Ron Crosby, a frequent shopper at Record City, who describes himself as a “self-employed swap meet vendor who focuses on selling music,” has lived in San Diego his entire life. The difference between someone who likes music and downloads individual songs, and a collector, is all about passion.” There’s something about getting a record you’ve been trying to find for a long time. People with iPods are just not that passionate about music anymore. “I don’t think someone who downloads music is passionate about the band they are listening to. “It’s a pet peeve of mine that people search the Internet and find out about some obscure music, then come in here and ask us why we don’t have a psychedelic South American section,” Adler joked. Jack Adler, a Record City employee who started working there 10 years ago, said the store has the largest inventory of used records in San Diego County, and a lot of that has to do with McNamara’s passion for tracking down hard-to-find albums. singles chart in 1976 and spent a total of 209 weeks on the charts.) (Showaddywaddy’s song “Under the Moon of Love” was a No. “I would have to say that, of all the great music that came out in those days, my favorite bands have to be The Police and a band called Showaddywaddy, who was a pop group that specialized in revivals of hit songs from the 1950s,” McNamara said. The Sex Pistols were causing a stir with their violent, unpredictable shows the sounds and political messages of The Clash were becoming popular the world over and, of course, disco music was reaching its heyday. McNamara’s mother is British, so he spent the majority of his teenage years, from 1975 to 1980, living in Great Britain-when the sounds coming out of the U.K. “Leonard said he was looking for a new location to move Record City, and he wondered if I would be interested in running the store-not because I had experience managing a music store but because he knew I had a vast knowledge of and enthusiasm for all kinds of music.” “In 1997, I was working as a hairdresser for SuperCuts,” McNamara said. His said his passion for music pulled him into the store to search for the records he loved growing up. “That was right about the time Napster and Internet downloads hit and became popular.”Īt the same time, Graham McNamara, the current manager of the Hillcrest Record City, was frequenting the El Cajon Record City. “All of the record stores closed around then-even Tower Records,” Leavitt said. Record City’s Hillcrest location opened in 1999 after Leavitt decided to close the original location on El Cajon Boulevard due to slowing sales. (Christy Scannell/SDUN)Record City, owned by Las Vegas resident Leonard Leavitt, originally opened on El Cajon Boulevard back in 1993 (the original Record City in Las Vegas opened for business in September 1988 and is still in operation). “It’s a pet peeve of mine that people … come in here and ask us why we don’t have a psychedelic South American section,” said Record City employee Jack Adler. It’s one of the last of a dying breed-the independently-owned record store where patrons actually can purchase vinyl LPs and hard-to-find albums by obscure artists, not just CDs like those sold at the big-box stores, or credit-like cards you can purchase with a certain number of downloads from iTunes. Tucked away near the busy street corner of Sixth Avenue and Robinson Avenue in Hillcrest is a tiny, independently-owned music store called Record City.
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