Attention L.A. ILXors: Aron's Records Is Closing

http://eil.com/newgallery/New-Order-Crystal-196698.jpg

That said, I also had a slight disdain for some of the employees pre-Amoeba, yet I haven't had a chance to go back since Amoeba opened... and given that Amoeba is at least easy bussing or a minor urban hike from Aron's, I might have to go there afterwards for more functional purposes. But I want to step into that brown brown store just one more time.. to see that micro-parking lot and see the memories of people trying to cram in there all the time, being amazed at how people were able to park there at all.

He rang up my very first purchase there! (1985/1986?).. I got some hard-to-find Tackhead and Einsturzende records there... if that was him working the counter. It's hard to say, because so many guys at the front looked like him over the years. He kinda set the template for the long-haired really-tired looking disinterested Aron's employee.. the only thing that changed into the 90s was the addition of "irony" to the playing of old metal in the store.

Oh, so YOU'RE the one who got him into industrial.

"YOU WANNA STEP INTO MY WORLD!"

Great stock, yet none of the employees ever seemed to have a clue about almost any genre of music (though someone must have, based on what they carried).

Still, really sad that, as mentioned above, we now have Amoeba, or the mega-chains to deal with exclusively. Vinyl Fetish is run by a rather unfriendly guy with records that are EXTREMELY over-priced. Sea-Level is good, but has a very limited stock. Rhino also has an unfriendly staff, and too much mark-up.

And this is LA, the apparent "rock and roll capital". We get great shows, but as for record stores....

My friend says it best- you can't spell LAME without LA....

"YOU WANNA STEP INTO MY WORLD!"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

I wish, but since -- much like today -- I was an intense music dork, even when I was 14, I asked him "DO YOU LIKE TACKHEAD? THEY'RE REALLY GOOD!". And, barely awake, he said something, turning his back to me, like "yeah i saw the records.. but... mm.. never heard them.. "

Then I got a $35 parking ticket when I got back to the car.

LA KARMA

It's always too bad when a music store goes out of business and I'll miss Aron's cheap vinyl... But are people really bemoaning that the fact that LA now "only" have Amoeba? Is that some sort of joke? Amoeba's incredible. Try moving to a small town in Texas, then bitch about your lack of music stores. Unbelievable.

I don't think Amoeba is the only record store in L.A. by any means. Maybe soon, the only BIG record store.

How's Tower Records Sunset doing? now THERE's a store that had almost every 80s hair band musician as an employee at one point!

Yes, but LA has great qualities, range of record stores for a city its size not being one of them.

Vinyl Fetish is awesome because they'll pay you BANK for the cheap-ass Siouxsie records you can buy elsewhere for two bucks each.

Used to be true, not true now.

But are people really bemoaning that the fact that LA now "only" have Amoeba? Is that some sort of joke? Amoeba's incredible. Try moving to a small town in Texas, then bitch about your lack of music stores. Unbelievable.

Amoeba is incredible, but it's now pretty much the only show in town, which is ridiculous for the size of LA. I grew up in a very small city and we had 3 quality indie record stores. Not really "unbelievable" to expect that a record industry town would have, um, a good number of record stores....

Are all the techno record stores on Melrose still there?

Nope. All gone, except that crappy trance one near the hair salon.

You're fucking kidding me. :(

Well, NYC -- for its population -- has a criminally small amount of record stores as well... the most well known of them amongst hipsters being run by someone legally and ethically challenged (as well as ethnically biased.)

I don't remember Philadelphia being the best record store town either, given its size. Don't know about Chicago.

I think there comes a point where a city just becomes too big to sustain a population where there's a high enough percentage of music geeks.

It's weird that cities like Boston, San Francisco, Richmond, Seattle, Portland, Austin (on its way back thanks to 33.3), Vancouver, Minneapolis, and other not-so-gigantic cities each have more good record stores than any of the aforementioned gigantic cities... (though I don't know about Chicago.)

But I agree- smaller cities do much better by proportions.

Wait- my mom lives in Toronto. Is T-Dot a record store, or slang for Toronto?

Imagining this spoken by a 14-year-old Donut (whom I've never met) makes me smile for some reason.

Amoeba doesn't let you preview vinyl though.

Vinyl previewing is a dealbreaker for me, as far as my wanting to shop in a record store that carries vinyl. That's why I've rarely went to Fat Beats. (Then again, maybe that's why Fat Beats' records are so cheap. No need to open up the records, and therefore inflate the prices to maintain the upkeep of having preview stations. "Let the other record stores do that. Then they'll come to use afterwards", etc.)

Slang for Toronto, because the written abbreviation for Toronto is T.O., or "T-Dot, Oh-Dot".
Check out Kardinal Offishal's "Bakardi Slang" for a full breakdown of Toronto hip-hop speak.

Record Chain Bets on the Past, Future

No industry has been as thoroughly eviscerated by new technologies and changing cultural norms as the music business.

