Depending on your generation, you probably had a different reaction to the news that the Sam Goody record store chain may be down to just one store, in Oregon, as of next year. If that was a shrug or blank stare, we hear you: The once-mighty stores peaked two or three decades back, along with the shopping malls in which many of them thrived.
But for those whose response to the imminent collapse of Sam Goody was a nostalgic sigh, we hear that too. Long before online music existed, Sam Goody — named after founder Sam “Goody” Gutowitz — was an institution and mall staple. But it wasn’t just a place to flip through bins of records. Coming of age as it did with rock & roll itself, the chain was a crucial sonic signifier, proof that the music and the culture it represented had arrived.
The first Sam Goody store opened in the late Forties in midtown Manhattan, with the brand really taking off in the Sixties; Goody himself sold the name and business to a bigger company in 1978. But part of the appeal of the Goody stores, which soon numbered about 1,500, was pure location. Not every one was in a shopping mall, but when I was growing up in New Jersey, every mall seemed to have a Sam Goody.
Arriving by bike at whichever retail mecca, like the Garden State Plaza or Willowbrook Mall, my friends and I would roam the grounds, popping into a Spencer Gifts to ogle the latest novelty items or checking out the make-your-own-T-shirt emporium. (Favorite purchase: A shirt with the Yes logo that read instead, “Maybe.”) We’d kill time buying pretzels, hanging out near the indoor fountains, or popping into whatever bookstore chain was nearby (Brentano’s in my cases). If you’ve seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High, you more or less get the idea.
Inevitably, we’d wind up at Sam Goody. Compared to everything else around it, especially the anchor department stores that loomed over just about every mall, each Goody store felt like an oasis, an entry point for the counterculture that was just emerging and taking hold of our brains. The experience would begin as soon as we crossed the Goody transom. In those pre-internet days, most of us had no idea when a new album was dropping unless you were fortunate enough to work for a record company or a radio station (or a magazine like this one). I’m not even sure most of us knew that the standard new-music release day was every Tuesday — it changed to Friday in 2015.
Nonetheless, week in and out, we’d walk into Sam Goody and be confronted with the new-release bins at the front of the store. Wait, Neil Young has some strange-looking record titled Tonight’s the Night? What is the Kinks’ Soap Opera? And tell me more about Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants” by Stevie Wonder! These days we all know when a blockbuster record is set to arrive, often right down to the minute, so it’s hard to express how startling, and even miraculous, it could be for clueless suburban kids to stumble upon such seminal albums out of the blue.
Beyond those bins sat aisle after aisle of records, alphabetized and by genre. Even if budgets didn’t permit buying many of them, I still remember seeing my first-ever copies of Richard and Linda Thompson, Nick Drake, or Parliament-Funkadelic LPs in some of those stores — records we’d read about in the music press but never actually heard on even the most progressive FM stations. Sam Goody was where I encountered and bought my first Folkways release, Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads. Each Goody also had what were called “cut-out bins”: flop albums that had their corners sliced off and were being sold for as little as $1.99. That’s how I bought my first Chuck Berry record, a second volume of hits that apparently no one cared about.
There were also sections of the stores devoted to turntables, speakers, and other audio gear, and another aisle for sheet music. In the latter, I found a songbook for how to play the tunes on Jerry Garcia’s Garcia and an instruction manual for rhythm guitar. Before I learned to drive, I’d latch my acquisitions onto the back of my bicycle and pray that my new purchases wouldn’t bend or break on the nearly hour-long ride home.
Reacting to this week’s news on social media, friends waxed nostalgic about shopping or working at Sam Goody (fondly in the former case, not always so fondly in the latter). Celebrity sightings (cast members of Saturday Night Live! Lauren Bacall!) proved what a destination site Sam Goody could be. But when Tower Records began encroaching on Goody’s East Coast turf in the Eighties, my own love affair with the Goody chain began to fade out. With its multiple floors and even deeper catalog, the Tower store in downtown New York felt like a more vital, pulsating music gathering place. Nearby used-record stores were also cooler and less sanitized than a typical Goody.
Starting in the late Seventies, the Goody chain was purchased by one corporate owner after another, and its brand and importance seemed to diminish with each changing of the hand. It had disappeared to such a degree that I wasn’t even aware that there were only two stores left — one in Ohio; another in Oregon, where, incidentally, the last Blockbuster store still stands — when the announcement was made earlier this week.
Still, the Goody stores weren’t merely about LPs, cassette tapes, speaker cabinets, and sheet music. Before MTV changed the game, they flourished at a time when rock & roll still wasn’t really considered mainstream culture and was regarded warily, like a guy in denim who showed up at a posh dinner party. And yet here were stores, tucked into malls around the country, that demonstrated that the music, the people who made it and bought it, and the culture itself all mattered. These days it’s easy to take pop’s place in the cultural landscape for granted. But a typical Goody store meant something more: We bought records, therefore we were.
