The End of Amoeba As We Knew It.

I've lived in California for 15 years, beginning in Berkeley where I was introduced to music mega-stores Rasputin's and Amoeba Records. I spent a lot of time at both, being a vinyl junkie, leaning towards Amoeba due to the amazing storehouse of unusual records that would appear for sale there. They even have a section called "Unusually Experimental" which today still holds the oddball recordings I learned to ride a bike on. In Berkeley, the Amoeba shop was the one that would have rare FMP LPs for a while, a great jazz collection and what seemed like miles of used LPs. Amoeba was so successful at what they did, buying and selling in volumes that allowed them discount pricing, that they opened a second shop on Haight Street in San Francisco in the late 90's and another in Los Angeles in the early 00's. I recall selling some records at Amoeba in Berkeley back in the mid 90's and getting a great deal from the staff. By the time the 2 new stores opened things began to change; I guess that's normal for a small operation going big-time. The buying policy became much stricter. The rare LPs had always been taped shut into plastic poly-bags, but it seemed suddenly that each record had an entire roll of clear tape locking it shut and you could hear the guy or gal in charge of taping up records ripping away at the roll of tape, the noise competing with whatever music was on the PA system.

Jeff Plansker and I have made pilgrimages to the LA store on a regular basis on my visits south and since I moved to LA 2 years ago; it is like a trip to church, checking in at the holy shrine of recorded sound. For years you would almost always be surprised at the treasures you'd find. I can only begin to list what great records I found at Amoeba: like the Music In The World of Islam on Tangent Records, another copy of the great Ron Geesin LP "Right Through" that I'd had in the 80's but lent to the electronic music teacher at the Boston Museum School; I literally yelled "Yes!" when I found that about 2 years ago in the Recent Arrivals bin in the LA store. But recently our less frequent visits have supported the feeling that the Great days of Amoeba past are gone. We often leave the shop with nothing; there is just not the great turnover of records that there was back a few years. I suppose with eBay, sellers of vinyl have gotten savier about getting what they can for rare records. The whole market for recorded sound has changed so much in just a few years, with so many young persons just going online for MP3 copies and trading with friends.

While it's good to see the demise of the dinosaur record companies who gave recording artists small percentages of music sales, it contributes to a more specialized and precious world of collecting records. The death of Tower Records was a landmark of this trend, that people are just not buying enough CDs to keep the big retail chain stores in business. Amoeba seems to be going strong, and they have a good dvd/movie room that probably accounts for a growing amount of sales, as many people seem hyped about dvd and home theater (not to mention "gaming") these days. But sadly, Amoeba has begun to feel like the second coming of Tower. The used selection has diminished greatly and prices for rare-ish records are high. We've noticed that it seems there is a box set of anything by anyone who ever farted; everything musical has been commodified to such an extent that it is rendered inert and easily explained. There is so little mystery left in the discovery of unusual music. Now this could be partly an effect of growing older; we may have arrived at a point where looking for recorded music just doesn't provide a lot of discovery any more. We must look into our collections now and figure out what we have gathered, it may be something of a totality which describes the experience of our lives, finding music that we had to have which led to further discoveries. When you're discussing Horace Tapscott and Morton Feldman records I think there isn't that much further to go. The question then is How do I activate what I know, what I have, into an educational force, How can I share this?

So it may seem that an era of record stores has come to an end, both for me personally and in general, that I was just lucky enough to have my interest in recorded music coincide with a period of great richness in the music market. I can't say how much it is me and how much of it is the record market. I've lived my life very closely with records, not having to listen to music constantly but always seeking out new material --often for radio programs I hosted-- and then as an interested listener, maker of music myself and filmmaker who sees music and sound as integral to film experience, to open my own mind, in search of new experience. It is all being folded into the internet. But nothing approaches the clarity of expression found on well recorded and preserved LPs and CDs.

Amoeba is dead; long live Amoeba.