Well, I knew the writing was on the wall when Canadian music store chain Sam the Record Man went bankrupt in 2001, and then reorganized a year later allowing its Toronto flagship store to remain open.
But I was saddened to learn today that Sam’s Toronto store is finally closing on June 30th 2007.
Their Toronto store I remembered best was from this same time, the 1980s, still with its glowing double neon disks staring like zombie eyes across Yong Street. Back then Sam’s was a huge shaggy dog of a place, full of crooked little rooms, narrow stairwells, funny corners, uneven flooring, and packed to the roof with records. There were racks and racks of vinyl albums featuring rock and punk and new wave music. There were bins crammed with records from the 50s, 60s and 70s. There were rooms full of jazz, rooms of classical music, even rooms full of records featuring Broadway musicals. And all over on the walls you could see rare and specialty albums, picture disks and imports.
Sam’s routinely had Saturday specials for record albums for $5, and I still have a bunch of 80s albums featuring groups as varied as The Police, U2, The Payolas, Joan Jett, Thomas Dolby etc., that I grabbed from their front racks. They would routinely have racks for Canadian content that I would go through, and I was also struck by all the photographs and autographs adorning the walls. They were also selling a whack of cassette tapes at this time, but it was the record albums that attracted me.
It’s hard to describe things back there unless you were there. In some ways it’s the little things that are most striking. Back then you would make your purchases at Sam’s in cash if you were a teenager; none of this ATM debit machines, and if you didn’t have ready cash in hand, and a cool record showed up, well you were SOL. The vinyl records you bought were often big and bulky and had a nice heft in your hand when you pulled them out, and had huge and gorgeous cover art. And when you bought a record and they wrapped it up for you, you carried it away with some care so it would arrive home with some care so it wouldn’t be cracked or broken when you pulled the vinyl disc out of the protective sleeve and put it on the turntable to listen.
Or you could buy a couple of cheap 45’s for a few bucks each in an orange or white paper sleeve. You had to slip in a funny plastic doohickey that looked like the symbol from the classic Star Trek episode “Gamesters of Triskelion” so you could play it on your home turntable. While cheap and prone to scratches, by using 45’s you could ‘taste’ a new artist on the cheap or just get the ‘good’ songs from an otherwise ho-hum album.
Well, records gave way other media stuff, and then they started selling VHS and Beta tapes and then DVDs. Cassettes started to take over more, and then CDs were all the rage in their clear plastic clacky-ricky anti-shoplifting storage racks by the early 1990s when I was actually visiting Sam’s nearly every day to browse and shop for music. Sam’s was always something to pop into an browse for either a few minutes or a few hours when passing through the downtown.
After finally moving away and noodling around doing other things like going to medical school and so on I stopped thinking about Sam’s except on those rare times I stopped into the city and then stopped into the store for old time’s sake. By this time the store had spread-out octopus like in the bank next door. The rough tiled floors were smoothed out, the walls repainted by interior decorators, the eclectic music also toned down. Instead of those funny shaped rooms, things were now neatly compartmentalized rooms for DVDs, Music Videos and CDs for all different types of music.
And now, like many of Toronto’s other icons and traditions of old I used to know and visit from the late 1970s to early 1990s—Mr. Gameway’s Ark, the original Bakka Bookstore, the games section at The Silver Snail, etc.–even this will become but another shadowy memory.
::B::
