Enjoy this peek inside one of the most interesting spots in neighboring Catonsville (AKA, “Music City Maryland”), as told and photographed by UMBC editorial intern Anjali DasSarma ’21.  

Tucked between a dive bar and a pretty pink beauty parlor lies Catonsville’s resident vinyl store: Trax on Wax. The light smell of incense hangs in the air of the store, emanating from bottles stacked neatly on the display shelves. The owner, Gary Gebler, has been selling records since he was 15 years old. Gebler is 60 now. He stands behind the counter, brown fedora perched jauntily on his head with thin silver hoops in each ear. His white scarf is tied in a loose knot around his neck and his black shirt underneath has the logo for the shop emboldened across the front, as he carefully wraps records in bubble wrap. The shop is packed with records in blue and green crates and wooden shelves, birds made of vinyl crafted by a local artist, bowls made of warped records, and anything else related to the vinyl industry.

Right when customers enter the store, they are greeted by rows of photographs of Gebler with icons like Tina Turner, all in the same style of thin black frames. Some are slightly tilted, and others are faded, but they all show the same thing: Gebler, with a slight smile on his face, standing next to an artist (oftentimes holding their own record proudly).

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Each of the photos has a story behind it. One photo from around 1987 shows a young Gebler with a ginger beard next to Tina Turner. Gebler now sports whiskery white stubble, but the look in his pale blue eyes is the same as in the photo. “I met Tina Turner and she was huge at the time. We were instructed not to look her in the eye but then when we met her she was like ‘oh those guys, they do that all the time’ so she was really cool,” he says.

In the past, he was oftentimes invited out on stage to “just jam out” with artists like Bob Seger at Merriweather Post Pavilion. “Back in the day, I got to go out on the stage and play with him. I don’t play anything, they just put me behind the congas,” he says.

Gebler has an effortless way of talking, the kind of ease that only comes with years of experience. “The first day I went in and [sold records], I was still in high school. I thought to myself ‘well this is what I’m gonna do with the rest of my life,’ and I knew it! My day is still exactly the same day as when I was 15,” he says.

Silk tapestries and woven blankets hang from the ceiling alongside t-shirts with sayings like “Rocknroll Motherf&*er.” Next to the counter, there is a listening station, complete with a shiny leather stool and a pair of worn gray headphones plugged into a record player.

Growing Up With Vinyl

Trax on Wax has now been open for nine years. “When I first opened up, it was a bunch of old people like me, and so the people would come in and talk about their first concert. Then as the years progressed, there’s been a lot of younger people who are digging the store which is cool too. We get a lot of high school and college kids now and they come back on a regular basis, and it’s really cool to see them grow up,” he says.

Gebler doesn’t run Trax on Wax alone. His store manager, Jeff Ball, has been working in the vinyl industry, selling records or working in the entertainment section of department stores since 1986. He has been working at Trax on Wax for five years. He, like Gebler, found his interest in records early on, milling around vinyl shops as a teenager.

He took the summer off from working one year, and found himself at a party, where he ran into an old friend who encouraged him to come work at Towson’s Record and Tape Traders. “He said ‘I guarantee you’ll have a job right from the start.’ And it was true,” he says. The store manager, John Lewis, hired him on the spot. “I never filled out an application for a company that I worked for over twenty years. At that store, within a month or two I was manager.”

Ball now stands behind the counter wearing light blue jeans with a worn hole in the left knee and a green flannel casuallydraped over his black t-shirt with the Trax on Wax logo. He is ringing up a young woman who can’t be older than 25, who sets ten incense sticks on the glass surface. Ball taps the charge into the gray cash register, hitting the keys deliberately, before reading out the cost. The girl hands him the bills, and tells him to keep the change. He waves her back to the incense stand and tells her to “take a couple more sticks!” before she and her long-haired boyfriend leave the store.

Every store has its regulars, and Ball recalls one man named Danny from the “CD era… probably 1991” who would arrive every Tuesday when the store Ball worked at, Waxie Maxie’s, would get new arrivals and buy one of every single CD. “He had a good job, but he was quite the character. His car was loaded with bags and newspapers and you couldn’t even see out the back window, and my suspicion was that he was a hoarder. It was all great, but then suddenly Danny lost his job,” Ball says, his eyes widening a little. “He’d be begging his mother for money on the phone. It was like his drug, you know? I don’t know what happened to him after that.”

An Element of Danger

Even though both Gebler and Ball have followed similar routines their entire lives in the business, Ball’s involvement in the selling of bootleg records added an element of danger and excitement. Bootleg records are unauthorized, unreleased songs that are sold with no profit to the artist. Ball first heard about bootleg records at “rebellious” music store, Music Liberated. “They would actually go and slide a door open under the counter,” he says, gesturing to the smooth counter in front of him. “It was run by a bunch of hippies, and they had an F-U attitude to a lot of things.”

