Glenn Branca in I Need That Record | Image by screen­grab from I Need That Record

Vinyl junkies, CD col­lec­tors, music heads, and, casual music buy­ers: Don’t for­get tomor­row, April 17, is national Record Store Day—that third Sat­ur­day in April intended to cel­e­brate and pro­mote the Amer­i­can inde­pen­dent music store that has been so vital to so many of us for most of our adult lives. And this year’s day offers an lit­tle extra incen­tive to patron­iz­ing your friendly neigh­bor­hood inde­pen­dent record store—besides, you know, sup­port­ing a local busi­ness that wants to turn you on to new tunes: Start­ing tomor­row, direc­tor Bren­den Toller’s doc­u­men­tary I Need That Record!: The Death (and Pos­si­ble Sur­vival) of the Inde­pen­dent Record Store will only be avail­able on DVD at inde­pen­dent record stores until its June 27 wide release.

Refresh­ingly, the glim­mer of hope sug­gested by the title’s par­en­thet­i­cal is car­ried over into the doc itself. Toller runs through the by now famil­iar rea­sons why the inde­pen­dent record store faces chal­lenges in today’s mar­ket­place, chart­ing that music-industry com­mer­cial­iza­tion path that starts with the homog­e­niza­tion of radio in the 1950s through the rise of MBAs tak­ing over the major labels in the 1980s and on through the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Act of 1996 that enabled con­cen­trated media own­er­ship, the emer­gence of online music trad­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion, and the rise of the big box stores that has turned Wal-Mart into the largest retailer in Amer­i­can, even though CDs sales rep­re­sent less than 2 per­cent of list revenue.

“No one at Tar­get is going to rec­om­mend Hawkwind’s Space Rit­ual live to you,” offers one of the two clerks from Cul­ture Clash in Toledo, Ohio, inter­viewed in the movie. “But I will rec­om­mend Hawkwind’s Space Rit­ual to you.” He’s respond­ing to the rise of big-box stores as music retail­ers, but this can­did moment rep­re­sents what I Need That Record gets so right. Toller frames his doc­u­men­tary by intro­duc­ing two record stores clos­ing: Record Express in Mid­dle­town, Conn.—the store Toller says he grew up with—and inde­pen­dent insti­tu­tion Trash Amer­i­can Style, where after 18 years in its Dan­bury loca­tion, its land­lord maneu­vered owner Mal­colm Tent out of his space. And in mak­ing the story per­sonal to him, Toller taps into the inde­pen­dent record store as local cul­tural hub.

That aspect is what so many of Toller’s inter­view subjects—Thurston Moore, Ian MacK­aye, a blithe Glenn Branca, Chris Frantz, Legs McNeil, Mike Watt, Pat­ter­son Hood, pho­tog­ra­pher Bob Gruen, and Noam Chomsky—remark on, and what so many record store own­ers rec­og­nize about their estab­lish­ments, whether its Mike Dreese of New­bury Comics or the good peo­ple at Grimey’s in Nashville, Tenn. The record store isn’t just some mer­can­tile space where you go to exchange money for goods; it’s where you go to recharge your bat­ter­ies with the good things in life.

And I Need That Record exudes the same sort of play­ful atti­tude. Toller tells his music-industry story in a col­lage of found footage and cut-out ani­ma­tion by Matt New­man, which lends the doc an insou­ciant edge. Music indus­try track­ers and store own­ers aren’t going to learn any­thing new, here, but with I Need That Record Bren­dan Toller offers an enter­tain­ing reminder as to why the inde­pen­dent record store should mat­ter to any­body who, you know, pro­fesses to like music.