Reckless Records may have been founded in London, but for nearly 30 years, it'd been synonymous with Chicago's sprawling music scene. There are three locations there, the largest of which is in Wicker Park, a once-scraggly neighborhood that's now among the Windy City's hippest. Reckless keeps the independent spirit alive there, with a massive and wide-ranging stocklist of new and used vinyl, a staff of Chicago scene lifers and a deep sense of community permeating both sides of the counter. Here, Wicker Park store manager Melissa Grubbs and new product buyer Dave Hofer discuss some of what makes Reckless such a Chicago institution, and they present a playlist of music cataloging some of the shop's fabled in-store performances, from a Shellac appearance open only to those 18 and under to the time Hofer learned the hard way not to plug all of a band's equipment into a single power strip.
