Sometime in 2000, Patrick Brown pushed Paul Epstein, then owner of Twist & Shout in Denver. “Hey,” the record store manager said to his boss, “I think Eric Clapton is out there shopping.”
“What should I do?” Epstein said.
“How about saying, 'I'm Paul, I own the store, how can I help you?'
Epstein helped Clapton search for a dark Bing Crosby soundtrack from the '40s, and the two bonded over blues and jazz records. Epstein learned that Clapton was waiting for his clothes to dry at the laundromat across the street from the then location of Twist & Shout. And Brown listened quietly. “It's not so much about me,” he recalls. “I said hi and that was it.”
Today, Brown owns this capital of the music community on Denver's west side, a laid-back gallery of colorful rectangles, from the portraits of Madonna and Pete Townshend perched atop a west wall to the rows of books, CDs and LPs. . which seems to go on forever. Epstein and his wife, Jill, who co-founded the store in 1988, retired in 2022 and sold to Brown, one of two remaining employees who worked at each of Twist's three locations over the years. “Patrick is a little less likely to fanboy, even with people he's a fan of,” she says Alf Kremer, the store's accountant for many years. “With him, it wouldn't be Clapton – it would be, I don't know, [Robert] Fripp.”
Brown landed his first job at Twist in 1992, after spending an earlier summer roaming the aisles belting out indie rock and avant-garde jazz through his headphones. Epstein put Brown to work ripping off the paper oblongs of the CDs and slipping their billfolds into plastic sleeves. The idea was to store the actual CDs in the back to avoid shoplifting.
He turned out to be not only a loyal employee but also an indispensable one. “Six months, this guy is on the fast track. Whatever I ask of him, he does. And then it just stayed,” says Epstein. “From the absolute lowest part-time extra help he's done every job in the store over the years.” Eventually, Brown was promoted to general manager.
Patrick Brown
Courtesy of Twist & Shout
Today, the 11,000-square-foot Twist & Shout remains Denver's signature record store, having weathered the Napster-era recession that cut chains from Tower Records to the Virgin Megastore and then leaned into the unexpected vinyl revival that kept indie retailers going. . Twist's sales mix, according to Brown, is about 60%-70% vinyl, 15%-20% CDs, 10% merchandise and posters, 5% tapes and 3% stereo equipment. “There aren't many stores like this,” he says. “Waterloo in Austin, Amoeba stores, Record Archive in Rochester, Music Millennium in Portland. We all had that old-school record-store catalog depth. We do all kinds. We have invested a lot in physics. There just aren't stores with the big footprint.”
Brown, a soft-spoken 55-year-old who is as comfortable talking about seeing experimental jazz composer Anthony Braxton at a festival as he is at the music-retail inventory, has a more low-key presence to staff and customers than Epstein. He made. “I want it to be what it's always been — a comfortable place to shop,” he says. “Record shops have a reputation for being mean and dismissive of your tastes and we try to avoid that as much as possible. We're just here to help you find what you're interested in.”
The store's storied customer roster includes not only Clapton but also Morrissey, who once paid an impromptu visit with two suave bodyguards, stationed on either side of the “M” aisle so he wouldn't be disturbed while shopping. “I'm charitable—I think he was buying them as gifts for other people,” Brown recalled. “But he still bought his own music as gifts.”
When the Epsteins opened Twist, they were “selling dark music to a small but dedicated clientele out of an overly cluttered building on a quiet Denver side street,” as Advertising sign later reported. They upgraded twice over the years, to new locations across the city, eventually settling on West Colfax Avenue, what Brown calls “The Cultureplex,” a busy corner that includes the iconic but struggling bookstore Tattered Cover and the independent center films Sie Film Center. During an interview on a weekday afternoon, studs of East High School students roam the stores. (The Epsteins own the building, and Twist & Shout, along with the adjacent Chipotle and a sushi restaurant, pays them rent.)
“It has the feel of, 'This is our world, here,' all in this space,” says Mollie O'Brien, a veteran Denver folk and R&B singer. “It's welcoming.” Like the Epsteins, he adds, Brown continues to physically buy albums from local artists, even if they aren't recording for major labels or major distributors. Typically, however, Twist & Shout buys wholesale from all the major labels, as well as major indies like Sub Pop and Secretly Group and one-stop distributor Alliance Entertainment. “I wouldn't change our mix,” Brown says.
Like everyone else, the Epsteins spent the first part of the pandemic terrified that consumers would be locked out of record stores forever — but business quickly picked up as sheltered customers rediscovered their turntables and records. Epstein said in Denver Post that 2021 sales were 25% higher than 2019 sales. But the Epsteins realized they were tired of running the business. After the longtime owners of The Record Exchange in Boise, Idaho, sold to three employees and one of their spouses in the fall of 2021, Epstein made a similar offer to Brown, who took over the store in March 2022.
When the Epsteins called a staff meeting to announce the new owner, Brown told employees, “I'm sure you're wondering what I'm going to change. And I'm not going to change a thing. Otherwise, I wouldn't want this business.” Kremer, who performs as a Denver dance-music DJ in a gorilla suit called There's An Ape for That, says that prediction has come true: “The philosophy is the same. The approach to business is the same.”
In his 36 years at Twist & Shout, Brown has seen micro and macro changes in the record business. In the '90s, dance music and rave parties exploded in the Denver area, and the store emphasized vinyl to meet DJ demand, which declined when dance music performers went digital in the early 2000s. Then came mp3s, file sharing, Napster, the iTunes Store, YouTube, and Spotify, and the demand for physical products waned for a while. Once the LP revival began, Brown says, “We were ready for it.”
Big record retailers are rare in this age of tiny shops devoted to punk or dance or other niches, according to Andreas Paschalispresident of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores, of which Twist & Shout has been a member since the coalition's inception in 1995. Since Napster and file sharing disrupted CD sales, he says, “It's really hard to build a store with the catalog and inventory that Twist & Shout has when you don't have the decades to do that.”
Twist & Shout is not invulnerable. Brown acknowledges that the vinyl boom could fizzle out, and while CD and cassette sales are picking up again, they're unlikely to catch up. If anything happens to neighboring Tattered Cover, which recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, foot traffic could be reduced at The Cultureplex. And Brown won't even try to predict record business trends. He is a shop steward, not a visionary. “Nothing drastic,” he says. “Keep it as it is.”
