circles_sticker_ball

New Times’ Robrt Pela, noting the dissolution of Circles records, offers a memoir of the record-store scene in Phoenix in the 1980s:

In 1980, while my pals were prepping for their SATs and applying to various colleges, I filled out only one application: at Hollywood Records, the music shop located just behind my childhood home. I explained to Beef-Bob, the assistant manager there, that I’d be graduating on June 3 and could start the following Monday. Hollywood wasn’t hiring, but Beef-Bob told his boss, a short-tempered grouch known as Fuzz, that he needed to meet this kid who was obsessed with vinyl. Fuzz grilled me for an hour with record label minutiae, finally offering me a job when I answered his “What’s the flip side of the new Sylvester single?” by asking him, “Which version, the Dutch seven-inch edit on Mercury or the domestic 12-inch on Fantasy?” Fuzz probably figured I already spent more time at Hollywood than I did at home, so he might as well let me ring up sales while I was there.

Hollywood was a sister chain to Circles, run by Angela and Leonard Singer, whose last store, the Circles flagship on Central and McKinley, is in the process of closing, after some 38 years in business. More on that story here. The massive sticker ball (above) on the counter at the downtown Circles is testament to the store’s longevity

I have only one complaint about the Pela piece. These grafs rang false:

I recently downloaded an advance copy of an album by a singer named Sarah Jaffe, but there was no cover art, so I couldn’t tell what Sarah looked like (hey, it matters); there were no liner notes, so I didn’t know Sarah’s story (was she a teen prodigy, or had she been singing in saloons for 30 years?). Sarah’s career was new enough that there was no Wikipedia entry on her. My computer had neatly tucked Sarah’s debut album into my hard drive, but I found myself wanting to have had it handed to me by someone vested in its success, maybe someone who’d just returned from hanging with Sarah and her husband in Vegas. I listened to Sarah’s album twice and deleted it; it didn’t really belong to me.

“That’s because the record labels have taken all the fun out of it,” Angela Singer said to me when I dropped in at Circles last month to say goodbye. “The whole process of discovering and selling music has become utterly impersonal.”

The idea that there is less info or images available about new artists is a little silly. Back in the 1980s, the main way to hear about music was over the radio, which generally gave you nothing. Liner notes were nonexistent outside of jazz. The amount of infomration and community available to music fans today is extraordinary. This is all just blindered nostalgia.