At one point, Peaches had eight stores across the metro area but, by the late ’80s, the operation was consolidated into the Reas’ main shop at the intersection of Gentilly Boulevard and Elysian Fields Avenue—a crossroads you couldn’t miss if you were traversing Uptown NOLA.This space, with its doors wide open to the community, became the beating heart of New Orleans music, especially its burgeoning homegrown hip-hop scene. From behind the counter of Peaches’s current location on Magazine Street, also Uptown in the Garden District, the younger Lee Rea shares some wisdom from his father, who passed away in 2017:“Something my dad used to always say [was],‘If art imitates life, and you’re in such a musical city, then your local record shop should be the epicenter for local culture, period.’ People should be coming in here to find out what is going on.And that was our focus.When mom took over, she was so artist focused, and wanted to help all the local artists. Being in our location allowed mom to help foster people, and expose them to all of the city.” And foster she did. Many local rap stars refer to Miss Shirani Rea as “Mom,” and she doesn’t take that title lightly. “The artists here are like my children,” Shirani says with conviction.“They’ll tell you that.They are as close as they can be to being my biological children. Mia X, KLC, and Mannie Fresh were in the store every day.” She stops to share credit with her late husband and their kids, Lee and Lillie. “The whole family is responsible for Peaches being Peaches. It’s more of an institution than a record store. It’s a labor of love. A family taking care of families.” It’s a vibe captured in the 1993 video for “Bootin’ Up” by Da’ Sha Ra’, an early bounce music classic that put local label Take Fo’ Records on the map. “Different artists from the East Bank and West Bank would all get together there after school in the afternoons, and there was no separation between high school kids and gangsters,” Shirani says.“Everyone put their stuff down when they came in, and it was just amazing. There was a lot of love involved, just so you know. A lot of them had bad home lives so they had no other place [to go]. It was a very cultural place where everyone got a chance to do positive things, and help each other out, no matter where they came from or what kind of life they had. It was a very beautiful experience. It’s hard to explain that.” You kind of had to be there to truly understand the importance of a great, community-centric record store in the days before streaming and social media. Bars and clubs would leave flyers advertising live music. Local poster artists could showcase their work promoting a non-stop barrage of events that, in a city like New Orleans, never seemed to end.At Peaches, candlemakers, authors, and artists of all genres and experience levels had a space to sell their wares. But it was when members of the city’s rap scene started producing cassettes and CDs of their extremely local sounds that Peaches really became the place to be. MC Gregory D started out with pioneering New Orleans group Ninja Crew in the mid-’80s, and later released some of the earliest New Orleans rap albums as part of a duo with Mannie
Fresh. “Peaches was basically the heart of the Seventh Ward, and the heart of a lot of local musicians,” he remembers. “They gave breath to a lot of artists.You only had a handful of stores doing consignment, where you could drop your shit off, and come collect…the whole nine yards.” This was huge for independent artists just starting out, not knowing the ins and outs of the music business. Shirani recognized that, and helped local talents produce and release their recordings. When a young MC T. Tucker—the originator of bounce music, alongside DJ Irv—brought this new sound to Shirani’s attention, she helped him get it to the streets. An early cassette version of the duo’s single “Where Dey At?”—widely considered the first bounce track—was sold through the shop, with the label S.R. Records, for Shirani Rea, printed on the tape.“Artists didn’t know what to do, and didn’t have the money, so Mom wanted to help,” Lee explains. The help didn’t end there. Peaches would commission local artisans to paint murals across the side of their building promoting new releases by local acts—advertising them to everyone driving through one of Uptown’s busiest intersections. The first of these featured the 1989 Gregory D and Mannie Fresh album, D Rules the Nation . This meant the world to Gregory D. “Peaches was where everyone hung out. After school, you could come in and see me, see Mannie, see Master P, see Cash Money, see Mia X working there, the whole New Orleans…if you was anybody in the hip- hop field, the R&B field, the music field, you had to go through Peaches.That was the spot to be.” He reinforces how love played a real part in making Peaches more than just another record store.“Between Shirani and Lee and the staff, they made you feel like home,” he says. “They [would] treat you so good. You would hang around Peaches even if you didn’t have no business being there because they had arcade games in there. Without a store like that, I don’t know what we would have done. Peaches gave birth to a lot of major situations in New Orleans.” Before Cash Money Records had its game-changing, $30-million joint venture with Universal, a rep from the major label asked Shirani what was hot in New Orleans. She told them about Cash Money, and shared a copy of B.G.’s Chopper City (an independent 1996 Cash Money release not to be confused with 1999’s platinum-selling, Universal-distributed Chopper City in the Ghetto ), among other albums. “It was easy for her to put that package together,” Lee explains. “We were selling pallets of this stuff when they were independent.After that, we probably in 1998 to 1999 sold twenty thousand units of Juvenile’s 400 Degreez by ourselves.” Hip-hop wasn’t the only genre moving major units at Peaches. “There were no slow days in that Seventh Ward location,” Lee says. “Sundays would be full of customers in search of gospel music once they got out of church.Then, in the early afternoon, people would leave their party on the lakefront, grab a daiquiri, and come
12 WaxPoetics
( opposite ) Shirani Rea and Harris “Lee” Rea IV, the mom-and-son team behind Peaches Records.
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