Time & Again Records Wisconsin: Beatles Roots, Ministry Ties & the Moment That Built a Record Store6/24/2026 From paper-route Beatles singles to sitting beside Al Jourgensen, Ray's path to Time & Again, celebrating nine years this July, was anything but planned.  Before Time & Again existed, Ray already looked like the guy who’d open a record shop. Ray didn't open Time & Again because he had a business plan. He opened it because one day, after 35 years in retail, he hit a wall, said "F— it," and built the record store he wished existed, not in Detroit or Milwaukee, but in Sturtevant, Wisconsin.
He'd already lived a whole life in music retail: raised on Beatles singles bought with paper-route money, working at Rose Records and Capitol Records, running a used record store alongside a young Al Jourgensen before Ministry was Ministry, and eventually writing two Beatles books. Time & Again feels like the sum of all that experience. On my last visit, I walked out with a DEBUT magazine-and-record combo featuring The Smiths, exactly the kind of piece Ray seems to save for the right person at the right moment. So instead of telling his story for him, I asked Ray to tell it himself. Editor's Note: Time & Again celebrates nine years in business this July. The conversation below has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
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Why Record Stores Still Matter in 2026: Inside the Culture, Community, and Chaos of Record Works6/17/2026 
Inside Record Works, where the hunt never ends. Photo credit: Tourism Oxford.
The Spark That Every Vinyl Lover Recognize
Every vinyl collector has a moment when a record store changes them — a moment when the world suddenly feels bigger, warmer, and full of possibility.
For Doug Marsh, that moment happened in 1987. He wasn't trying to start a business. He was simply helping another shop track down an out-of-print Burton Cummings record. He walked into Dr. Disc in London, Ontario, and felt the same jolt every crate digger knows: this is where the magic happens. "A light bulb went on about how downtown Woodstock could support this type of cool operation," he says — not as a businessman, but as someone who recognized a feeling and followed it.
That spark became Record Works, a shop that has survived four decades, multiple format deaths, the rise of streaming, and the collapse of physical media.
But this isn't just a story about one store. It's a story about why record stores still matter.  Every one of these is the real deal — pulled straight from Duke’s own bootleg collection. The Records They Never Wanted You to HearGuest Contributor: Duke — guitarist & songwriter who never stopped dropping the needle. A vinyl bootleg is an unofficial record released without the authorization of the artist or record label. Often built around unreleased studio sessions, demos or live recordings, bootlegs gave collectors access to music they simply couldn't find anywhere else. Bootlegs. No, not the kind you wear—the kind you listen to.
For decades, bootleg albums have occupied one of the strangest and most fascinating corners of the music world. Some sound terrible. Some sound incredible. In certain cases, the packaging and artwork are better than what was available in record stores. Collectively, bootlegs have generated billions of dollars worldwide, yet almost none of that money has ever gone to the artists themselves. So why do collectors continue to seek them out? The answer is simple: bootlegs preserve moments that would otherwise be lost. Long before smartphones and digital recorders, dedicated fans smuggled cassette recorders and microphones into concerts to capture performances. The results ranged from dreadful to astonishing, but they documented shows that existed nowhere else. These recordings became the stuff of legend, passed between collectors and discussed in record stores, flea markets, and record conventions like whispered campfire stories. Today, many of those same recordings can be found online with a few clicks. YouTube, fan archives, and countless websites have made rare performances readily available. But for collectors of physical media, there remains something special about holding the recording in your hands. The vinyl, the artwork, the liner notes, the mythology—it all becomes part of the experience.  Jacob Chung and the chase behind a life in jazz“It’s coming back from playing Charlie Parker for 20,000 people to being a saxophone monkey at a wedding gig that pays next to nothing.” That was the week Jacob Chung described to me, and it left me wondering what success even means when it can change rooms overnight.
I didn’t meet him in person. We talked over Instagram messages. That feels normal now in a way that would’ve surprised me before I started listening to jazz at all. I’ve only been inside this music for a few months, still learning how to hear it properly one artist, one record at a time. So when I first heard Jacob Chung, I wasn’t listening as someone who understood jazz. I was listening as someone still figuring out why it mattered at all. |
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