Remembering Dave Kuzenko, 1956–2023
Obituary | Emmet Matheson
David Kuzenko, a fixture of Regina’s small business and music scenes, died unexpectedly on May 25. He leaves two daughters and two grandsons, and several generations of music lovers who found friendship and community in his stores.
Kuzenko grew up in Manitoba and worked at Records on Wheels in Saskatoon before he opened a Records on Wheels satellite location on Scarth Street in 1987. ROW became his own X-Ray Records in 1996. In the mid-2000s, he closed his Scarth Street Mall shop, but later reopened in a series of locations in Regina’s downtown and warehouse districts.
I met Dave on my second day in Regina. My family moved here from Saskatoon in 1992, just before I started grade 10. I dropped $14 on a Lou Reed t-shirt so everyone at my new school would know exactly who they were dealing with. I remember Dave’s gentle encouragement at my selection. That meant a lot to a new kid in town.
You’ll hear a lot of similar stories among people who grew up in and around Regina. I know of two people who grew up outside the who got their first taste of Fugazi on a visit to ROW. Regina in the 1990s, especially if you were young and a bit of a misfit in some way, could feel isolated and stifling. Dave’s shop, along with Gord Ames’s Buzzword Books (1994–2006), was a lifeline to a bigger world. I can’t imagine how lonely my life in Regina would have been without X-Ray and Buzzword.
When I started writing about music, Dave was an invaluable resource. I’d hit him up the way people today start with Wikipedia. I had to interview British singer Joe Cocker once, and I was struggling to find an angle. Dave told me about how as a kid in Winnipeg, he was enamoured with the spangled moonboots Cocker had worn during his iconic performance at Woodstock — which Dave had seen as a movie. Whatever happened to those boots?
So when I got on the phone with Cocker, I told him about Dave’s moonboot obsession and Cocker didn’t know where they’d gotten to, but he had a good laugh and that warmed him up to the rest of my questions.
Dave played a big role in getting CJTR, Regina’s community radio station, on the air in 2001. He was often the public face of the station when it was still just an idea. He brought people in, me included. The summer of 2006, he asked me to fill in for him on his Wednesday night show, Any Way the Wind Blows. What an honour.
The last few years, we mostly touched base when people died, whether a mutual friend, like Brent (Fubar) Johnson in 2017, or someone we both admired, like John Prine in 2020. We compared injuries; my hip, his sciatica. We showed off the little people in our lives; my kids, his grandkids, who really obviously meant the world to him.
Dave Kuzenko was 67. ■