Ball himself was involved in the selling of bootlegs, especially Bruce Springsteen bootlegs, as the owner had a soft spot for his music. “Springsteen’s label had been in touch, because they got wind about how big we were. We even sent out mailers filled with nothing but bootlegs! One Monday, we had just opened. My employee showed up, hungover as usual. This guy walked into the store, bought a one dollar record and walks right out, doesn’t say a word. A couple minutes later, I’m standing at the counter, and I see the same guy walking up, and he’s got a state trooper with him, and I’m like ‘we’re going to get busted.’” he says, with a sly smile.

“This one guy comes out and says ‘picture time!’ and hands us each a bootleg. And I’m like ‘I’m not having my picture taken.’ And he goes, ‘oh really? Then let’s get in the car. We’re going downtown.’ And I said ‘where’s that record?’” Ball says, snatching a Smithereens album and holding it up like he would an identifier in a mugshot.

When it comes down to it though, excitement or not, Ball cherishes the feeling of listening to records. He, like Gebler, believes that vinyl makes the listener value the surrounding experience more than other forms that music takes on.

Gebler appreciates the aforementioned. “It just sounds good. It’s just a real interactive experience. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a snob, I’ve got an iPod, I listen to CDs in my car,” he says, laughing. “But when I really wanna sit down and experience music, [vinyl is] how I prefer to do it. And luckily there’s enough people who want to do that too to keep me in business.”

And Gebler knows the value of history. Hanging above the door, facing inwards is a sign for the “Kozy Korner Record Shop” that closed in the late 70s. Gebler bought all of their old records when they closed down, but he left the sign up in Trax on Wax. “It’s good to keep that bit of history alive,” he says.

Catonsville resident Gus Russo ’72, political science, is married to the mob. And to U.S. history. He is a writer and investigative reporter specializing in the shadowy netherworld of American crime and politics. Russo has worked on 15 television documentaries for major networks in the United States and elsewhere, and he is the author of seven books – including “Where Were You? America Remembers the JFK Assassination” (Lyons Press, 2013).

The 1960s and 1970s (when I was a student at UMBC) were not just defined by musical revolutions, but also by the tumult of politics and conspiracy – and the frantic efforts by public officials to keep secrets: Who killed JFK, MLK and RFK? Why were we in a senseless and seemingly endless war in Vietnam? Who ordered the Watergate break-in and what were the burglars after in the Democratic National Committee headquarters? What were all those silver discs people thought they saw in the sky?

In the 1980s, I gave up work as a musician to embark upon a journey to find answers to those sorts of questions as an investigative journalist. While it’s often portrayed as a glamorous profession, the skills and tools I employ are the same mundane ones that previous generations of gumshoes have relied upon: developing and working sources, skip-tracing (locating subjects), and obtaining documentary records from courts, real estate transactions, federal archives and law enforcement agencies.

Other than giving faster access to a small percentage of available records, the digital revolution hasn’t changed the work much. Investigative reporters rarely find their best stories online. The real truth (or as close as we can get to it) often lies buried in undigitized repositories of primary source documents, or in the closely guarded memories of the first-hand players and witnesses.

It’s often hard to win the trust of those actors and witnesses to history. It requires patience and perseverance, especially in the areas that most interest me: organized crime and intelligence agencies domestic and foreign. Old school wiseguys and retired spies don’t open up their vaults (or memories) just because you sent a nice email or even snail mail. I’ve sent Christmas presents, birthday presents, get-well cards, and funeral floral arrangements. (When I’m in the middle of a project, I have “Edible Arrangements” on speed dial.) I’ve hopped on countless planes, trains and autos to take someone out to dinner and slowly gain their trust. It often takes many months. In some cases, years.

But more often than not, determination pays off. When I flew to Chicago in 2000 to take ten members of former boss Sam Giancana’s family to dinner in a suburban restaurant infamous for its parking lot whackings, I thought I must have lost my mind. But it worked. The clan introduced me to many of Sam’s still-living friends and associates – a treasure trove of information for my then work-in-progress, The Outfit.

Then there is the paper trail – and the elusive “smoking gun” that everybody wants to find. But the truth is that document trolling is painstaking and boring 99 percent of the time.  (I should know: Staff members at the National Archives have told me I’ve spent more hours there over the last 20 years than any other researcher.) And for every useful page, I’ve discarded a thousand others.

