O.C. INSTITUTION
Bionic Records
In conversation with owner Mike Desisto
June 12, 2019
BUENA PARK, CALIF. – When Mike Desisto first got into punk, who knew some 22 years later it would lead to him overseeing one of Orange County’s most beloved record shops?
The house of Bionic Records, has served or featured in store everyone from No Doubt and Sublime to Korn, but perhaps its most important customer is you. Yes, you, and everyone else making up the community that’s part of an integral network supporting this independent purveyor of music.
“We get new faces, new kids coming through all the time. And by kids, I mean teens and 20s, and they usually do become regulars because they find this is their thing,” Desisto said. “These are my people. The community aspect is for sure there.”
Bionic Buena Park, at a deceptive 800 square feet, is crammed floor to ceiling with music and related merchandise. And, unlike other shops that run more niche, Bionic casts a wide net with an assortment that includes punk, metal, hip-hop, indie, jazz and blues. It’s also dripping with history beginning with its start in 1988 by Dennis Smith, Mike Freed and Craig Latronich.
Desisto would become part of the shop’s history a little over a decade after its start. A kid born in L.A. County and raised in Huntington Beach, he was and still is an audiophile. The conversion from Bionic customer to buyer and merchandiser for the then mini-chain’s Huntington Beach store came in 1997. About a decade ago, when the original owners sought a different path, Desisto assumed the position of owner.
“I was a regular. I knew them and was buying stuff that was coming out the day of, and it wasn’t even stuff that was really on fire or really hot yet. But the buyers and managers that worked there would know well enough [to carry it] because Bionic’s only ever, and still to date, hired people that really gave a shit,” Desisto said. “It can’t be any other way. I’ll get kids all day long wanting to work here like it’s a Hot Topic part two. On the internet, it’s become so image based. I call it the Cosplay generation. From Comic-Cons to Instagram, you see a lot of imagery that gets adopted or absorbed by people and they don’t necessarily educate themselves on what they’re representing.”
Bionic, at its peak, totaled three stores. Huntington Beach and Fullerton have since shuttered and Desisto has long been courted by landlords looking to add an indie business to their property, but he’s on the fence.
“I don’t know. It’s just one of those things,” he said. “You could go bigger on anything, but you have to decide if it’s something you want to take on. There’s other stuff I’m tossing around as we speak and it’s trying to figure out the amount of time I have to sacrifice.”
That other stuff he referenced would be producing band merchandise, including small batch runs to accommodate local bands unable to meet the quotas of larger printers. It’s an idea he’s been mulling for a while now.
If Desisto did open another store it would likely sit between the Orange County and Inland Empire, or potentially in south Orange County. However, he admitted it would probably make more sense to redirect the kind of energy involved in opening a store to online endeavors. Unlike most businesses, Bionic does not do e-commerce.
Its staff is small at two permanent employees with Desisto continuing to handle all the buying. “That’s the name of the game,” he said of a position that serves as the life line to any retailer.
“It’s like anything else, once you get used to something, you know your limits,” he continued of buying. “There are similarities to the stock market where you need to pay attention to it all day. You have to have that buyer mentality and a work ethic because it’s a constant flow of stuff going out the door and stuff coming in.”
Yes there’s social media, Bandcamp, subscription lists and on but Desisto mostly relies on labels to sift through all the noise and keep up to date on emerging bands.
“In music, there’s a greatness to something like Bandcamp,” he said. “There’s also an aspect where people don’t understand and they ask ‘Do you look around Bandcamp all the time?’ I’m like, ‘No.’ There’s a lot of bands on there where it’s nothing past a garage project and that’s great. They’re not going to the next level and that’s where labels are so important because they’ll promote and put them on tour with bigger bands they can learn from. A lot of it is internet trickery: everyone’s an actor, a musician. I respect, to a degree, figuring out the system that is and manipulating it to serve you, but it doesn’t make you anything if it’s just a facade or illusion you’re putting together on social media.”
He said all this surrounded by piles of CDs with his laptop in front of him, propped up with a doorstop. Make a mental note: He’s not surrounded by cassettes and Bionic doesn’t have a “tape section.” Yes, tape sales are at a decent level, but Desisto sees them either plateauing or beginning to drop off at some point in the near term. Vinyl sales still rule at Bionic followed by CDs.
“So many years ago, tapes seemed to be more, for lack of a better term, a hipster thing. And I will say one thing for the hipster, there’s a lot of versions of hipsters in the world; they blend into just about everything and a lot of them don’t spend money. I think that was partially why it was so cool to collect cassettes because they’re cheap,” he said. “With an audiophile, you’re going to be like ‘What’s the point?’ If you’re going to measure sound quality, Mp3s are compressed and sound worse than a CD. CDs sound worse than vinyl.”
He’s had people come into Bionic asking where the tape section is. It’s a small area near the cash wrap equivalent to the size of a bathroom medicine cabinet, which just goes to show where Bionic’s stance falls on that if it wasn’t clear already.
“I don’t need a tape section; I don’t want a tape section,” he said. “We’re catering to these [music] styles. I don’t care if it’s a sticker, a patch, a pair of underwear. I don’t give a shit what it is. It’s metal. It’s punk. But it’s not a format.”
Here again, just as with everything else Bionic, Desisto is overseeing and protecting an already carefully crafted world that began with the shop’s founders and well before the retail adage “the customer is always right” became used and then abused by shoppers pre-Yelp and other social media platforms. If you get Bionic, you get it. If you don’t, well that’s fine too.
“Make things as un-PC as possible. It’s another reason to keep this kind of entity alive,” Desisto said. “You talk about not wanting to deal with people’s politics on social media and I couldn’t agree more. I know people from all ends of the spectrum and most of them don’t harp on stuff like that in the real world. There’s no room or space for it. All walks of life come through the door and no one gets pissy with, ‘Oh, that offends me.’ Then get the fuck out of here. It’s really that simple. We’re not out to offend, but we’re not here to kiss your ass either. If anything, 99 percent of people who walk through the door are going to be happy because it’s like ‘Oh, it’s a place where I can let my guard down and just be normal and human.’”