Top Of The Shops

I'm back from vacation ... and boy howdy, did I have some fun!! In fact, as far as my credit card goes, I probably had a little too much fun ... but I'd been behaving myself over the last several months, so you could say I was entitled. I'll probably be sharing some of my favorite new acquisitions with you in the coming weeks (gonna try and get back to at least a semi-regular posting schedule ... but, as usual, I can't make any promises), but for now I thought I'd share with you some of the amazing stores I visited on my travels. Now, some people like stores based on the ambience or the friendliness and forthcomingness of the staff (with regard to exposing their customers to artists they might not have known about before), but what I look for when I go into a store is the selection. I usually have oddball stuff and imports on my want list, so the more stock a store has, the more likely I am to find what I'm looking for (or, all too often, a lot of stuff I wasn't looking for). Here are some of my new favorite stores in California:

Rasputin Music (6623 Pacific Ave., Stockton) -- Rasputin is a chain of nine (and counting) stores stretching from Vallejo to Fresno, but they're still independent of the corporate machine. I'd never been in one before, but I had to check out the Stockton location, which is housed in what used to be a Tower Records, and that gives you an idea of how much square footage they have. The selection really impressed me ... they have two big racks of 50-cent CDs on the wall, a whole aisle of budget CDs ($5 and less), and a massive main section, divided up into nearly every genre imaginable. I only had a little over an hour to spend in the store, and I could have spent twice that long and still not seen everything. I've been thinking about taking a weekend trip down to Berkeley to visit their Amoeba and Rasputin locations, and now I'm all the more eager to do so. If you live in Northern California or are planning to visit or even just pass through, pencil this one in.

Rhino Records (235 Yale Ave., Claremont) and Mad Platter (1223 University Ave. #160, Riverside) -- Long before the Rhino label was bought out by Warner Bros. Records in the '90s, they also ran this store, which has led to the erroneous impression that it's corporate-owned; in fact, Rhino sold this store way back in 1981, and it's been independent ever since. The owners opened a sister store, the Mad Platter, later on in the '80s. I'd been into Rhino a couple of times before, but hadn't visited Mad Platter until this trip. They're not the biggest stores, and they don't even have the biggest selection, but the racks are packed plenty full and you'll always find some obscure item that you forgot you were looking for or didn't even know existed, and sometimes at a really good price, so that makes both of these stores a whole lot of fun to go into.

Record City (3757 6th Ave., San Diego) -- Another store I hadn't seen or even known about until this visit, Record City is almost deceptively small-looking from the outside, and is hidden on a side street in the Hillcrest area of San Diego. But inside is an impressive selection of CDs, with just as much vinyl occupying the other half of the store. Again, not the best selection in the world, but I found a few things not on my list that I just couldn't resist picking up -- especially since half my purchases came from the dollar section! It's a good enough shop that it's now on my list of regular stops in San Diego.

Amoeba Music (6400 Sunset Blvd. [at Cahuenga Blvd.], Hollywood) -- This is the granddaddy of them all ... nearly a whole city block of CDs and records of every imaginable genre and subgenre, and an upstairs crammed with DVDs (and even VHS tapes!). I must have had my expectations a bit high, because I didn't find as much on my list here this time as I hoped to, but I still came away with a whole bag full of stuff that came to nearly $150 (after $30 credit for the bag of CDs I took in for trade). It'd be easy to spend half a day in this store, and it's an absolute must stop for any music fan, no doubt about it. They also have locations in San Francisco and Berkeley, so you don't have to be in the L.A. area to get The Amoeba Experience.

Best of all: every one of these stores is independently owned and operated, so you can be assured that by patronizing these fine businesses you're helping to keep "the little guys" in business.