The record companies are consolidating, laying people off, wondering whither their audience has fled.

Record chains like Tower Records and Wherehouse Music have spent long stretches under bankruptcy protection. Makers of portable devices and purveyors of online music are all searching for the right formula to serve a mass market.

Through all this upheaval, Amoeba Music survives. The independent record chain was founded in 1990 in a Berkeley storefront and subsequently expanded to three stores — one on San Francisco's Haight Street and another, launched in November 2001 near Sunset and Vine, that instantly became a Hollywood landmark.

Up to now Amoeba's success has been based on looking backward. It relies for as much as half its unit volume on used, vintage, and collectible LPs ("vinyl" in used-record parlance), CDs, and DVDs on which high profit margins make up for the razor-thin margins on new CDs. Amoeba's used-record buyers are masters at assessing with a glance material that comes across its trade-in counters by the thousands per day — more than 200,000 items a month at the Hollywood location alone, not including items acquired from established collections or at estate sales.

But Amoeba is about to take a couple of big leaps into the future, with plans to start its own record label and to create an online site for downloadable music.

"We're starting the 21st century now," Dave Prinz, 52, one of the company's co-founders, told me last week in Berkeley. "The Internet is changing everything. We were ignoring it."

As a chain that has stayed in private hands, remained manageably compact, and built a devoted (not to say fanatical) clientele, Amoeba has long seemed immune from the changes roiling the rest of the industry. Only this year has it detected any flattening of sales that might arguably be traced to free peer-to-peer music trading and commercial downloading sites.

Part of its appeal to customers is the stores' unique atmosphere. Amoeba shuns industry promotions that make customers at Tower Records or Best Buy feel as if they're trapped in a "living commercial," in the words of Marc Weinstein, 48, who was working in a Bay Area record store when he co-founded Amoeba with Prinz and two other friends. (One, Karen Pearson, now oversees the L.A. store; the other is retired.)

Amoeba takes great pride in the uncanny erudition of its staff — its test for applicants for a buyer's position is so tough that, according to company legend, only one person, a buyer at the Haight store, has ever notched a perfect grade.

Indeed, armed with a list of hard-to-find CDs from several genres, I was able to stump the Berkeley floor staff on only one, an obscure Hungarian recording of the ensemble piece "Coming Together/Attica" by composer Frederic Rzewski that I've been trying to replace for years.

Amoeba is the rare chain where the inventory encompasses items including the Guarneri Quartet's 30-year-old recording of Mozart's Six Quartets Dedicated to Haydn, Ellington's "Great Paris Concert" and a huge selection of the avant-garde saxophonist John Zorn — not to mention black metal, electronica, world music and much more. The very breadth of the inventory creates its own sense of community among the customers — especially within the diversity of L.A.

"Amoeba is this little distillation machine," Weinstein says. "I can't tell you how many people thank me just for creating a place you can go and be proud of the L.A. scene."

Weinstein and his partners have consistently resisted pressure to expand the chain beyond what they could embrace with their own arms, turning down feelers from New York and Chicago. Los Angeles was harder to rebuff, in part because customers visiting the Bay Area from Southern California kept pleading for a local outlet.

"L.A. was the biggest chance we took," Weinstein says. "It was the chance of losing control."

The owners focused their energies by making the L.A. store big enough to serve as a destination for the entire region. They spent roughly $2.5 million to acquire used vinyl and CDs over a period of months before the grand opening of their 30,000-square-foot store, seeding it with an inventory that exceeded that of the two Bay Area stores combined.

The new store soon exceeded the owners' projections, and not merely in sales volume.

"The sheer number of hard-core music lovers and collectors in L.A. was far beyond what we expected," Weinstein says. "Then there's the ethnic and economic diversity. It's a deep and rich tapestry, and after 25 years up here in the Bay Area, it's refreshing to have that alternative reality in my life."

Still, opening a major bricks-and-mortar location doesn't sound like an experience the partners are eager to repeat. Instead, they're contemplating alternative ways of distributing music.

That has led to plans, still in development, for an Internet download site, perhaps to absorb the technological challenges they know are coming. "The next store we build will be virtual," Prinz says.

More advanced are plans for an Amoeba record label. Prinz, an enthusiast who wears his passions on his sleeve, says the first CD, scheduled for January, will be a previously unreleased 1969 concert recording by one of his artistic heroes, the country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons. Prinz hopes to follow the CD with other archival material from Parsons, only a fraction of which appeared before the musician's death in 1973 at the age of 26.

Amoeba will also release an album featuring the Robin Nolan Trio, a Gypsy jazz group inspired by Django Reinhardt, and Brandi Shearer, a local singer who happened to join the Nolan group for a promotional appearance at the Haight Street store and knocked Prinz over with her smoky voice.

The label's business model will thus reflect that of the stores — a little looking back, and a little looking forward. Says Weinstein, "this business has always been about the cool stuff we could bring to people."

