Where the Good Stuff Is, Part 1

One of the advantages (among many) of living in the Bay Area is that of you are a music junkie, you have many avenues for both product and perfromance to get your fix. Almost too many, as you can easily OD (technically I have been flatline for years).

My first music store love was (and is) Streetlight Records. While I occasionally prefer going to Amoeba in SF, The Beat in Sacramento or the Virgin Megastore in NYC for their particular selection of certain genres, Streetlight is the cornerstone.

When I first began shopping there I was in my early teens and the store was in a house-style building on Bascom Ave. It was small (less than 800 Sq Ft of space) but not an inch of the store was wasted. I would spend hours pouring through liner notes of what was then a majority vinyl operation (we are talking late 80s here folks). Their bargain bin of 50 cent 12" singles and albums helped feed my desire for new sounds (now of course, the bin is $1, but it feeds my artistic jones with my Vinyl Remix series).

In the early 90s they expanded to a warehouse space a half mile down the Ave, to a 40+K sq. foot cavernous affair. They adopted a display space that housed all manner of rotating weirdness -- sometimes literally; the store features for quite some time a lifesize Elvis spinning in a coffin, often presented with images of Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson when they were married.

Everyone from local heroes Janitors Against Aparteid* to Tony Levin (King Crimson, Peter Gabriel) have performed in the store. It has had some great staffers, including a woman I only knew as Sarah who always made my day by ordering the entire LTJ Bukem stable of acts from the Good Looking/Looking Good labels (which meant there was always something new from LTJ, Nookie, Blame, BluMarTen, etc to pick up) , Joey who made great recommendations to me about rockabilly (you were right, that Mike Ness solo disk was righteous), and various others who all have come to know me if not by name, than by face (including the fellow who recognized me from my one spot on the Screen Savers cable show and the low-key gal with the horn-rim glasses who always seems to have such a great disposition for someone in retail).

Thanks Guys.

Now stock more jazz, yo.




* I had a college class once with their alto-sax player,Michael Liu. I wonder what happened to him and the rest of JAA?