It's a shame Cheese Fry offspring won't ever experience aimless strolls along the aisles of a music store. Those stores - Sound Warehouse, Hit Records on Forest Lane, Musicland (or was it Sam Goody?) in the local malls - played a big part of our coming of age, usually experienced with friends apart from parents. We always felt older and more sophisticated somehow going in those stores. Well into our 20s, in fact, we were still taking frequent spins through the Wherehouse at the Beverly Connection to check out the sales bins or the Virgin Megastore on Sunset that had this amazing innovation of providing samples of tracks from the week's top ten albums by just putting on one of the headphones lined along the back wall.
As we all know, the digitization and iTunes-ification of the music industry slowly but surely drove those stores out of business. There are music sections in stores like Target or Barnes and Noble, sure, but those are sanitized facsimiles of the brash, sprawling, neon stores of the past. Young people now don't even own physical media. Their songs are bits and bytes in a Spotify playlist, a trend we admit that's completely infected us as well. Our background music now mostly comes courtesy of Sirius XM with an embarrassing lean towards 80s and 90s. We can't even remember the last time we bought a CD and that's coming from someone who - much like you, we guess - were once the proud owners of a CD tower packed with the coolest artists only. (Side note: to whoever stole our Toad the Wet Sprocket CD during one of our 1993 apartment parties, a pox on your house. Of all the CDs to choose from, that's the one you picked?)
The Sound Warehouse by Bachman Lake - and later, when we didn't dare run the risk of being seen by friends with our father, the Sound Warehouse out by the late, great Valley View Mall - was to our teenaged brain an oasis of coolness. We couldn't shake a feeling of being an outsider walking through those doors, as if the other customers knew weren't trendy enough to enter their world. It was always exciting, like walking into a real-world version of MTV. The music blasting, playing the latest release by some popular artist - or even better, some obscure artist who hadn't yet "sold out." The grungy employees who seemed so impossibly hip and bored we didn't dare ask a question for fear of a painfully dismissive eye roll. The band posters and flyers covering every wall. But most of all, there were the endless options. Rows and rows of LPs to flip through like alphabetized card catalogs, all of it organized by genre. Rock here, country there, soundtracks back over here. It was organized and yet also somehow sloppy and overwhelming. You didn't have to buy anything. Part of the fun was just looking at the album covers and reading the song lists, debating which item was worth your gas mowing money. It was a whole process. And get this, Zoomers, you could only buy whatever was in stock. (In theory, yes, you could have the store order something for you but we never did that.)
During our early middle school and high school years, our focus was cassette tapes because they played in our bedroom (dual) cassette deck and our 1979 Ford Granada. The music stores of the 1980s had endless shelves full of cassette tapes stacked like gold bars in Fort Knox, all of them in that distinctive crinkly shrink wrap. The less we say about our brief foray into the Columbia Music House record club - ten cassettes for only $1! - the better. And then somewhere along the way we discovered the 45 single. Friends liked to make fun of our fixation with top 40 pop radio hits. So instead of spending $9 for a cassette to get one radio song, why not spend $2 for a little 45 record with just that one song? That there is smart economics. We ultimately ended up with the equivalent of about three shoe boxes worth of 45s and recently converted a good chunk into MP3s. For the record, about 10% were too scratched to transfer and another 10% or so deemed by us to fall into the "what were we thinking?" category and unworthy of preserving. Our collection offered an unexpected cross-section of the rise and fall of 45s: lots and lots of 80s hits and a few early 90s ones through about 1992 or so which coincided with the industry's shift to cassingles. That was actually the name of them. We bought a few of those, sure, but soon the record companies realized they'd make more money making us buy the whole CD.
For the record, our first cassette purchase was a three-fer: The Police's Synchronicity, The Cars' Heartbeat City, and Huey Lewis and the News' Sports. Pretty sure the first CDs we bought alongside the sleek badass CD player we got for Christmas one year were Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814 and Milli Vanilli's Girl You Know It's True (they were fakes, but those are solid songs, people).
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