Canterbury Records, Colorado Blvd. in Pasadena. L.A.’s oldest surviving record store. I’m a frequent patron, and sometime I’ll tell you about it.

Amoeba Records, the world’s largest independent record store, a chain. I’ve been to the one in Berkeley, several times, and the iconic location in Hollywood, before and after the move.

And, of course, PooBah. PooBah is the Mother and Father of DooDah, which is a parade and breaks records. That’s records of audience participation. One year they threw tortillas. We caught them and ate them on the spot.

That’s Pasadena at its fringical best. I wrote a poem about DooDah, the parade. It’s in my collection, Seminar Poems, which should be forthcoming once I convince Kristina that it’s ready, though she keeps insisting that it needs illustrations. I remind her that I can’t draw, and she says, “Exactly! That’s what people want.” It’s a pretty good poem, reasonably clever. The new owner/manager of PooBah in the third location I’m aware of, is a guy from Canada. I told him about the story I wrote when PooBah was downstairs in Old Town Pasadena, and I called it Play it Again Records. The guy said he’d like to read it. [You can read it in my blog post, 11/18/2023. “Three Times Walter Lee.” It appeared in the great Canadian magazine: event, journal of the contemporary arts, Volume 14, Number 2, 1985. I’ve been writing (and publishing) for a long time.]

Record stores. Southern California. Of course. Hollywood. The center and the source.

Like the iconic Capitol Records Building near Hollywood and Vine, a 13-story circular tower like a stack of LPs. I’ve driven by it so many times. You can see it from a distance, even from the freeway.

I remember when Amoeba moved to its new location. They didn’t have quite everything but they always had a lot, so much so that I always found new things I just had to have. My world got larger by experience and my collection expanded. I was always going to have a bookstore, with an extensive section for records, videos, CDs, DVDs. I had thousands. Amoeba told me where I could buy replacement needles for playing my old 78s.  

I miss the past.

Like Wallach’s Music City, where you could listen to the new records in your own little sound proof room. If you liked the record, you could buy it. That’s where we got our copy of the Beecham, de los Angeles, Bjoerling La Boheme. It’s never been surpassed.

If you didn’t want to buy the record, no problem, you’d just slip it back into the sleeve, then into the jacket, and put it back on the shelf with the new records. We were always careful not to leave scratches.

Those were the trusting days, long gone. Now, nobody trusts anybody. They may pretend to, but we have TV.

People now lie with such impunity that even they don’t know when they’re not telling the truth. The washed brain is hung out to dry.

What this has to do with records and record stores, I have no idea. But, from what I’m reading, the new generation is discovering vinyl.

There’s hope for the world.