By Steve CrumHere’s an overview of part of the immense Wallichs Music City, a fantastic record store that thrived from 1940-78. The main store was in Hollywood, and owned by Glenn E. Wallichs, co-founder of Capitol Records. Wallichs Music City was the first of its kind to put albums on display in plastic, so as not to damage the paper covers as customers browsed through all the records that were alphabetically arranged according to genre. Wallichs created this system based upon library index cards. Sounds familiar? Thousands of record stores throughout the country then adopted the same system.
I only got to visit the store once during a visit to Southern California, but I remember the three albums I bought there: the soundtrack to Cool Hand Luke, the John Gary Carnegie Hall Concert album, and a cut-out of the Pepe soundtrack album. (I think I paid 50 cents for Pepe.)