Thirty years of Dr. Music
The little shop on Section Street across from Page & Palette doesn’t look like an institution, but thirty years into business, Dr. Music Records has become exactly that — the place where Fairhope learns what it listens to. Owner Wade Wellborn marked the anniversary with a public party at District Hall, six bands in five hours, an air-guitar competition between sets, and free admission for the customers he credits with keeping the doors open since 1996.
“I’ve never turned 30 before, so I wanted to have a party,” Wellborn says — the store’s 30, that is. The bill read like a map of the local music scene: Grayson Capps and his band, the Pine Hill Haints, Reconciler, the Bankhead Boys, Rufus McBlack, and Marla and the Singers. Between sets, guests decorated old records and album covers with art supplies brought by employee Greta Fritz and her mother, artist and musician Christy Wells-Fritz, while local character Dirk McCall drew what he calls Bad Portraits.
“I really just want to celebrate my customers,” Wellborn says. “We’re going to give some stuff away and have some other fun components.”
Named for a doctor who never owned it
The store’s name is a story Wellborn tells with a laugh. He grew up in Mobile, moved to Fairhope the summer after eighth grade, and studied English at the University of Alabama. He was running an electronics store in Pensacola when the pull of his hometown became irresistible — he wanted to open a record store in a small city he believed sorely needed one. An older acquaintance, a retired doctor and music lover, had strongly encouraged the dream, and Wellborn named the store in his honor. In the earlier telling of the story, the acquaintance was a local surgeon with terminal cancer who shared the dream; years later, the man — very much alive, his recovery a “miracle” — walked back into the shop on Section Street.
What Wellborn didn’t anticipate was that customers would assume the name was his. “Many refer to me as Dr. Music, or they’ll call me Doc,” he says, in the shop and out of it.
Surviving every format war
Thirty years is several lifetimes in music retail, and Wellborn has adapted through each upheaval. The early years on Greeno Road near Fairhope High School were CD years. Then Napster and home CD burning gutted disc sales, and Wellborn diversified: DJ work, sound engineering, consulting for businesses and churches, home system installation, and the design of his Sonic Suitcase powered speakers. He moved downtown to North Church Street, sharing space with Over the Transom Books, and then a decade on Section Street.
Then came the twist he never saw coming. “In 2010, people started coming into the store and asking about records, and I was dumbfounded,” he recalls. “My first thought was that it would be a short trend… And that was 16 years ago, and vinyl is still growing.” The revival brought back the customers he had lost — “Young people didn’t come to the record store at that time,” he says of the download era — and changed the store’s clientele from mostly Baby Boomers to every generation.
These days the newest turn is the most old-fashioned: “We’re selling CDs like crazy and can’t keep used cassettes in here,” he says. His theory is that school phone bans cut students off from streaming, so they are buying Walkman-style players, CDs and cassettes to fill the silence.
The journey, not the collection
Wellborn’s philosophy of the shop has hardened into something like a creed: loving music is a journey, and discovery matters as much as the favorites you already know. “Music that challenged me became my favorite stuff,” he says — jazz took him years to crack, and his son is named Cole Trane. He debunks vinyl-market myths on request: not every record is collectible, new pressings aren’t inferior, and the passion matters more than the price guide. The store buys, sells and trades records, CDs and vintage stereo equipment, and its bargain bins sit alongside premium used records and new releases.
Three decades in, the shop that was named for a doctor is prescribed by its regulars as exactly that — a place to get lost in the side streets of a musical journey. Fairhope has changed around it. Dr. Music, somehow, keeps playing.
Record Store Day and the early years
Dr. Music’s calendar still turns on Record Store Day, the celebration launched in 2007 to support independent record shops, with exclusive editions each April and on Black Friday. On one early Black Friday morning, the line was out the door before opening and stayed busy all day — a scene Wellborn says captures what independent stores do best: advance a customer’s musical journey rather than just sell them a product.
The store’s own journey ran through nine years on South Greeno Road before it moved downtown to share space with Over the Transom Books on Church Street, then on to Section Street. Wellborn buys, sells and trades records, CDs and vintage stereo equipment, pays fairly for collections, and keeps a full range from bargain-bin albums to premium used pressings and new releases — reissues of Led Zeppelin among the steady sellers.
The doctor who came back
The story of the store’s name came full circle a few years ago, when the surgeon whose words started it all walked into the Section Street shop after more than two decades out of touch. “It had been more than 20 years since I’d seen or heard from him,” Wellborn says. “He said that his survival was simply a miracle.”
Wellborn’s advice to collectors hasn’t changed since: collect the music you love and that makes you happy. “We do deal in collectibles, but really it’s the passion for the music that we care about.”