It is a typical Wednesday morning, and Scott “Scooter” Thomas is sitting behind the desk of the record store he opened over seven years ago. He cleans his glasses as Jeff Tweedy’s voice croons over the speakers. As he absentmindedly fidgets with a Fant Memorial Library pen, clips of the 1978 sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati” play on his laptop.
The walls of Scooter’s Records are covered in music memorabilia, ranging from posters of Modest Mouse, Cheap Trick, Prince and Led Zeppelin to a 1986 issue of Rolling Stone that depicts David Lee Roth’s exit from Van Halen. The counter has countless items strewn across it, including a bowl of “Cool Ass Pins” which are labeled with Scooter’s handwriting, stickers, magazines, CDs and more.
Scooter is wearing a dark blue shirt that lists the members of bluegrass/folk-rock band The Nervous Wrecks: “Snider, Kimbrough, Mariencheck, McLeary.” 
As he rambles about an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati that involves dropping turkeys over the city as a Thanksgiving surprise, he moves around behind the desk, using his hands and facial expressions to convey the hilarity of the show.
“By all that is holy, I swear I thought turkeys could fly,” Scooter said, reminiscing on the t-shirts that were created in honor of the episode.
Growing up in Jackson, Scooter’s first radio was an AM clock radio. He regularly listened to 62 WJDX, which was a Top 40 Hits station at the time. The husband of his mother’s best friend happened to be the station manager, so he had the opportunity to go up to the station regularly.
“Whenever I had to go to bed, I would stay up, you know, and listen to the radio,” Scooter said.
While his mother was not interested in pop music, his aunt Vicky played a large role in sparking his interest in records. She worked at a record store in Hattiesburg and gifted Scooter his first record: Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy by Elton John. As he spoke, he rustled through a stack of records that were lying behind the counter, retrieving a copy of the record and laying it on the desk.
“If this is the first record you ever got…” Scooter trailed off. “I mean, just look at that.”
Between his aunt’s influence and his love for his AM clock radio, Scooter fell deeply in love with music at a young age. He bought The Kinks Greatest Hits, the first record he spent his own money on, at a garage sale when he was 10 years old, and because it was the mid-1970s, it only cost him a nickel.
Scooter realized early that his hobbies did not align with the kids living next door.
“All the kids in my neighborhood, like, you know, their parents were getting them motorcycles and shit like that,” Scooter said. “My mom wasn’t getting me a motorcycle.”
As a kid, he loved drawing barns, band logos and Star Wars characters. He took art lessons for a while and even won second place in a drawing contest for a fox that he drew when he was nine. A couple of years later, his parents got divorced and he moved to Louisville with his mother.
“That was also whenever I discovered that girls were like, a thing,” Scooter said. “Like way more interesting than dudes were, right?”
Not long after moving to Louisville, Van Halen started to get big and became one of Scooter’s biggest influences. He got involved with his school’s band program in fifth grade and was told he could not play the drums so he picked up the saxophone. Soon after, his mother decided that he should get braces, which rendered him incapable of playing sax.
When his band director realized he couldn’t play anymore, he moved him to drums, which was, as Scooter put it, “what I wanted to do anyway.” He and his best friend, Jayson Triplett, decided to start a band, but there were a few complications. First and foremost, Scooter did not have a drum set. Secondly, while Triplett owned a guitar, he did not have an amp.
Their band practices were conducted strictly over the phone, with Triplett learning guitar riffs that he would quietly play for Scooter and Scooter using drumsticks to keep a beat on the pillows in his living room.
They named the band TNT Connection (as a play off of Triplett and Thomas) and designed a logo that looked sneakily similar to Van Halen’s. Scooter’s first real drum kit was gifted to him by his high school band director, who allowed him to take old drums from the band hall and create a makeshift kit. He also provided Scooter and Triplett with a room to practice in, and with time they started to become a true band.
“We learned ‘Crazy Train’ by Ozzy Osbourne and ‘Switch 625’ by Def Leppard,” Scooter said. “Jayson had this little guitar solo called something that he basically stole from Quiet Riot and we didn’t have a singer. So, we played ‘Crazy Train’ with no vocals.”
Even without a vocalist, they headlined their high school talent show, wearing parachute pants and bandanas—iconic signs that it was the 1980s.
As Scooter discussed why he chose to attend Mississippi State, his fingers played with the corner of a copy of the February 5, 2025, issue of Starkville Daily News whose headline read, “SOCSD hires Hopson as athletic director.”
Many members of Scooter’s family were from Hattiesburg, and his initial plan was to attend the University of Southern Miss. His mother didn’t like the idea of him being near his father’s side of the family so she gave him two options: Mississippi State or East Mississippi Junior College.
“I was like, ‘I ain’t going to freaking Decatur,’” Scooter said, scoffing.
Mississippi State didn’t have a computer science program (which was what Scooter intended to pursue) so he settled for computer engineering.
“At the time I didn’t know that that was not even remotely the same,” Scooter said.
He spent a little over a semester in computer engineering before switching to industrial technology, a major that he described as, “vo-tech on steroids.”
When asked what he went to school for, Scooter said, “to please my mom.” Though he had busied himself with other things, records were a part of his life that never disappeared. Throughout his time in college, he became friends with Owen Pugh, who owned a record store called Crossroads. Pugh would let Scooter take home cartons of 100 records for $10.
Through taking home massive volumes of records that he had never listened to before, Scooter was exposed to artists that he now loves, namely Jeff Beck.
“I would start out with the crazy album covers and just listen to them,” Scooter said.
The summer after his junior year of college, Scooter and his old bandmate Jayson Triplett played a wedding reception for one of their mutual friends. On his way home from the reception, his high school math teacher’s husband pulled him over and gave him a DUI.
