Indie Record Store Profile: Twist & Shout in Denver, Colorado

Sometime in 2000, Patrick Brown nudged Paul Epstein, then-owner of Twist & Shout in Denver. “Hey,” the record store manager told his boss, “I think Eric Clapton‘s out there shopping.”

“What should I do?” Epstein said.

“How about you say, ‘I’m Paul, I own the store, how can I help you?'”

Epstein helped Clapton search for an obscure Bing Crosby soundtrack from the ’40s, and the two bonded over blues and jazz records. Epstein learned Clapton was waiting for his clothes to dry at the laundromat across the street from Twist & Shout’s then-location. And Brown listened quietly. “It’s not my thing so much,” he recalls. “I said hello and that was it.”

Today, Brown is the owner of this music community capital on the west side of Denver, a soothing gallery of colorful rectangles, from the Madonna and Pete Townshend portraits facing off at the top of a west wall to the rows of books, CDs and LPs that seem to go on forever. Epstein and his wife, Jill, who co-founded the store in 1988, retired in 2022 and sold to Brown, one of two remaining employees who has worked at each of the three locations where Twist has existed over the years. “Patrick is a little less likely to fanboy, even over people he is a fan of,” says Alf Kremer, the store’s longtime bookkeeper. “With him, it wouldn’t be Clapton — it’d be, I don’t know, [Robert] Fripp.”

Brown landed his first job at Twist in 1992, after he’d spent an earlier summer wandering the aisles, blasting indie rock and avant-garde jazz through his headphones. Epstein put Brown to work tearing up cardboard CD longboxes and slipping their liner-note booklets into plastic sheaths; the idea was to store the actual CDs in the back to avoid in-store theft.

He turned out to be not only a loyal employee but an indispensable one. “Six months, this guy’s on the fast track. Whatever I ask him to do, he does it. And then he just stayed,” Epstein says. “He went from the absolute lowest part-time additional help to doing every single job at the store over the years.” Eventually, Brown rose to general manager.

Today, the 11,000-square-foot Twist & Shout remains Denver’s signature record store, having weathered the Napster-era downturn that felled chains from Tower Records to Virgin Megastore, then leaned into the unexpected vinyl revival that has kept indie retailers afloat for two decades. Twist’s sales mix, according to Brown, is roughly 60%-70% vinyl, 15%-20% CDs, 10% merch and posters, 5% movies and 3% stereo equipment. “There are not a lot of stores like this,” he says. “Waterloo in Austin, the Amoeba stores, Record Archive in Rochester, Music Millennium in Portland. We’ve all had that old-school-record-store depth of catalog. We do all genres. We’ve invested heavily in physical. There just aren’t stores with the big footprint.”

Brown, a soft-spoken 55-year-old who is just as comfortable talking about seeing experimental-jazz composer Anthony Braxton at a festival as the evolution of music-retail inventory, has a more low-key presence among staff and customers than Epstein did. “I want it to still be what it always has been — a comfortable space for anybody to shop,” he says. “Record stores have a reputation for being snotty and disdainful of your tastes, and we try to avoid that as much as possible. We’re here just to help you find what you’re interested in.”

The store’s historical customer roster includes not only Clapton but Morrissey, who once made an impromptu visit with two beefy bodyguards, whom he positioned on each side of the “M” aisle so he could be unbothered while shopping. “I’m charitable — I think he was buying those as gifts for other people,” Brown recalls. “But he was still buying his own music as gifts.”

When the Epsteins opened Twist, they were “selling obscure music to a small but dedicated clientele from an over-cluttered building on a quiet Denver side street,” as Billboard later reported. They upgraded twice over the years, to new locations throughout the city, finally settling on West Colfax Avenue, what Brown calls “The Cultureplex,” a busy corner that includes iconic but struggling bookstore Tattered Cover and indie-movie haven Sie Film Center. During an interview on a weekday afternoon, packs of East High School students roam the stores. (The Epsteins own the building, and Twist & Shout, along with the adjacent Chipotle and a sushi restaurant, pays rent to them.)

“It feels like, ‘This is our world, here,’ all in this space,” says Mollie O’Brien, a veteran Denver folk and R&B singer. “It’s welcoming.” Like the Epsteins, she adds, Brown continues to purchase physical albums by local artists, even if they don’t record for major labels or big-time distributors. Usually, though, Twist & Shout buys wholesale from all the major labels, plus big indies such as Sub Pop and Secretly Group and one-stop distributor Alliance Entertainment. “I wouldn’t change our mix,” Brown says.

Like everybody, the Epsteins spent the early part of the pandemic terrified that consumers would stay out of record stores forever — but business quickly picked up as shelter-in-place customers rediscovered their turntables and records; Epstein told the Denver Post that 2021 sales were 25% higher than 2019 sales. The Epsteins, though, realized they were tired of running the business. After the longtime owners of The Record Exchange in Boise, Idaho, sold to three employees and one of their spouses in fall 2021, Epstein made a similar offer to Brown, who took over the store in March 2022.

When the Epsteins called a staff meeting to announce the new owner, Brown told employees, “I’m sure you’re wondering what I’m going to change. And I’m not going to be changing anything. Otherwise, I wouldn’t want this business.” Kremer, who moonlights as a Denver dance-music DJ in a gorilla suit called There’s An Ape for That, says this prediction came true: “The philosophy is the same. The approach to the business is the same.”

In his 36 years at Twist & Shout, Brown has experienced micro and macro changes in the record business. In the ’90s, dance music and rave parties exploded in the Denver area, and the store emphasized vinyl to accommodate DJ demand, which diminished when dance-music performers went digital in the early 2000s. Then came mp3s, file-sharing, Napster, the iTunes Store, YouTube and Spotify, and demand for physical products briefly dipped. Once the LP revival kicked in, Brown says, “We were ready for that.”

Large record retailers are rare in this era of tiny stores devoted to punk or dance or other niches, according to Andrea Paschal, president of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores, of which Twist & Shout has been a member since the coalition’s 1995 inception. Since Napster and file-sharing disrupted CD sales, she says, “It’s really tough to build a store with the catalog and inventory that Twist & Shout has when you don’t have the decades of doing that.”

Twist & Shout isn’t invulnerable. Brown acknowledges the vinyl boom could dissipate, and while CD and cassette sales are rising again, they’re unlikely to make up the difference. If something happens to neighbor Tattered Cover, which recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, foot traffic could drop at The Cultureplex. And Brown won’t even try to predict record-business trends. He’s a steward of the store, not a visionary. “Nothing drastic,” he says. “Keep it as it is.”