Amoeba Records San Francisco...my first visit

Is a lot of the sixties/seventies used U.S. vinyl still shrinkwrapped?

 

I have to say: out of all the stores I checked out in the SF/Berkeley, Rasputin's in Berkely was the best by far in terms of selection of used as well as prices that weren't too outrageous. They also, unlike Amoeba, didn't moronically seal up almost all of the used vinyl.

 

That guy has a doppelgänger down here in LA called The Record Collector.

 

Hate non price tags, repeat hate non price tags.It usually means their expensive 'royal pita.

 

Record hunting.
Another pet peave.
You think the store your going to has got new stock ( well your optimistic ), you even get there a couple of minuets before the shop opens..only to find a record geek waiting also to go in. Argh'moment.

 

I've only gone there once and I will never go back. That place is a joke!

 

Stopped in briefly at Streelight on Market near Castro in SF last night and was a bit dismayed at how much higher their prices were than the last time I popped in.

 

I was there in 1998, it was very impressive indeed. I also met Sean Lennon a few days later at Tower Records in Chicago and visited other record stores in LA and NY. Quite a fun trip!

 

I see! Well, my wife will be happy about that.

 

One of the funniest things is to go to the SF/Haight St. Amoeba right when it opens on a Saturday morning. You can typically see a cluster of about 5-6 slovenly middle-aged record geeks who look like they spend the rest of the week under a rock, and as soon as the doors open they race frantically to the new arrivals section like flies on poop and flip through it with the intensity of men in the wild hunting for big game to feed the family.

 

Last time I was there was Fall of '98. Spent quite a few hours there and walked out with a few extras to flip on Ebay. It was a great place back then.

It seems all stores have gotten savvy about their product over the last 15 years. They almost all have their own Ebay store and sell any rare records online. They never even see the shelves.

 

Ahem. Is it within reason that some of those "hunters" may be members of this esteemed forum?
(I'm rarely in the Bay Area, so I don't think you are describing Me...nah.)

 

Well, note that I've seen this phenomenon firsthand on many, many occasions, which puts me right there at the scene along with them!

 

And of course , be sure to dress accordingly so you blend in and do not stand out from the pack...like an expert hunter and gatherer would do...

 

blend in... with a full Digital Camo outfit? BRB have to make a Cabela's order.

Luckily? for me I'm a later riser and usually visit late in the day

 

I just came back from Amoeba SF after a several month hiatus. There were some great deals there, and lots of nice choice imports I picked up. I left a Miles Davis Cellar Door boxset there that was only $99!

 

Was that a new/sealed copy? I picked up a used (but perfectly fine) copy of that for $49 from Amoeba SF last summer. Was v pleased.

 

Oh sorry, I have a fever (was stopping by on way home from doctor), it was plugged nickel. Used. That wouldn't be a steal for cellar door

 

I haven't been to Amoeba SF since '06. It was the only time that I've been there. I remember spending two hours there, but not buying a thing, because it was overwhelming. After collecting my thoughts, and thinking about how to allocate the bankroll, I went back later in the evening and ended up a few hundred lighter in the pocket. The staff was nice enough to toss in free T-shirts. At the time, they had OOP Mosaics, Bear Family, rarities on CD and vinyl, cool concert posters--great stuff. It is worth checking out, but it can be dangerous on the wallet.

 

Or Cancer.

 

I was at the Hollywood one 7 years ago. I had to leave early because I ran out of money.

 

So, I was doing my weekly round at Amoeba/Rasputin's on Telegraph last night, and was surprised to find when venturing down into Rasputin's vinyl basement that, with the exception of the new arrivals rack, ALL of the vinyl was gone. Except for some DVDs at the far end of the room, the basement was nothing but empty record racks. I asked a guy down there who was pricing DVDs where the vinyl had been moved to, and he told me they'd transferred it to Mad Monk, the new store Rasputin's owner Ken Sarachan is opening down the street and across from Amoeba (in the store that used to be Cody's Books), but that Mad Monk wasn't open yet because of some unforeseen delays, and they had no idea when it would open.

It seems awfully strange to me to downscale the well-established cultural institution that is Rasputin's by gutting all of the vinyl and moving it into a new store with new name, but Sarachan has made a career out of similarly bizarre and fickle moves. This one guy who has been working in Rasputin's vinyl basement for the last few years once said that with the vinyl resurgence they get significantly more traffic in the vinyl basement than in any other part of the store. So, I can see moving it back up to the main floor or some place more prominent. But with Rasputin's CD and DVD sections being relatively dead these days, the current Rasputin's is going to turn into a ghost town, since it seems everyone's just going to go to Mad Monk instead.

I actually read in an article a year ago that Sarachan was planning to sell LPs in Mad Monk, but he's tossed around so many ideas for the place (vintage clothes, an eatery, a nightclub, a venue for "didactic" rap performances and "poetry slams", etc.) that I wasn't sure what to believe. I suppose the space is big enough to accommodate all the above.

The article speculated that Sarachan's motivation was purely a continuation of the adversarial relationship that's existed between the two stores from the get-go. It quoted one of Amoeba's cofounders as saying, "Whatever his motivations are, whether it's an offhand insult or a gesture of competition, it will help us." Basically, Amoeba isn't concerned, and I don't think they have a reason to be.

Should be interesting, though. I just hope they don't move the opening date to Record Store Day.

 

Oh, and and on the subject of Amoeba, I was in LA recently and went to the Hollywood store for the first time in over five years. I was surprised by how in the Rock vinyl section, there seemed to be way more new vinyl than used. I mean, the new arrivals and newly priced sections were fairly robust with used records, but the alphabetized section seemed to be kind of lacking in used vinyl. I'd be looking through the 'A' miscellaneous section, for example, and it seemed to consist almost solely of brand new, shrink-wrapped vinyl. This is not the case in Berkeley or SF, where there seems to be more of an even split between the two. Very strange. I ended up walking out of there with a few CDs and a book.

 

The used clothing store ended up going in another building further up on Telegraph, where Wet Seal was some years ago. It's called Anastasia's (get it? get it??!).

Also, I dunno if it's already been mentioned here or not, but the Rasputin on Powell in San Francisco abruptly closed a month or two ago. I believe the one on Haight is still open.