Considering his options, Scooter realized he might do better to stay in Louisville jail for the night than to tell his mother what happened. Triplett came to check on him and wrote him a note, saying, “Your mom is gonna freak out.”
“They brought me cigarettes and I didn’t even smoke,” Scooter said.
When Scooter’s mother found out, she told him he would be spending the next semester living with her in Louisville and would have to find someone to commute with. 21-year-old Scooter was adamantly opposed to this proposition and begged her to let him take a year off college.
He moved into a house with a couple of friends and many of his classes fell to the wayside. “Completely uninterested” in school at this point, Scooter decided that the night before his physics final exam was the perfect occasion to drive to New Orleans with his friends to see Living Colour and The Rolling Stones in concert.
“I got back to Starkville and the sun was coming up,” Scooter said.
While he did make it to the exam, once he sat down, he promptly fell asleep. Due to this, and a few other classes that had been neglected for some time, Scooter didn’t graduate.
“My mom didn’t know about it until she got the thing in the mail,” Scooter said. “By that time I was done.”
Once college was out of the picture, Scooter wanted to open a record store but didn’t see it as a viable option considering how CDs had virtually made records obsolete. He spent a season trying to become the drum tech for Blind Melon but they never had quite enough money to hire a crew.
When one of his roommates moved out and rent started being split two ways instead of three, Scooter realized he needed to find a job to support his drum and beer buying habits. He started working for the city of Starkville in the water department and spent 27 years there.
He monitored the water tanks and wells, ensuring that everything was in compliance with health codes. A year into working there, he was promoted, in spite of the fact that his hair was past his shoulders. Though he had a better position, the city hadn’t raised his pay.
“I figured out the reason why they weren’t is because I had long hair so I cut my hair off and they gave me a $10 an hour raise,” Scooter said. “I used to say I was discriminated against,” he recounted, laughing.
After years of stretching himself thin at a job that wasn’t fulfilling, Scooter realized it was time for a change. He’d spent decades putting his health on the backburner and it was starting to take a toll.
“Scott was not taking care of himself at all,” Scooter said, referring to himself in the third person. “I was drinking too much, I was smoking cigarettes.”
One Sunday, he was at home watching TV when he started to feel like he was having a heart attack. He drove to the Starkville hospital where they sent him to Columbus in an ambulance. Though he was dismissed, saying that everything looked fine, this scare was enough to make him turn his life around.
“That was the last day I smoked a cigarette,” Scooter said, his eyes wide. “And that was like the first day that I looked at the calendar and was like, ‘If I do everything right, don’t take any time off, don’t get sick, what is the day that I will have my 28 years in?’”
He circled the date on his calendar and devoted all his energy to getting to retirement as quickly as possible. As he imagined what post-retirement life would be like, his mind wandered to his old dream of owning a record store.
Between February and April of 2017, the city allowed him to take paid leave time so he spent nearly every day scouting downtown Starkville to determine where he should open his record store.
The building that is now Scooter’s Records was previously a tanning salon, but the owner had recently died of cancer. At the time, the building was being used as a storage unit. Scooter wanted to change that.
The Starkville Area Arts Council had also recently started hosting Sunday Fundays—a community-driven event where local artists and musicians would come together to share their work—so before having a physical location, Scooter started building a community there.
In April, he officially decided to name the business Scooter’s Records and formed the LLC. His first official event was the Old Main Music Festival where he took five crates of records and sold nearly everything he brought.
In September of 2017, the owner of the building contacted Scooter, saying he was ready to rent the building. They renovated the inside, tearing down walls of previous tanning booths to create larger, open rooms.
He signed the lease in October and by November Scooter’s was officially open for business.
“The first day I opened I was busier than I ever thought I was going to be,” Scooter said.
Scooter opened the store with the intention to make just enough to break even and was shocked by the amount of traffic he was getting. For a few years, everything was going better than he could have imagined. Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. “It’s hurt my business a lot,” Scooter said. “It’s hurt a lot of people’s businesses a lot. I’m just barely scraping by.”
When Starkville allowed businesses to open back up in May of 2020, Scooter headed back to work, but things were very different. Rather than sitting behind the counter while customers bustled through the store, people would message him with orders that he would bring to the door.
He was concerned that these new policies would be met with backlash but was pleasantly surprised by the customers’ reactions.
“I never had to deal with it because cool people buy records,” Scooter said.
Rachel Holaday, who worked for Scooter from 2019-2020, said that Scooter is the best boss she’s ever had. He was kind, authentic, patient and knowledgeable, and his trust in her gave her confidence in herself.
“He always wanted me to be safe and anytime I didn’t feel safe, he would say, ‘Tell me and I’ll come up there immediately,’” Holaday said.
Outside of being a business owner, Scooter plays drums in Battle and the Wheelers, a band that he started with his friend of nearly two decades, Keatzi Gunmoney. Gunmoney noted that Scooter is a special kind of drummer and that you don’t find a player like him just anywhere.
“He’s not only great at it, but he’s got such an authentic like, throwing caution to the wind, just old school punk rock attitude about the way he plays drums,” Gunmoney said. “So when people want that, they go to him.”
Gunmoney and Scooter share a love for cars, records and big loud rock n’ roll, but their friendship goes much deeper than that.
In Gunmoney’s words, Scooter is hard-working, determined and has always been a reliable friend that he can go to when he needs advice. He’s an easy person to collaborate with no matter what you’re working on and he’s very dependable.
Between the store, his studio, his woodworking shop and his beloved 13-year-old corgi, Vincent, there’s not much more Scooter could ask for in life.
As he looked around the store, thinking about how far he’d come and the place that he grew up, one sentiment rang true for Scooter.
“It scares me to think of the person I would have been if I’d stayed there.”
