Impresario Randy Now — aka Randy Ellis — had something of a vision for Randy Now’s Man Cave when he opened the store’s first location on Farnsworth Avenue in Bordentown in 2012.
With the move of his store to a space on West Ward Street in Hightstown that is three times the size of his old space, he has been able to broaden that vision.
“I had no clue what I was doing, but yes, I had a vision,” Now says at his new quarters just off Route 33.
Prior to opening Randy Now’s Man Cave in Bordentown, Now put Bordentown on the map, booking shows at The Record Collector.
Years before that, he put a once-seedy neighborhood in Trenton on the map for the shows he booked in the 1980s and ’90s at City Gardens on Calhoun Street. Joe Zook and Blues Deluxe had a Tuesday night residency at the club, and Now arranged for bands like Nirvana, Green Day, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the Godfathers to perform at the 1,000-person capacity City Gardens before others on the East Coast knew who these bands were.
When he opened the Man Cave in Bordentown, Now says, “My idea was to turn people on to stuff and give them a little bit more of the odd-ball music.”
Appropriately, the Man Cave sells vinyl LPs, compact discs, music and movie-related books and magazines, and a variety of snacks, juices, sodas, and the famous Charles Chips potato chips, pretzels, and other snacks from Spring Lake, New Jersey.
“The idea was to continue with some things that got started at City Gardens,” Now says. “It was a shot in the dark.”
He had a good run on Farnsworth Avenue in Bordentown, but eventually the space proved too small.
Additionally, he says, since the pandemic, restaurants with expansion tents have taken over many of the parking spaces near his old store. Too many patrons were complaining for many months there was no place to park in Bordentown.
Prompted by another Bordentown resident, Mark Fenton, who had previously moved his store Handmade Art Studios to 149 West Ward Avenue in Hightstown, Now and his wife, musician-educator Mary Mindas, took deep breaths and moved the Man Cave in May to Hightstown.
In addition to having the space for merchandise, Now’s new store sits adjacent to a 130-space parking lot. Nearby outlets include the Old Hights Brewery, a yoga studio, a luncheonette, and a unisex hair stylist. The new Man Cave retail store is also a designated Amazon pick-up location.
Now says, “Fenton was bugging me for a couple of years, ‘You’ve got to come over here and check out some spaces.’ We came out here a few months ago to say hello to him, and there were a couple of vacancies he knew of in town.”
And although he says past experiences made him think that “Hightstown was a little rough,” Now and his wife visited and “parked right here and saw this building and the sign said ‘Closing March 1.’ I asked Mark to look into it.”
It turns out his new landlord and his wife were fans of Randy Now’s Man Cave in Bordentown and actually came out to the store on several occasions.
Since the move, Now is carefully monitoring his new customer base and his old customer base via an extensive e-mail list, and wants to take some time to get the new store grounded with a solid customer base.
He says about 60 percent of the Man Cave patrons over the years have been women, shopping for their husbands or boyfriends or just for themselves.
“When I opened this store in Bordentown somebody said to me ‘You know you’re going to lose all your women customers with a name like this,’ and I said well I’ll bet you it’s going to be 60 percent men, 40 percent women. Actually, it’s kind of been the other way around, more women shop here. Men will buy the high-priced collectible items, some vinyl album that means a lot to them, but women will come in and buy a couple of different things: t-shirts, a couple of sodas, a couple of snacks.”
Now’s father worked as a deliveryman for a Bordentown-based laundry business and his mother was a housewife who raised four kids and never got her driver’s license. Now is a fourth generation Bordentown resident.
Now got interested in music in junior high school via Princeton University radio station WPRB-FM and eventually befriended several of the station’s DJs, who came in handy once he began promoting shows at City Gardens.
After attending a semester at William Penn College in Iowa, where he had plans to major in communications / journalism, Now came back home to play drums and sing with his former band, Construction. The band got busy and gigs were lucrative during the heyday of the Trenton-area club scene of the late 1970s.
Now eventually left the band and took a job as a postman in Cranbury. It was at that time in 1980 he began working as a club DJ. He put that club on the map as a DJ playing new wave and punk rock bands including the Talking Heads, B-52s, and the Ramones, and later, as an entertainment director for the club.
After many successful shows at City Gardens and the usual numbers of flops, Now eventually left City Gardens in 1997 but with experience in marketing, merchandising, public and community relations, and dealing with different personalities from a broad spectrum of musicians and comedians, many of them very road-weary.
Combining the past experiences with the freshness of a new location, Now seems well-positioned to enjoy continued growth in Hightstown.
“At the Old Hights Brewery in back, people told me they used to go to shows that I booked at City Gardens,” he says, “so I’m hoping that me being here will help them and the luncheonette here, my friend Mark Fenton with his jewelry and art stuff, and even the hair stylist who came up the other day and introduced herself. I’m hoping I can help bring her new business, too. We’re all looking to work together here and everybody has been really friendly.”
In the end, the Man Cave simply outgrew its old space on Farnsworth Avenue. Asked about the possibility of some future in-store performances, Now originally says he’s taking it one day at a time — then sets the stage for a Saturday, September 3, event: “An Evening with Steve Wynn” covering songs from the singer, guitarist, and bandleader of the Dream Syndicate’s 40-year career.
Randy Now’s Man Cave, 119 West Ward Street, Hightstown. Wednesday, noon to 6 p.m., Thursday through Saturday, noon to 7 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. 609-424-3766 or www.mancavenj.com.
