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Bobby Bernard: The Music Nut

Bobby Barnard has lived his whole life with a soundtrack.

“When I was real young, I had an older brother bringing home the Elvis records and the Buddy Holly records and Jerry Lewis and so forth, the original guys, and I was just a little squirt hearing them and got hooked then. By the time the Beatles came around I was a full fledged musical nut,” Barnard said.

He graduated from high school, went to college for a semester, then decided to work at a place where he could be surrounded by music all day long.

“That’s when I decided to try to get my foot in the door and start a record store, and I had a chance to do that in Denver, Colorado,” he said.

“There was a company store that had just started and they were franchising it out and it was called Budget Tapes and Records.”

Barnard and his brother bought a franchise and moved to Colorado to run the store.

After a few years, he ended up in Houston at United Record distributors, where he tried to convince his boss to open up a record store.

“Finally my existence in Houston, like I think normal people would get tired of it – who weren’t born there – I soured on Houston and looked for a way out. San Marcos was a great location for a store, and here I am still, 32 years later,” Barnard said.

He opened up Sundance Records, a classic record store that carries every genre of music.

“Most of us have been kind of tossed aside, the little guys have,” Barnard said. “The music business kind of changed here in the last 10 years. It’s gone through some changes and the little guy record stores have been shoved aside.”

Barnard said he still has loyal customers, especially from Texas State University, but most big-name recording artists choose to put their albums in large stores like Wal-Mart and Best Buy. Those stores can buy hundreds of thousands of CDs to be distributed to all of their store locations, he said.

“It’s real convenient for the record label to be able to sell to one account.”

Barnard said he carries a lot of local bands in his store that larger stores don’t sell.

“That’s what we do focus on. We can find a little niche and keep this going. We can carry things that those guys won’t have, so you try to provide something for the customers that you can’t find at the big stores,” he said.

Tickets are one of those things.

“We’ve always sold concert tickets for events in this area since the 70’s,” he said.

Barnard said he doesn’t have a favorite album, he just listens to what he’s in the mood for. But he said the Beatles were a definite influence on his life and rock ‘n’ roll.

“They were so polished, you know? They really took music to another level with the group effect. Until that time, mostly everybody was individuals. You had singers and you had session players that backed up most popular singers. There were very few groups, much less a group that would kind of grab everybody’s attention in the whole world like the Beatles did,” Barnard said.

He said the popularity of the Beatles was what enabled rock ‘n’ roll record stores to open.

“That was the turning point for music. By 1971, 72, music was so established that people were starting rock record stores. It kind of legitimized it,” he said.

Barnard has been through 8-tracks, reel-to-reels, cassettes tapes, CDs and MP3s.

“I think CDs kind of replace the cassette. It’s the mobile music. You can take it anywhere, you can play it on anything and record it on your iPod,” he said. “If you really want to keep something, you go out and buy the record. Well, I would. It seems like that would be the best form, but I’m speaking from old fashioned perspectives.”

The record industry is the only one that Barnard has ever known and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“When you grow up and when you decide what you want to do in life, don’t you always envision doing something that you like? That supersedes, for me, making big money. I want to do something that I love doing and so I don’t really imagine myself doing anything else,” he said. “Then getting up and going to work is not really work. You want to be there and you look forward to it, and I think that shows as you go through life. Being happy is really most important and I think doing something that you like to do for a living is where you want to be.”

Bobby Bernard's story was originally published in the San Marcos Daily Record on August 20, 2009.