Current/Ex-Torontonians: Sam the Record Man is Gone

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Yep, it finally happened. Toronto’s best-known record store is dead.

Sam the Record Man was to Toronto what Tower Records was to LA: it was the place to go for recorded music. If no place else in town had it, Sam’s did. If you didn’t know what it was, but you had an idea, somebody at Sam’s could help you. I don’t know if it was true or not, but there was a story that you could hum a few bars of the melody to Sam himself, and he could idenify what you were looking for. No matter what song.

Sure, Sam kept the popular stuff near the front, where you could see it through the window to the street. But unexpected treats also awaited inside the store–Sam stocked more 45 RPM singles than you could imagine, and all were for sale. You wanted a 45 from 1968 by a one-hit-wonder? I did once, in about 1980–and Sam had it, even then. On the second and third floors were further rewards for the intrepid explorer willing to plow through sale items, deletes, and other obscure treasures.

And when you weren’t flush enough for even the sale racks of deletes, Sam’s could still function as a museum. At some point in the 1970s, every rock act that played Toronto made a pilgramage to Sam’s, where they would sign the wall. The autographs of Elton John and Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones, among others, were preserved on Sam’s wall. He would cover them with plexiglass to protect them, and usually attach a sticker with the date on it.

Sam’s was notorious for its Boxing Day sales (the day after Christmas for those who don’t have a Boxing Day). People would begin to line up in the wee hours of the 26th, just to get first chance at the best selection. Everything would be on sale, in some way; and if you were into music, lining up along Yonge Street on a cold frosty December morning just made sense. The deals were worth it, and while I never made the early-morning trek, I would be in later that day to do my share of pushing and shoving and waiting an hour or so in a checkout line.

So last Saturday was Sam’s last day in business. I was unable to make it, even thoughI was on a fast trip through Toronto. I did take a Sunday walk down Yonge Street though, to take a last look at Sam’s. The giant neon records are still there, and Sam’s name was still lit at the top of his sign, but the store was empty. A sign saying “50% Off Everything No Matter What The Sticker Says” could be seen, but otherwise, it was all gone. All that remains are memories.

Thanks, Sam. I spent a lot of time and bought a lot of records in your store. Hope whatever comes next is good to you.

2

:: snif ::

I went by there on Monday and it looked so forlorn and empty. I didn’t get down there in time for the auction; apparently some guy bought the entire theatrical marquee that was inside the movies section for $1500.

Sam’s was housed in a rickety warren of three interconnected buildings. There were doorways and floor-level changes and stairs and ramps. The original building was second up from the cross-street, and had three floors. But Sam’s had cut two passageways in the south wall and taken over the old bank building on the corner next door (using the safe as an office). It had cut passageways in the north wall and taken over the ground floor of the building on that side as well.

The arrangement of the store underwent many changes as the years went by, but this was it near the end of its days:

The ground floor of the old bank building was the main general CD area and had the largest entrance. Hip-hop, electronica, and reggae were on the mezzanine upstairs. Behind was the movies section.

Next door to the north, on the ground floor of the original building, were the main checkouts. Behind were magazines, soundtracks and comedy, and stairs to the second floor. The second floor contained music from other countries, lounge, country and western, French, and all sorts of other things. There were stairs to the third floor. During the last years, these were blocked off, but formerly the third floor had held the dwindling LP section (before those became a specialty adjunct to the music genres that use the turnable as an instrument), plus the Sams Interactive section during their 1990s foray into software and games.

The ground floor of the north building held the classical section. Upstairs, reached only from the second floor of the centre building, there had been a large jazz/new age section, but that had vanished some years ago.

The famous rotating signs adorned the outside of the centre building. Smaller ones adorned the north and south buildings. Sams was very much the centrepiece of a whole record-selling area: there was (and is) HMV on the next block south; Sunrise Records was across the street, and further south on Yonge, there was an excellent electronica shop in one of the buildings that was demolished to make way for the new development on the northeast corner of Yonge and Dundas.

Tower Records perhaps made a mistake on its foray into Toronto by putting itself at the corner of Queen and Yonge, quite a bit further south. But I found myself going there for the quality of their magazine selection more than for CDs anyways.

I’m going to miss you, Sams. And yet… 99 percent of the new music I listen to these days arrives as net radio, so I can understand why your livelihood dried up. Even a large general store like you could not carry all the obscure stuff that I searched for, and I’m sure there were equally as many people seeking equally-obscure stuff in every other direction.

When the Internet liberated us from needing radio stations to introduce us to new music, your job as provider became impossible. And I speak as one who lived in a city that was blessed during the eighties and nineties by unusually vigorous and adventurous radio. Towards the end, I was going there to buy archival copies of things I had acquired on the net and even then, more often than not, when I went in to buy something, I liked what you were playing in the store and bought it.

Goodbye Sams. May you make peaceful accommodations with whatever comes next.

3

As a kid who grew up in Sarnia, I made a point of hitting Sam’s when visiting the Big Smoke. RIP Sam. The times they are a changin’.

4

Sam’s was always a fixture of my weekly trips downtown when I was a kid, and even into my teens and twenties. I knew I was in the heart of downtown when I saw those huge spinning neon platters. I can’t say I really ever shopped there that much; my tastes in music tended towards the sort of stuff more readily available at specialty shops. (DJ vinyl cuts, cassette (and later CD) singles, etc.) I spent a lot more time at the Vinyl Museum up Queen (which disappeared sometime in the later 80s/early 90s) Still I went in there from time to time to see what they had. It always struck me as a bit rickety, what with its creaking wooden floors and such. Still, that place had been around forever, and I don’t think I could ever picture Toronto without it.

