, buy it cheap and sell it for way more. So I wrote a jingle for the shop to hype used merch. Do you want to hear it?”
“Of course,” Gaston answered.
She cleared her throat, hummed a few bars of melody and sang, “Wahooz Records buys the stuff you don’t want ’cause … we can sell it to someone else who does,” the words rhyming in her faux-country drawl.
“Bravo! Bravo!” Gaston clapped and Connie smiled.
“Thank you, you’re sweet,” she said, touching his knee. “I have a wide range of talents.”
Whatever he expected her to say next, Connie talked business, explaining how she negotiated deals directly with manufacturers and distributors to stock the store’s inventory. The largest piece of the shop’s music pie consisted of dumped merchandise called cut-outs, a name picked up from the slash cut across discounted record covers.
“It’s the kind of music you might find at gas stations off the interstate: greatest hits collections from one-hit wonders, sentimental compilations of forgotten acts,” Connie told Gaston. “Cut-outs were originally destined for discount bins and one last try.”
“Sounds tough making any money by selling bargain bin music.”
“You’d think. But the labels and manufacturers figured out how to screw musicians by sticking titles in discount bins, which allowed them to avoid paying anywhere near full royalties to the artists.”
“Aren’t you capitalizing on their model, too?” Gaston asked.
“Sometimes you need skills in something to figure out how to do it differently,” she answered. “You understand about being different, based on your place of employment. Not exactly mainstream research … memories of reincarnation type, extra sensory perception, remote viewing,” she said, employing the same jargon used by researchers in the organization to label various paranormal phenomena.
“I guess you did your research on me and DOPS,” Gaston noted. “I’ll just say they give me the necessary avenues for my research interests there,” he replied.
“Have you seen any spooky stuff yet?”,
“No, and I don’t really expect to, either,” Gaston stated bluntly.
“Let me know if something changes. I’m totally looking for a new cause,” Connie teased.
After their first date, the pair became a hot couple in town, connected with the best people, invited to the right parties, successful, young and attractive. At the time, they believed their success came from hard work, taking chances and even luck, but not predetermined fate. And I would have agreed, without hesitation.
Arlo Gust 