What Happened To The CD Stores of Palo Alto?

I grew up in Palo Alto - I moved there when I was 10, and stayed until two days after I graduated high school.  I come back once in a while, to have dinner with my parents, and this morning, I had to come down to do a meeting at Mozes. As I was driving down Lytton Street, I tho ught back to all of the CD stores that my friends and I used to hang out at, back in the late '80s and early '90s. They're all gone; I'm unsure if there's anything that even resembles a music store in or near Palo Alto anymore. (It looks like there's a Hear Music at Stanford Shopping Center, but at $17/CD, I don't think I'd have any reason to go there).

When I was 12, I worked at a tiny store adjacent from where the Apple store is now, called Rainbow Records. My friend Erik Bielefeldt and I probably spent all of our eighth-grade spring break alphabetizing cassettes in exchange for Lemonheads and Little Caesar promo tapes. To paraphrase the VU, "Hey, those were different times." I think Rainbow went under around 1990, and besides, they never really caught the CD train. We also spent a good bit of time that year running errands for a really large dude named Rob, a 250+ lb. diabetic chap who ran the Record Heaven on El Camino, a smelly but well-stocked store that was sadly later overrun by Mr. Chau's, who occupies the space to this day. Compact Disc Land, for a time, was the only CD store on the University Ave. strip (1990-2002), but they folded right before I moved back to town.

It's funny - my return to Palo Alto coincided with the widespread use of iTunes as the de facto music browser. I came back to town in late 2003, to take a teaching internship at my old high school, Palo Alto High. It was around this time that I began to notice the iPod as the ubiquitous portable music device, as most of my students at the time carried one. It's revisionist shorthand to say that the iPod killed all of the record stores in town, but it should be seen as no small coincidence either. As I walked down University Avenue this morning, listening to New Order on my iPhone, I was unsure which way I would rather have had it. While I missed being able to go to a store and flip through the stacks of shiny plastic CDs, there was something really satisfying about purchasing my former bandmate Luke Paquin's new album, Happiness, Ltd. on my computer at work, without having to get up and go anywhere.

If you're wondering what this (first) post has to do with social media, it's a muddled attempt, for me, to be constantly asking myself how close I am to my roots, and how those roots made me the person I am today. And if social media's not about being real, then I don't know what the fuck it is.