Bay area designer and DJ Chris Preston didn’t move to Tampa until 1997, but he remembers skipping school to take his first car to visit local record stores. He discovered Vinyl Fever after a friend suggested they visit since it was much bigger than their normal haunt, the likewise long-gone Alternative Record Store. The pair drove out to finally check out the store’s old Dale Mabry location, but it was closed.
“We were all excited and drove out on a Sunday not knowing what their hours were at the time. We were so bummed,” Preston, 40, told CL. “I remember pushing my face up to the glass and trying to see what they had.”
He ended up getting in there another day, and Preston — who spins records under the DJ Cub moniker — estimates that 90 percent of his music collection came from the shop. He even got a job at the South Tampa institution on his way to becoming an in-demand designer of show posters, graphics for skateboarding and album art. He’s not quite sure which single Tampa Bay record store he’d pick for a resurrection.
“It’s too hard to pick just one. If a gun was to my head, I would say 403 Chaos, only because I was too young for Blue Chair and only got to go a few times. I feel like 403 really picked up where they left off, and I saw some really incredible shows there,” Preston said.
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“But really, there were so many good stores and venues in Tampa over the years that I have some great memories from.”
One of those memories is designing a poster for Vinyl Fever’s final event: a concert with Will Quinlan, Guiltmaker and Matt Hires. Preston seems to remember his old boss, Lee Wolfson, asking him to do the design.
“When I got a job there I was pretty much over the moon. I had an idea of what I wanted to that last poster to look like,” he explains. “It means a lot.”
That store meant a lot to us, too, so we asked our creative director Julio Ramos to incorporate the design into our cover — look for the 2017 edition of the music issue where we revisit important faces, places and shows that made our scene what it is.
Read more from the music issue here, and connect with Cub on Facebook and Instagram. Check out his enamel pins here.
This article appears in Jul 13-20, 2017.
