Ask Det Ansinn to describe where he lives and the president of Doylestown’s borough council talks of “our little Norman Rockwell painting.”

It’s looking more like Bedford Falls to me these days.

That, you will remember, is the fictional home of Jimmy Stewart in "It’s a Wonderful Life." In this production, the role of George Bailey will be played by Blair Elliott, proprietor of Siren Records.

He was walking down Main Street the other day, about to show me where his indie music store used to be before they padlocked it, when a woman named Jenny Isaacs grabbed him.
“You still have something to do with Siren?” she asked. She had a silver ponytail and steel rimmed glasses, a small nose hoop and an open checkbook.

She handed him $50.

Elliott walked another a half block before being accosted by another well-wisher.

This time it was Wes Goddard, owner of Basically Burgers. “I’ve got a bucket for you,” reminded Goddard, whose customers have been stuffing dollars bills inside a glass jar next to a “Save Siren Records” sign.

You see those pleas all over this picturebook town. A entire community is pulled together to try to keep a shuttered landmark from folding altogether.

“I just feel we need to take care of our own — especially in these times,” Goddard said.

A downbeat economy and the rise of the Internet threaten the independent record store. Last month Siren joined Think Music and Relapse Records in the local cut-out bin.

Siren had some additional troubles — its landlord and the borough pressured it to curtail live concerts, which it was conducting without having the proper zoning approval.

But wonderful part of this story is that fans, friends, customers, musicians and neighbors are working to write a different ending. Together they’ve raised more than $20,000 of the $33,000 that Elliott says he needs to get his property back and re-open Siren in smaller quarters.

Last weekend alone, three nights of benefit concerts raised the biggest chunk of that money. It’s left Elliott grateful, overwhelmed, exhausted.

Over coffee and a croissant he gave a short musical history of the store he began in high school with a friend named Bob Strawn. Strawn was a decade older and managed a converted barn in Furlong, Bucks County, that Elliott’s father owned. Strawn had adventurous taste in music; he gave Elliott his first home-made cassette: Pink Floyd’s debut lp on one side, the first Sex Pistols album on the other.

They called the store Siren Records because it could mean many things: a warning, a wail, a creature who calls others to rocks.

When Elliot graduated from film school at NYU he moved the store to State Street, where for 16 years he curated an eclectic, essential collection of punk, pop, ska, blues, R & B, jazz and indie rock.

For most of the year and a half it was in its last location Siren held up to three shows a week. That got the notice of the borough, which in April ordered the shows stopped. Elliott says he was in the process of applying for a zoning variance when his landlord got a judge to order the place padlocked. “I thought we had it all worked out,” Elliott says, wearily.

He’s 40, balding, bespectacled with a long, pointy goatee. “The reason Siren meant something was that customers could tell it wasn’t just a business. There was a passion behind it. We were obsessively curious about music and we drew people who shared that curiosity.”

An incurable mix-tape maker, he has been searching for the tunes that create the right soundtrack for his condition. He’s listening to the new Raconteurs CD and the Fleet Foxes, whose cathedral-pop harmonies remind him of the Beach Boys.

“When I’m in a time like this, I need a little energy and beauty — something with grace. Other times I can listen to sheer noise — like a Karlheinz Stockhausen record, but only when I’m comfortable and secure.”