Popular Hopkins record shop owner Rob Sheeley of Mill City Sound, 69, dies

After he already built up two successful audio/video companies over three decades, Rob Sheeley got around to what his family said was his “dream retirement” in 2014: spending the next decade working hard in his own record store.

The shop he opened, Mill City Sound in downtown Hopkins, became one of the Twin Cities’ most reputable shops for vinyl and other music collectibles. Its co-owner, too, gained a reputation as a fair and affable shopkeeper and enthusiastic rock ‘n’ roll booster.

Sheeley, 69, died Thursday at his home in Minnetonka while under hospice care following a lengthy off-and-on fight with cancer.

“He was working at the store just 10 days before he died, even though he wasn’t feeling well,” said his wife of 47 years, Donna Sheeley. “He still loved it.”

A Beatles maniac who got his start working as a sound engineer at live shows, Sheeley opened Mill City Sound in a 115-year-old storefront on Hopkins’ Mainstreet in September 2014. His shop proved there were plenty of vinyl-collecting musicheads living in the suburbs — and others willing to drive there if the bins were stocked with enough variety and rarities.

Sheeley became known for taking cross-country trips to purchase large collections he brought back to his Minnesota clientele. On one trek in 2016, he paid $100,000 for about 100,000 sealed records found in the basement of a store in West Texas that had closed 30 years earlier.

From another basement closer to home in 2015, he bought up 22,000 vinyl LPs and 6,000 CDs stored up over four decades by music critic Jon Bream in the Star Tribune’s old building. That sale funded a still-active arts journalism scholarship at the University of Minnesota.

In recent years, Sheeley also became a record label operator specializing in reissuing out-of-print LPs on vinyl.

His label, BackGroove Records — which he co-founded with longtime Matthew Sweet drummer and store manager Ric Menck — rereleased albums by ‘90s alt-rock hitmakers Material Issue and Menck’s band Velvet Crush. Last year, it put out a new print of the legendary 1979 compilation of Twin Cities punk and new wave, “Big Hits of Mid-Amerca, Vol. 3,” featuring the Suicide Commandos, Suburbs, Hypstrz, Curtiss A and more.

In all these cases, Sheeley was known to operate more out of his love for the music than for profit.

“He was kind and passionate … one of those people that we all desperately need more of in this world,” said Patrik Tanner, guitarist with Tina & the B-Sides and other bands.

The famously Anglophilic Twin Cities band Two Harbors posted of Sheeley on its Facebook page, “He was a lovely guy and a massive champion of ours over the past decade.”

Sheeley had already made good money by building up and then selling his previous businesses, Vaddio and Acoustic Communication Systems, both of which specialized in setting up audio and video equipment for businesses. Clients included the Mall of America, Grand Casinos and Alaska’s Department of Education. His longtime partner in those businesses, Tom Mingo, also became the co-proprietor of Mill City Sound.

Mostly raised in Minneapolis and a graduate of Washburn High School and North Hennepin Community College, Sheeley’s entrepreneurship grew out of his love of music, which got him interested in the technical side of audio equipment.

“He liked the hard part of starting a business from the ground up and getting it to where it got so big it had to take on more of a corporate structure, which wasn’t really his thing,” said Sheeley’s daughter, Jesi Wytonick. “He cared about his employees too much to become more of a CEO type.”

Employees at Mill City Sound credited Sheeley’s friendly attitude for helping make the store so popular. It was ranked in the top three of Twin Cities record stores by both Yelp reviewers and the Minnesota Daily, and it became a go-to stop for music fans every year on Record Store Day in April.

“I never dreaded going in,” said Brian Oake, a longtime radio DJ at Cities 97 and the Current, who started working at Mill City Sound between on-air gigs and stayed on permanently.

“Rob was at the heart of that. He was just a warm dude and fair to everybody. He wanted you to work hard, but always had a smile on his face. He knew a lot about music and encouraged us to explore everything there. He really ran an incredible store.”

Jānis Barobs, who worked at the store on the side of a public relations job, said Sheeley “was a true musicologist and had a story to tell about any LP pulled.”

“His knowledge was vast and deep but presented in a very friendly, conversational way,” Barobs said. “He would hold court sitting up at the front counter talking to customers about the music they loved or the concerts they’ve seen. It was always about them, not himself.”

With Sheeley’s illness worsening last year as the store celebrated its 10th anniversary, he and Mingo began working with a business broker to sell Mill City Sound. No deal has been struck yet.

“Hopefully, it’ll go to someone as passionate about it as [Rob] was,” Donna Sheeley said.

In addition to his wife and daughter, Sheeley is survived by his son, Nick Sheeley, as well as two grandsons. A memorial service is set for Thursday, 11:30 a.m., at Washburn-McReavy, 5000 W. 50th St., Edina.