It’s also difficult to find the best documents. They certainly aren’t all at the National Archives.  I’ve pulled FBI files from garages and attics of retired agents. My eyes have gone blurry pouring over faded real estate quitclaim deeds. I’ve begged Congressional committee chairmen to open up investigative files stored in the Library of Congress before the traditional 50-year lockdown date expires, and appealed FBI and CIA denials more times than I can count. When the FBI tried to tell me they only held 275 pages on the mob’s longtime fixer, Sidney Korshak, I hounded them for two years to obtain the rest of what I intuited they must possess. Eventually I was rewarded with 7,500 pages delivered to my doorstep at no charge. Maybe they felt guilty about the two-year runaround.

There was gold in those files, but there were no “smoking guns.” In fact, that concept should be erased from the minds of budding and seasoned journalists alike. The only “smoking gun” proof is the literal kind: a perpetrator caught holding one of them over the body of a victim. Nothing that dispositive can ever be found after the fact. Any document can be forged, any picture Photoshopped, and any witness mistaken or corrupted.

The seasoned investigative reporter knows that the more sensational the information you have, the more corroboration is needed so that one can arrive, at best, at an approximate truth based on a preponderance of evidence. If you require concrete proofs in your life, I suggest majoring in math. Otherwise you’ll be in for one major disappointment after another.

Serious investigative work – pounding the pavement, working the phones, and poring through over documents – can max out your stamina and your credit card. But it’s the only way I have been able to find answers to the questions that dog me about the shadow powers in our country.

Plus, you make some lasting human connections along the way. (What a concept!) In the week that I wrote this piece, I had phone calls from Sam Giancana’s daughter, Carlos Marcello’s son, the man who found Lee Harvey Oswald hiding in a Dallas theater after the Kennedy assassination, and two members of JFK’s Secret Service detail.

Often when these friends call or we visit in person, I feel sad for a generation that has been led to believe that all information, knowledge and wisdom reside inside in an invisible digital server or the “cloud.” It is a failure of my generation, which created and sold the myth, and it certainly doesn’t bode well for the future of my profession.

Read the full issue of the Winter 2014 UMBC Magazine.

It’s not often you find someone who has an art gallery in their home. But that’s exactly what UMBC professor Carolyn Forestiere and her husband, Asher, decided to do in the fall of 2012 when they opened the David Mikow Gallery in their living room. Make sure to check out their newest addition, Brianna Faulkner ’11, visual arts, on December 13 from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. For more information, click here.

The David Mikow Art Gallery
1002 Vineyard Hill Road
Catonsville, MD 21228

Note: The show is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided.

Eric Conn doesn’t exactly have a traditional career. Then again, he was never a traditional student.
Between switching majors several times and taking a few years off from college to play in a rock band, it took Conn nearly seven years to finish school. However, he has never regretted his decision to take a non-traditional path.
In fact, it is Conn’s adventurous edge that has allowed the 1985 computer science major to prosper as an inventor and entrepreneur.
His latest project, Cellblock.com – a social networking site that allows users to e-mail photos from their cell phones to a real-time online slideshow – will be on display at UMBC’s 40th Anniversary, Homecoming and Family Celebration this month.
The Rock Star Life
After high school, Conn chose UMBC for its reputation in the sciences as well as its proximity to home.
“I lived only 4 miles away in Catonsville, and since I didn’t have a car, my primary means of transportation was my feet.”
He started off as a pre-med major, however, the chance to make a living as a rock guitarist lured him from his studies.
“Since music, especially rock music in the early 80s, was a young person’s game, I decided to pursue that career path while I had the chance. After I had lived the rock star life (albeit on a local level) for a few years, I wanted to get back to school and challenge myself intellectually. My junior and senior years at UMBC were my favorite because I had scratched my musical itch and could really concentrate on academic activities,” he explains.
The Perfect Major
By this point, Conn had also finally found his perfect major. After trying out biology, chemistry, physics and math, he decided to study computer science.
“I ultimately selected computer science because I found it intriguing and it allowed me to solve many of the scientific problems that I had encountered in related disciplines more efficiently,” he said, adding, “There were also many jobs available in the local area and since I paid my own way through college, finding a job was a top priority.”
He credits his experiences at UMBC with teaching him self-confidence, discipline, and problem-solving skills. These skills went a long way to help him establish his career.
After graduating from UMBC, Conn worked as an engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for almost 10 years. During this time, he received a master’s degree in computer science. In 1996, he launched a software development company with several friends, which they sold in 2003. In April 2005, Conn started his new company, Gloto Corp.
“Gloto.com is our original concept for a mobile phone interface that enables social networking and remote directory services like maps and directions,” says Conn.
A Twist on the Traditional Slideshow
Gloto Corp. recently launched a new concept as part of its mobile phone interface. The new component, Cellblock, allows users to e-mail photos from their computers or camera phones to a shared photo album at Cellblock.com.
“The idea is simple; however, the implications are great,” said Conn. “Many people can contribute to a shared photo album using regular camera phones and the pictures can be displayed on a large screen as they arrive. This is ideal for public events like UMBC’s 40th Anniversary where anyone in attendance or at home can contribute and view pictures of the activities without any special software or advanced notice. It takes the traditional photo album concept and turns it into a social event that promotes communication between groups of people.”
Cellblock.com’s technology will be used extensively at UMBC during the 40th Anniversary weekend. Attendees will be able to email photos from their phones to a UMBC album (umbc@cellblock.com). The photos will be updated in real-time and appear in a slideshow projected at various points on campus.
In the future, Conn would love to see Gloto.com and Cellblock.com achieve the popularity of other social networking sites.
“We hope that consumers and businesses discover the uniqueness of Gloto.com and Cellblock.com and use it in imaginative ways for fun or for profit. We’d love to have millions of users visit the site each day and contribute content for everyone to enjoy.”
– Jennifer Matthews ’07
Originally posted October 2006

