Back in the day: A memoir about Phoenix record stores

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.

Circles Records is closing, after 38 years

Angela and Leonard Singer were feted at the Phoenix Art Museum last night—after decades of support for the museum, they were given the institution’s “Michael and Heather Greenbaum Leadership Award” at a private party. “After my family, I loved the museum,” Angela Singer said simply.

But the evening was a bit bittersweet, in that the couple were simultaneously overseeing the closing of their Circles Records, after nearly 40 years of business at Central and McKinley.

To say the store—literally a mom and pop operation—was an anomaly in the 21st century is an understatement. For many years the music retail industry has been under attack. “Big box” retailers siphoned off sales by low-balling CD prices to get customers into their stores; Barnes & Noble and Borders moved into music sales; then came the rise of Amazon; and then, of course, came Napster and the vaporization of the music industry, cutting CD sales by 50 percent and counting.

Massive retail chains like Musicland disappeared; so did beloved operations like Tower. Yet through it all Circles remained.

The Singers are now in their 80s. Mr. Singer told me last night that the store had a lot of fixed costs that weren’t being met any more; the years of light-rail construction outside his front door couldn’t have helped either.

I suspect that the store stopped making money many years ago; but the Singers also ran a very successful distribution business, Associated Distribution, which no doubt enabled them to keep their retail operation open long after stand-alone operations might have shuttered.

Distributors routed products from independent labels to stores. Back in the day, before the massive consolidation of the record industry, indie labels produced a significant part of its sales, and the Singers handled Motown, Casablanca (home of Donna Summer and the Village People), and Arista—that was Clive Davis’ massively successful label—for a good chunk of California.

Indeed, Singer recalled, at one point he had to sue Arista when Arista by his lights violated some distribution agreements in San Francisco. The matter was handled in federal court in Phoenix, and Davis himself was deposed, but the label eventually settled out of court.

The main Circles store—the pair had a modest chain during the 1980s—was originally a car dealership; a designer named Phyllis Mann gave it its distinctive interior. It was fun hearing stories from Mr. Singer about the salad days of the industry; one of his staffers, he noted, left to open up his own record store—World Records, at 16th and Camelback—where he worked with a future mayor named Phil Gordon.

(PHXated might have found these stories more interesting than most, having worked at another major Phoenix record-store presence, Odyssey, during those days.)

There’s not much about the Singers or Circles on the web, but there is this nice remembrance from New Times’ Robert Pela:, who worked for the pair in the 1980s:

When the store was remodeled by Angela’s son Michael in 1981, the adjoining office on the north side of the building was turned into what would become the Southwest’s premier classical music store. I remember the hoopla when the revolving glass door that connects Circles Classical and Circles Records was rescued from a Manhattan department store that was about to be demolished and shipped here. At the time, and for a long time after Circles had the only revolving glass door in Phoenix.

Kimber Lanning has watched Circles for many years, as a fellow-music-retail owner and a downtown activist: ""Circles Records is a Phoenix landmark," she said in an email. “Its closing is a sad day for me not only as a downtown proponent but also as a fellow record store owner.”