San Francisco’s Amoeba Music is experiencing a record-shopping renaissance

But as business barely trickled in, product manager Tony Green also began to feel uneasy.

“We were very concerned going into December,” he said.

That’s when the city entered its second stay-at-home order, forcing the store to close for another month. But it wasn’t until late January, when San Francisco lifted the order and entered the purple tier of the state’s reopening plan, that the Amoeba Music on Haight Street experienced what Green called “a 180-degree turnaround.”
 
The atmosphere of the block seemed to change overnight, from that of a scene in an apocalyptic horror film to a newly awakened neighborhood blossoming with vibrant activity. As restaurants and bars with parklets and outdoor seating reopened, the difference in foot traffic was staggering. And though Amoeba had to reduce its operation to four days a week, the store found itself struggling to keep up with the surge in business, even with the return of most of its staff.

That’s when Green came upon a stunning revelation: The store has been continually making more in those four days of business than it previously had during a typical week in 2019, prior to the pandemic. Not only that, but the store has also seen an influx in physical media traded for store credit, accounting for about 70% of sales. Additionally, the amount of vinyl LPs purchased per customer had soared.
 
One thing was clear: San Francisco’s largest record store was still in high demand.
 
“I woke up this morning with a strange feeling,” Green said. “I realized it was job security. We’ve been incredibly surprised by the level of support and business.”

He attributes this renaissance to a variety of factors. For one, people had been cooped up at home for weeks, if not months. Some of them had stimulus checks they were eager to spend, or a handful of old records they no longer listened to and hoped to exchange for an upgraded selection. But Weinstein also believes that record stores provide a personal freedom that not necessarily everyone knows how to quantify.
 
“People were missing a space like ours in their lives,” he said. “They still want the experience of being part of a community and for immediate access to records. A record geek loves Amoeba because there are so many opportunities for real life serendipity.”
 
Regardless of the cause for the resurgence, it’s led to a renewed interest in record shopping at Amoeba that just might rival the store’s opening date nearly 24 years ago.

‘No one had ever seen anything like it’

It was Nov. 15, 1997, and record shoppers had been waiting outside in the rain for hours.
 
“That didn’t dampen anyone’s enthusiasm for coming in,” said Green, who had just transferred from his previous gig at the Berkeley store to a new role as head buyer for the Haight Street location. “It was just a stream of people, and so busy, you wouldn’t believe it. There was a line out the door the whole day, and I felt punch drunk by the end of it.”
 
Once they were let in, customers sprinted headlong down the ramps of what used to be Park Bowl and toward the bins containing thousands of new and used records and CDs. “Within half an hour, the aisles were clogged and the clacking CD cases sounded like corn popping,” read an article published in the Chronicle two days later.

There was a selection of rare jazz and soul records Weinstein himself had sourced from around the country, which attracted a reasonable chunk of the avid collectors present that day, as well as hard-to-come-by rock LPs and a collection of albums from the Country Music Hall of Fame. Customers excitedly noted that every album in Bob Dylan’s discography was available either used or new. There was even a $10,000 copy of the Beatles’ infamous “Yesterday and Today” butcher cover with the original shrink wrap on it — one of the most expensive records Amoeba has sold to date.

“Today, all friendships are off,” one of the customers, a San Francisco resident named James Colbert, told the Chronicle. “You get in and do your damage and get out.” 

Meanwhile, Weinstein was just happy that his dream of opening a record store in the city had finally come to fruition. Though the Amoeba Music in Berkeley had been successfully running for seven years by that point, Weinstein, fellow co-owner Dave Prinz and Joe Goldmark (who at the time was a part-time owner of Escape from New York Pizza) had originally set their sights on San Francisco — and specifically Haight Street — for their first storefront. Prinz described it as “Telegraph’s sister street,” and when Weinstein heard murmurings that Park Bowl owner Gilbert Klein had plans to move out, he struck a deal with the former KFAT-FM talk show host to lease the building before it went to market.

“The scale of our store has everything to do with the fact that it was a bowling alley. It was a rare opportunity to get a space that size, and still to this day is a unique aspect of Amoeba,” he said. “It represents half an acre of music, and no one had ever seen anything like it.”

