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Today I was walking and listening to a song performed live. I think it was Neil Young’s “See The Sky About To Rain” from 1971 (from a fabulous live album–he’s never sounded better). There was a long stretch of applause at the end of the song.

I was suddenly reminded that, in my childhood, I had a sound effects audio tape which included a bunch of recorded laughs and applause. How did I get this, and why did I have it?

Then I remembered. From the age of, I don’t know, 13 to 15, I rented a boatload of music CDs from an independent video store in a strip mall in North Vancouver. It was called Flicker’s Video (yes, with an ‘e’), and for a few years they had a sizable music section.

After my Dad’s extensive rock and jazz collection of LPs, Flicker’s was probably the most formative influence on my early musical taste. I’d often rent two or three CDs at random, just to see what they sounded like. I think it cost 99 cents per CD to rent them for two nights. I’m certain that I rented the sound effects album, mostly out of curiosity.

At some point in the nineties, Canadian law must have changed, preventing stores from renting music CDs. Flicker’s closed down in the late nineties. I could only find a single reference to the store on the Web–a business license application on the City of North Vancouver website. Their address is now occupied, oddly, by Clarke’s Family Martial Arts Centres Inc.

Now I’m wondering two things:

• Did the Vancouver-based founders of Flickr know about Flicker’s? Maybe the store left a germ of an idea for a name in the back of their minds?
• Did you ever rent CDs from a video store? Nowadays, renting a CD counts as an obsolete skill, I guess.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 7:25 am and is filed under Vancouver. Tag Testing Project: flickers video, history, north vancouver, renting cds, video store. Photo by . You can skip to the end and leave a response, or trackback from your own site. If you don't see your comment within a day or so, drop me an email. Sometimes my comment spam filter gets overly zealous.