Jason Hughes (L) and Nabil Ayers (R) discover that Fremont isn’t free. ALICE WHEELER
On September 27, 1997, Jason and I had no fucking idea what we were getting ourselves into. We were in our mid-20s, both college graduates who didn’t want to get real jobs like all of our friends had.
So we opened a record store.
Sonic Boom Records first appeared as an idea only a few months earlier. Neither of us had the record store fantasy—something most record store owners would claim. Jason was a political economy major from Berkeley. I’d majored in communications at the University of Puget Sound. We both worked at Easy Street Records in West Seattle because we wanted to listen to and talk about music all day…