Eric Conn doesn’t exactly have a traditional career. Then again, he was never a traditional student.

Between switching majors several times and taking a few years off from college to play in a rock band, it took Conn nearly seven years to finish school. However, he has never regretted his decision to take a non-traditional path.

In fact, it is Conn’s adventurous edge that has allowed the 1985 computer science major to prosper as an inventor and entrepreneur.

His latest project, Cellblock.com – a social networking site that allows users to e-mail photos from their cell phones to a real-time online slideshow – will be on display at UMBC’s 40th Anniversary, Homecoming and Family Celebration this month.

The Rock Star Life

After high school, Conn chose UMBC for its reputation in the sciences as well as its proximity to home.

“I lived only 4 miles away in Catonsville, and since I didn’t have a car, my primary means of transportation was my feet.”

He started off as a pre-med major, however, the chance to make a living as a rock guitarist lured him from his studies.

“Since music, especially rock music in the early 80s, was a young person’s game, I decided to pursue that career path while I had the chance. After I had lived the rock star life (albeit on a local level) for a few years, I wanted to get back to school and challenge myself intellectually. My junior and senior years at UMBC were my favorite because I had scratched my musical itch and could really concentrate on academic activities,” he explains.

The Perfect Major

By this point, Conn had also finally found his perfect major. After trying out biology, chemistry, physics and math, he decided to study computer science.

“I ultimately selected computer science because I found it intriguing and it allowed me to solve many of the scientific problems that I had encountered in related disciplines more efficiently,” he said, adding, “There were also many jobs available in the local area and since I paid my own way through college, finding a job was a top priority.”

He credits his experiences at UMBC with teaching him self-confidence, discipline, and problem-solving skills. These skills went a long way to help him establish his career.

After graduating from UMBC, Conn worked as an engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for almost 10 years. During this time, he received a master’s degree in computer science. In 1996, he launched a software development company with several friends, which they sold in 2003. In April 2005, Conn started his new company, Gloto Corp.

“Gloto.com is our original concept for a mobile phone interface that enables social networking and remote directory services like maps and directions,” says Conn.

A Twist on the Traditional Slideshow

Gloto Corp. recently launched a new concept as part of its mobile phone interface. The new component, Cellblock, allows users to e-mail photos from their computers or camera phones to a shared photo album at Cellblock.com.

“The idea is simple; however, the implications are great,” said Conn. “Many people can contribute to a shared photo album using regular camera phones and the pictures can be displayed on a large screen as they arrive. This is ideal for public events like UMBC’s 40th Anniversary where anyone in attendance or at home can contribute and view pictures of the activities without any special software or advanced notice. It takes the traditional photo album concept and turns it into a social event that promotes communication between groups of people.”

Cellblock.com’s technology will be used extensively at UMBC during the 40th Anniversary weekend. Attendees will be able to email photos from their phones to a UMBC album (umbc@cellblock.com). The photos will be updated in real-time and appear in a slideshow projected at various points on campus.

In the future, Conn would love to see Gloto.com and Cellblock.com achieve the popularity of other social networking sites.

“We hope that consumers and businesses discover the uniqueness of Gloto.com and Cellblock.com and use it in imaginative ways for fun or for profit. We’d love to have millions of users visit the site each day and contribute content for everyone to enjoy.”

– Jennifer Matthews ’07
Originally posted October 2006