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Re: [ARSCLIST] Other memorable record stores
Hello Peter,
In looking at your PDFs of the N.Y. record emporiums, it touched a
few haunts in my memory of the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood that I
visited as a youth. In Burbank where I lived, we had lovely
music/record shop on San Fernando Road where I bought my first LPs and
45s as well as many 78s prior to that. I think it was called Corradi's,
but I won't swear to it. I was hooked when RCA came out with their 45
changer with that magnificent BIG center spindle and the easily handled
disks. Of course, that was the main new source for pop singles (until
the EP came out), and the LP was for my classical stuff.
As I got to be a teenager, I moved farther afield and bought records
at Wallick's (of Capitol Records fame) Music City at Hollywood and
Sunset boulevards. They had those wonderful listening booths where you
could actually hear the recording before you bought it!!! My dad was an
amateur ham, so he had an early appreciation of audio, and I remember he
bought a Philharmonic (Hazeltine) Hi-Fi AM radio/Garrard record changer
combination with a 12" woofer and cone tweeter on which we listened to
classical 78s on Sunday afternoons. The shop where he purchased it was
called "Gateway to Music" in the high rent district of Wilshire
Boulevard, and the store sponsored a classical evening program, the
Evening Concert (later sponsored by the Southern California Gas Company)
on our main classical station (AM, then) KFAC. It wasn't until much
later that Tower Records opened on the famous Sunset Strip, and then,
extended its shops all over the Southland. So, we here in the West have
some wonderful memories from the early years of recorded music, too.
Rod Stephens
Peter Hirsch wrote:
<snip>
As a coda; I searched a bit in the NY Times back files, one of the
perks of my employment at a major library is access to some pretty
decent online resources that I once in a while use for my own research
(please, don't anyone tell my boss), and came up with a few articles
that might interest those participating in this thread. One was on the
closing of Music Masters, one was about the advent of Tower in NYC
(1984) and its impact on the existing record shops (could one ever
really think of Tower as a "shop") and a series of articles about a
block on 8th Avenue in Chelsea the impact (in the mid-1980s) of
rising rents. One of the businesses on this block was Max Draisner's
8th Avenue Records (it DID have and name after all!) and there is a
great picture of the place with Max holding court. Even if you never
were part of this specific scene, you were definitely in a place
exactly the same at some point. Anyhow, I'd be happy to send the PDFs
of these articles (and also Franz's photo from the Times) to anyone
who writes to me off the list.