Daniel Rubin: An indie effort to save a shop

Ask Det Ansinn to describe where he lives and the president of Doylestown's Borough Council talks of "our little Norman Rockwell painting."

To me, Doylestown these days is looking more like Bedford Falls.

That, you will remember, is the fictional home of Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life. In our production, the role of George Bailey will be played by Blair Elliott, proprietor of Siren Records.

He was walking down Main Street the other day, about to show me where his indie music store used to be before they padlocked it, when a woman named Jenny Isaacs grabbed him.

"You still have something to do with Siren?" she asked. She had a silver ponytail and steel-rimmed glasses, a small nose hoop, and an open checkbook.

She left him $50 the richer.

Elliott walked no more than half a block before another well-wisher accosted him.

This time it was Wes Goddard, owner of Basically Burgers. "I've got a bucket for you," reminded Goddard, whose customers have been stuffing dollar bills inside a glass jar next to a "Save Siren Records" sign.

You see those pleas all over this picture-book town. An entire community is pulling together to try to keep a shuttered landmark from folding altogether.

"I just feel we need to take care of our own," said Goddard, "especially in these times."

A downbeat economy and the rise of the Internet are murdering independent record stores. Last month, Siren joined Think Music of Northern Liberties and Relapse Records off South Street in the cut-out bin.

Siren had some additional troubles: Its landlord and the borough pressured it to curtail concerts, which it was conducting without proper zoning approval.

But a wonderful part of this story is that fans, friends, customers, musicians and neighbors are working to write a different ending. Together they've raised more than $20,000 of the $33,000 Elliott says he needs to get his merchandise back and reopen Siren in smaller quarters.

Last weekend alone, three nights of benefit concerts raised a big chunk of that money. The support has left Elliott grateful, overwhelmed, exhausted.

Over coffee and a croissant he gave a short musical history of the store he began in high school with a friend named Bob Strawn. Strawn was a decade older and managed a converted barn in Furlong that Elliott's father owned. Strawn seeded Elliott's taste in music: The first cassette he gave him had Pink Floyd's debut on one side with the Sex Pistols on the other.

They called the store Siren Records because it could mean many things: a warning, a wail, a creature who calls others to rocks.

When Elliott graduated from film school at New York University, he moved the store to State Street, where for 16 years he curated an eclectic, essential collection of punk, pop, ska, blues, R&B, jazz and indie rock.

For most of the year and a half Siren was in its last location, Elliott held as many as three shows a week. That got the notice of the borough, which in April ordered the shows stopped. Elliott said he was applying for a zoning variance when his landlord had a judge order the place padlocked. "I thought we had it all worked out," Elliott said, wearily.

He's 40, balding and bespectacled, with a long, pointy goatee. An incurable mix-tape maker, he has been searching for tunes that serve as the right tonic for his emotional state - something with energy, beauty, grace. He's listening to new CDs by the Raconteurs and the Fleet Foxes, whose cathedral-pop harmonies remind him of the Beach Boys.

"The reason Siren meant something to customers was that they could tell it wasn't just a business," he said. "There was passion behind it. We were obsessively curious about music, and we drew in people who shared that curiosity."