It’s worth noting that Park Bowl was once a success story in its own right. At popular Rock & Bowl nights, which were also run by Klein, retro music videos played over the monitors while upbeat pop songs thrummed over the speakers, and neon lights flashed over gaggles of mostly amateur bowlers as they filled the scene to drink and dance. It attracted the likes of celebrities such as Robin Williams, who hosted cast parties there.

On a visit to Amoeba, traces of Park Bowl are still visible. The right side of the building once housed a pool hall associated with the bowling alley, and when you walk into the store today, the stairs are where bowlers would have gone to sit down at the tables and pick up their bowling balls. There was a diner where the store’s buy counter currently stands, and the wooden benches that once appeared along the bowling lanes can now be found near Amoeba’s book section.

There are still a few bins of bowling balls in the attic, according to Green, and Amoeba’s management originally thought of leaving one lane up for employees to play after hours.
 
“Unfortunately, the equipment was so decrepit we couldn’t use it,” he said.
 
The record store’s massive neon sign bears the same font as the original Park Bowl logo, but perhaps the most obvious symbol of the bowling alley that once was is the sign at the top of the tower on the building, which the city of San Francisco asked Amoeba to preserve. They did so, albeit begrudgingly.

“It’s still there,” said Green, chuckling. “And it still gets tagged.”

A place to play

Over the years, scores of musicians have appeared at Amoeba on Haight Street, not only for in-store performances and to peruse the record bins, but also as employees behind the counter.
 
Joel Gion, the emblematic tambourine player of psych-revival rock band The Brian Jonestown Massacre, worked there for a number of years, as did Tim Hellman of garage rockers Thee Oh Sees and Flat Worms. Shayde Sartin of The Fresh & Onlys and currently the Peacers, Tim Cullen of Summercamp and Matt Correia of the Allah-Las were employed there, too. 
 
Several episodes of Amoeba’s Webby Award-winning YouTube series, “What’s in my Bag?” have been filmed at the Haight Street store as well, featuring the musical picks of actors Fred Armisen and John Cameron Mitchell, musicians Ty Segall and Mac DeMarco, singer-songwriter Valerie June, rapper Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def) and dozens of others.

“It’s a little weird when they’re doing it,” Green said of the filming of the episodes in his stores. “We have to turn the music down really low so it feels a little creepy … almost like something is wrong. But it’s one of the most popular things about our website, and it’s still going strong.”

Though Weinstein and Green are grateful all of their stores are now open to the public again, there’s one component of Amoeba that they’re eager to return to: its popular (and free) in-store concert series, “Live at Amoeba.”
 
The city of San Francisco recently issued guidelines that will allow indoor live shows to go on with capacity limits, but Amoeba will likely wait to resume its own events until the store is able to get back to its usual seven-day operation. And because most of the acts that perform at Amoeba are associated with touring artists, they must wait for those tours to start happening again, though Weinstein said he’s exploring the possibility of holding live shows with local artists this year.

These in-store performances notably debuted at the Haight Street location and have hosted a variety of memorable acts: Elvis Costello played at both Amoeba S.F. and Amoeba Hollywood in the same day in November 2009. Touring in a station wagon, the White Stripes borrowed a drum kit for the performance from one of Amoeba’s buyers, an employee named Jason. Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo showed up and played a 12-minute jam session. And after the release of her album “Born to Die,” Lana Del Rey stayed so long meeting fans and signing records that she chose to miss her flight home and took a taxi back to Los Angeles, said Weinstein.

On a recent trip to Amoeba myself, I overheard two employees discussing the time that rapper Childish Gambino (aka Donald Glover) had unexpectedly appeared at the store.
 
“He showed up with his whole entourage, and he didn’t even buy anything,” they said in apparent disbelief. The other employee just shook their head in disappointment.
 
But the show that sticks out most to Green was a performance from the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.
 
“There were about 600 people in the store, and the lead singer ran out on top of the CDs and played this insane guitar solo right in front of Dave [Prinz], our owner. I could just see the look on his face … it was totally rock ‘n’ roll,” he said. “No damage though. We may have broken a bin card.”

Even without the lively performances, masses of music lovers are slowly making their way back to Amoeba again, and despite the limited operation and an overall challenging year, Weinstein feels optimistic about the store’s future, which holds a special place in his heart.

“It’s one aspect of the old San Francisco we still have left,” he said.

It’s Haight Month at SFGATE. We’ll be diving deep into the neighborhood for the entirety of April as part of a new series where we’ll be highlighting a different corner of San Francisco every month this year.