MANKATO — Forty years ago, America was a different place.

Maturing youth fed up with troubling times created a counterculture of free-thinkers set to the tune of some of the most influential musicians and artists this nation has known. Downtown Mankato had its own local chapter: the Lost Chord record store.

This Saturday, Red Sky Lounge will host a reunion party for the Lost Chord, now a piece of Mankato history once located at 624 S. Front St. Still a subject of conversation today, the Lost Chord, along with its musical commander in chief Mark Weinstein, served as southern Minnesota’s unofficial Mecca of the alternative scene, he said.

In 1971, Weinstein was like any other college student: He lived in a house with six guys, he collected money sent from his parents, and he had a taste for good music. But upon hearing the newly established Lost Chord record store was going to be abandoned and dismantled, he did something most 21-year-olds would not. He bought it.

“I had $120 max in my bank account,” Weinstein said.

So, with his long hair, drooping black T-shirt and jeans, he procured the $2,000 he needed from the bank, which, like many things in the ’70s, ran merely on a policy of honesty. From the loan came 13 years of good business, during which time Weinstein remembered the basic business advice passed on to him from the shop’s previous owner.

“‘Buy it for a dollar, sell it for two,’” Weinstein said. “In other words, you’ve got to make a profit; don’t give it away.”

Although, Weinstein believes the Lost Chord grew to be more than just a business.

“It was a kind of meeting place for a generation,” he said. “That’s where the store becomes not about me, but about an era.”

Those were the days Weinstein calls “the age of innocence.” He describes a good portion of the Lost Chord’s clientele as drifters, wandering youth backpacking across the nation, magnetically pulled to his store and those like it across the country. Sometimes Weinstein would find a place to stay for these travelers, and sometimes that place was the Chord.

The record store acted as a safe haven for the counterculture, but it seemed as though everyone, no matter what walk of life, participated. When individuals stumbled into the store dangerously high, Weinstein said, he would send them to a nearby doctor who was accustomed to treating such ailments.

“It was so much more mellow back then,” said Billy Steiner, who was a young musician and part of the Lost Chord gang at the time.

Steiner, on the North Mankato City Council, said even the chief of police treated the store as an integral part of the community and would dine with them at the Wagon Wheel on occasion.

When asked what role the record store played in the live music scene, Steiner — whose band City Mouse was formed the same year Weinstein bought the Chord — said, “That’s where the music was. There was so much more music going on live back then. It was a seven-night-a-week town.”

The Lost Chord hosted both local bands and record signings from larger, touring bands.

Both Weinstein and Steiner agreed music was at the forefront of their lives.

“We were all trying to make it,” Steiner said, remembering Weinstein’s predictions of the direction music was headed. “‘The future of music is rap!’ He was a prognosticator in that sense.”

As the country went through another change by the late 1970s, so too did the Chord. With what Weinstein referred to as the “laissez-faire” lifestyle coming to an end — one of a live-and-let-live sentiment — the Lost Chord changed its business model and started focusing on high-class clothing sales.

The store eventually became a furniture business, Bed Post Furniture, which Weinstein owns and operates today.

Even now, decades later, Weinstein remembers the rapid change he witnessed at the end of that decade with curiosity, which may explain the upcoming reunion.

“No one ever talks about what happened to small town America (when that era ended),” he said.