Ep525: RSD with Jen Keenan - Queen B Vinyl Cafe
The Vinyl Guide - Artist Interviews for Record Collectors and Music Nerds
Nate Goyer
4.7 • 579 Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2025
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jen Keenan reveals how she built a thriving vinyl destination in rural Arizona, Queen B Vinyl Cafe, combining record sales with coffee roasting, ramen, and live music in a 12,000-person town.
Topics Include:
- Jen Keenan owns Queen B Vinyl in Cottonwood, Arizona, a unique multi-business destination spot
- Record Store Day philosophy focuses on obscure, abstract, and smaller indie bands over mainstream releases
- RSD features 9am opening, numbered line system, DJs, live bands, and free chair massage
- Record stores can choose RSD titles but quantities received remain unpredictable surprises
- Queen B Vinyl spans two buildings with courtyard, housing vinyl, cafe, barbershop, ramen house
- Coffee roasting happens in-house alongside direct-to-garment printing press and live music stage
- Cottonwood serves as crossroads for tourists heading to Jerome, Sedona, and Grand Canyon
- Maynard James Keenan's presence helped amplify area's wine industry from handful to 100 wineries
- Rural record stores require more advertising and unique inventory unavailable at big box stores
- Used vinyl comprises 30% of inventory, with curated selection over quantity focus
- Jen drives five hours to Tucson for quality collections like 80s metal acquisitions
- After school music programs inspired Jen's punk rock journey from trumpet to cello
- Band Glitter Wizard emerged from record store workplace, requiring careful schedule coordination
- Queen B stocks diverse punk releases, carefully avoiding exclusion based on political perspectives
- Vinyl manufacturing delays from nine-month backlog created significant challenges for store operations
- Small town stores thrive through exceptional customer service recognizing individual preferences and needs
- Pandemic surprisingly improved business by bringing new audiences to smaller town locations
- Falconry hobby involves training hawks with telemetry tracking within one-mile range
- Jen and Maynard maintain separate vinyl collections despite sharing everything else
- Tool vinyl represses remain frustratingly delayed, creating bootleg market opportunities
- Rural record stores serve as essential community spaces beyond commercial transactions
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Vinyl Guide, the podcast for record collectors and music nerds. |
| 0:10.0 | Here's your host, the biggest record nerd of them all, Nate Goyer. |
| 0:13.0 | Oh, hey everyone, it's Nate. |
| 0:15.0 | Welcome to episode 525 of the Vinyl Guide, the podcast for record collectors and music nerds. |
| 0:21.9 | And dear people, happy week of record store day, Black Friday, this Friday, November 28th. |
| 0:29.1 | It's a big week. Of course, there's Thanksgiving in there, but I mean, you know, what the hell? |
| 0:33.0 | You know, just a holiday. |
| 0:33.8 | You shovel in a bunch of food with your relatives. |
| 0:36.5 | Get to bed early so you can wake up and get in line at your local independent record |
| 0:40.6 | store. |
| 0:41.6 | Lots of cool stuff going out. |
| 0:43.3 | A lot of new and used. |
| 0:45.4 | I've been seeing a lot of record shops pulling out the big guns for this Friday, |
| 0:49.3 | November 28th. |
| 0:50.1 | So make sure you spend some time at your local independent record store. |
| 0:54.4 | Give them some love. And hopefully you'll get to take home some loot you've been looking for. |
| 0:59.4 | Today, I'm having a conversation with one of those independent record store owners, Jen Keenan. |
| 1:05.4 | And Jen's got quite an interesting background and a long line of very fascinating hobbies we'll get into. First off, |
| 1:12.4 | Jen owns the Queen Bee Vinyl Cafe in Cottonwood, Arizona. Of course, she's a vinyl collector as well. |
| 1:19.9 | But aside from running the cafe, Jen also roasts coffee. She's on the board of the Women in Vinyl |
| 1:25.3 | Organization. She drives race cars, is into falconry, and even has time to make a home with her husband, Maynard. |
| 1:32.9 | So, yeah, there's a little bit of pusifer and tool vinyl talk today as well. |
... |
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