Visiting Your Origin Story: Uncle Sam’s and the Church of the Weird Kids
- Rich Washburn
- 21 hours ago
- 4 min read
It’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s — that strange, in-between stretch where the world slows down, the clock forgets what day it is, and you finally have time to breathe. I was in Fort Lauderdale, grabbing lunch with my daughter, when I found myself walking straight into my own past.
We were at Tate’s Comics — part art gallery, part geek cathedral. But right next door sits We Got the Beats, a record store that feels like a heartbeat from another decade. Vinyl walls, album art, that faint hum of analog air.
And that’s when it hit me: this was the same spot where Uncle Sam’s Records used to be.
For a second, time folded in on itself.
The Church of the Weird Kids
Uncle Sam’s wasn’t a store. It was a social operating system — the analog kind. You’d walk from your bus stop straight there, skip home altogether. Your parents knew to find you between the incense and the counter, probably in a deep debate about whether Ten was overplayed or Badmotorfinger was underrated.
It was our place.The church of the weird kids. The music kids. The misfits. The thinkers. The dreamers.
Back then, it was the early-’90s — grunge, alt, a cultural collision between distortion and identity. The store smelled like Nag Champa, felt like rebellion, and played like discovery. You could lose five hours in there just flipping through CDs, reading liner notes, or talking with people who got it.
We didn’t call it networking — we just called it hanging out. But in hindsight, that’s where we learned to connect. To debate. To empathize. To listen. That’s also where I learned who I was.
The Other Side of Me — The Maker’s Kid
Here’s what most of those friends didn’t know: while I was living on the musical side of the street, there was another half of me — the tech side.
At home, I was the kid with the soldering iron and a death wish for warranty stickers. My Apple IIc was perpetually in pieces. Every clock radio in the house had been opened and rewired. My XT ran at 1.44 MHz and felt like a spaceship.
I could strip a headphone wire, splice it with tape, and make it play again. My friends thought it was witchcraft; I just thought it was Tuesday.
That was the same era when I was soldering Altairs, coding BASIC on a Sinclair, and carrying an IBM Luggable that weighed more than my backpack. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was already living in two worlds: one built from sound, and the other from silicon.
And in a weird way, Uncle Sam’s was the bridge between them — my first “interface.” The store taught me rhythm, culture, and community. The machines taught me logic, patience, and possibility. Together, they built my operating system.
South Florida, 1993
The world back then was loud and alive.Fort Lauderdale was still finding itself — sunburned suburbia colliding with underground culture. Miami had the glitz; we had the grit.
Our Uncle Sam’s wasn’t polished. It was a little dusty, a little sketchy, and completely ours. The clerks were sages in combat boots. The racks were shrines. Every poster, every sticker, every CD spine was a breadcrumb trail into someone’s new obsession.
This was how discovery worked before algorithms. You didn’t get recommended music — you got initiated into it. If the South Beach Uncle Sam’s was a nightclub confessional, ours was the youth center for the disenchanted. It was where you learned about bands, subcultures, and sometimes about yourself.
You could trace a direct line from those afternoons in the racks to the way I think about systems and creativity today: mix, remix, iterate, learn, repeat. Uncle Sam’s was open-source culture before that phrase existed.
Full Circle — and the Missing Space
So here I am, thirty years later, standing in the same space with my daughter — a guitarist, artist, and every bit the creative I once hoped to be.
Upstairs, hanging on the wall, is a framed original Uncle Sam’s bag — relic turned artifact. I stood next to it grinning, like someone who just found proof that their memories were real.
And my daughter? She’s living the same spark in a different era. She listens to ‘80s music, digs into the lore behind her favorite bands, talks about artists with that same sense of wonder. She wants what we wanted — connection, meaning, belonging. She even got a brand-new MacBook Air for Christmas. Sleek. Black. Monolithic. Naturally, I said, “Maybe I’ll help you set up ChatGPT on it.” She just laughed and said, “Nah.” She’s anti-AI, which, honestly, I respect. She wants something real. And she’s not wrong.
Because she doesn’t have what we had — that third space. Uncle Sam’s was ours. It was messy, loud, and full of life. Today, everything’s polished, optimized, online. But connection doesn’t live in bandwidth. It lives in rooms like that — where you can argue about music until the lights flicker and someone’s mom honks outside.
We had our Penny Universities. We had the Church of the Weird Kids.They taught us to listen, to wonder, to build. Now it’s on us to bring that spirit back — in some form, in some space, for a generation that’s still searching for the analog soul inside a digital world.
Because the truth is, the cloud might hold our music — but the soul of it still lives down here. In the heat. In the concrete. In the ghosts of the record stores that taught us how to listen.