Ha! I have this.

always parked in front of a plumber's shop a few doors down, i think, never got a ticket. (i remember going there on friday nights and they had VALET PARKING.)

-- hstencil (hstenc!...), January 6th, 2006.

I'm not really being fair- it's a loaded challenge. You can't prove me wrong because given the city's size, the frequency of dance events and turn-out at them is laughable. Your best shot at a decent dance experience in all of Southern California is to hit the tents at Coachella. LA? Dead. I really wish it wasn't so, but it is....

yeah seriously. the key to not having this happen is to know more than the employee.

but when i worked at a store (not even the indiest/snobbiest place) i was a dick. and it's not because i felt i knew more than the shopper, it was because working retail sucks a big fatty. tell me working retail doesn't make you realize how fucking stupid the entire population of the world is

that was in response to gear

That's funny! It is kind of a pick-up spot. I got clocked for over a year by an employee there (and that means a lot, because I'm in there at least twice a week), so I finally told her to give me her number. She told me to check out her Myspace page (I'm not a really a subscriber to that sort of thing) and she had over 800 friends and a quote about the delicacy of one's soul.....yikes!

Well, first off, I took a bus with ease to Amoeba when I visited L.A. over Xmas holiday... granted, i was staying with family in Pacific Palisades, which is an hour bus-ride from Amoeba, but thankfully it's the same big street -- Sunset Blvd. -- that runs from A to B. I felt really sorry for the car/parking crunch at Amoeba I walked by, but if one doesn't mind walking or is lucky enough to have an easy bus route, the stress factor can be relieved trivially.

Also, when browsing online, you don't have the experience of peripherally seeing really cool shit on the top racks e.g. oh, a used excellent copy of the recent ReR 5-CD Faust box set for $50 that I may or may not have bought, arf arf.

Obviously, there are pros in online shopping as well. I know them all too well.. my empty wallet is evidence of it. But I had to defend the real-time record shopping experience a little here... even at Amoeba.

I will always love going to record stores but in my old age I have to be more efficient. And for every awesome box set that I see used someplace, chances are at eMusic or Amazon or wherever (ILX!) I am also going to get roped into something that I didn't anticipate. Yes, there is a physical aspect of going shopping that is great, but lots and lots of kids are growing up without it. Times are changing.

Escaped from ILX for his mental health.

If someone were to hypothesize that record stores in the biggest cities will start to die out and become an archaic thing, I wouldn't disagree at all.

Then again, cassettes are relatively "obselete", but you can still find them in drug stores.. You can still buy cassette decks in stores.. just not the variety of yesteryear.

Music/media related trends don't usually go extinct in one fell swoop as much as go into an isolated receded state, living and dying off very slowly and quiety. Exceptions exist obviously. (Hello, 8T-TRAK!)

This is OTM. Also- nice one, Dom. I love that Faust box set!

I had a school-boy fantasy half realized at Amoeba Hoolywood- I was at a broken listening station and Kirsten Dunst leaned over from the station next to me and said "Those headphones don't work. Here- use mine." Then I fainted (ok not really, and yes I know it's lame to have celebrity crushes, but she's so cute in person).

Also (not to continue the lame name drop, but this is relative to my posts on the "Bands Everyone Loves" thread), I saw Drew Barrymore and that Stroke get out of line in front of me to put a copy of Alladin Sane back on the shelf. Go put your copy of Loveless back while you're at it! (Sarcasm there- she wasn't packing Loveless) She is very pretty in person, but she obviously ain't down...

Oops!

He has spent the last five years selling his collection on Amazon, GEMM, and eBay. He's a good friend--met him on the Internets in 1997 and used to visit him at the store when he worked there.

"All the way from England, promoting their latest album, The Ideal Copy *holds up vinyl jacket*, Ladies and Gentlemen, WIRE!"

Jeez, Don, I didn't know you knew ML. Great feller -- saw him last with Skip at Mouse on Mars a little over a year ago.

I got to know him through a different newsgroup...did you ever know Gondola Bob?

HAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAH

Oh yes, yes we did. And Donut and I knew him before anyone else as all three of us worked at KUCI. And trust us, those of us from a.m.a. who knew him...still remember.

My favorite insult from him to me, because it was so ineffectual and lame: "Oh piss off and listen to Pulp." Which is of course a FINE idea! Woohoo!

I just remembered his name was Ed Broome or some shit.

We could relive it all by Googling that newsgroup. I was googling a different friend from that era and I found posts from 1996!!

OT: The old Pasadena Penny Lane has closed, by the way. That was surely in the works when they decided to open the PCC store. It was selling Rose Bowl souveniers last time I walked by, with the Penny Lane sign still up. They must have moved that inventory to the new one, so it may be better now.

The aforementioned ML once met Broome at a concert.

Missing Aron's. It's just not as much fun to go to Hollywood anymore :(