I understand it has been declared a Heritage Site, which means that at the very least, the sign will stay put. I wonder what they’re going to do with the inside?

5

Ryerson University wants the site bad to have a prescence on Yonge Street. Maybe they and the Snidermans will come to a deal and build a cool ‘gateway’ building. With a recording studio, even!

(The ChumCity Building is moving as well. Is it just me or is this one of those ‘interresting’ years?)

6

I worked at Sam The Record Man’s Toronto main store in 1980 and 1981, in the basement stockroom. This was before they took over the bank on the corner; it was still the Bank Of Commerce then. I spent thousands of dollars at Sam’s before I ever worked there, in the downtown Toronto store and at the two in Hamilton, in the Mountain Plaza and downtown at King & James. The Hamilton stores carried the CHUM Chart, and the CKOC chart, and the CHAM Poster Chart. I still have quite a few of those from the early-mid '70s.

Boy, I knew every nook and cranny of the Yonge St. store! I knew where all the stuff was from the '40s through the ‘70s that got stashed away. It was like going through a private museum. I met a lot of characters working there! On payday nights, I’d go with an English co-worker named Pete, around the corner to the Library pub on Dundas, where he’d get wrecked and lose all his money to pool sharks. Regularly, and without fail. I found a lot of incredibly rare records there for cheap. Once, I opened a box of The Kinks’ Greatest Hits, and the copy on top had the cover photo in black-and-white and mirror-image reversed from the color layout. I don’t know how it got in there, but it’s mine, now! There’s only one!

I used to like to go to the warehouse over off Church St. It was huge, and old, and filthy, and there were zillions of mainly unsorted records of every possible kind. You could spend weeks there, just browsing - but only if you were an employee. That place was a Toronto treasure that most people have never seen. I wonder what they did with all those records…

Every available space on every rafter and floorboard had graffiti on it. Musicians and music fans write the most exquisite graffiti! I do remember that I got into the best shape of my life working there, lifting boxes of 50 or 75 albums through a trap door in the floor. I also remember the first day I did it. I went home, sat down in the easy chair, and woke up the next morning, so stiff I couldn’t move! After a year and a half, I was in pretty good shape. I know the public looked forward to the Boxing Day sales, but the staff didn’t. It took me about an hour to get out of the store to take my lunch break, and another 45 minutes to get back downstairs, and the sonsobitches docked my pay! It wasn’t all gravy. But it was a privilege to have worked at a Toronto institution, now a legend. No one who went there will ever forget what it was like.

7

Damned Fish; great story.

8

Oh, that makes me sad. I’ve never lived in Toronto, but I visit a family member there quite often, and I loved Sam’s.

I guess we’ll still have all the fantastic little ethnic eateries to visit, though. Usually when someone asks us what we did in Toronto, I end up giving them a meal-by-meal byplay. Ya’ll have some good eats up there.

9

Bah. I don’t understand all the fuss over this.

The place was disorganized, poorly merchandised, dirty, smelly, and over priced. If half the people crying rivers of tears over Sam’s closing had bought, I dunno, 2 CDs there in the last year they’d probably still be open.

But they didn’t. The place closed because they fell WAY behind the times and it was no longer profitable to keep open.

I’ve yet to hear a nostalgia story that doesn’t include the terms “vinyl”, “45”, or “stylus”… which should tell you something.

Good bye and good riddance I say. That rusty old sign and the window displays were an eyesore in an area undergoing a lot of revitalization right now.

10

Sheesh. Kids today. :slight_smile:

Falling behind the times is a problem befalling pretty much every music store these days. Digital delivery is where a good portion of the industry is heading, though the whole DRM issue is still being knocked around like a dodgeball. Sam’s isn’t the first, nor will it be the last casualty of a fundamental shift in the market. This is no fault of theirs, either; how do you propose a brick-and-mortar music store like Sam’s stay competitive when the root cause of the decline in business is Internet sales and digital content delivery? You can’t undercut online prices for digital delivery (essentially selling stuff for the cost of the license and the bandwidth to do so) when your own costs for the music alone exceed them. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the likes of Tower, Sunrise, hell, even HMV scale back operations over the next few years for the same reasons.

I’ll grant you that Sam’s was overpriced though. It’s why I almost always went to Sunrise across the street, or HMV a few doors down when they opened.

It tells me that reminiscing about old methods of audio reproduction is more or less the definition of nostalgia. Was it supposed to mean something else?

That would be interesting. I was thinking that whatever went in there it would have to have something to do with music. A recording studio would fit the bill quite nicely!

Wait, the one on Queen & John? (For some reason my first thought was the 1050 Chum building further north on Yonge) Moving where? And why, for Pete’s sake? That’s another building that has been a fixture there, albeit from the mid-latter part of the 80s. Perhaps most notable for the big bay windows wherein you could watch some of the shows being taped/broadcast – and of course, Speaker’s Corner.

“Interesting” indeed…

11

In 1986, I was working in a building on John Street, just between Adelaide and Richmond. I watched them renovating the building that was to become the CHUM/CITY building, when I went up to Queen Street for lunch every day. I quit that job before they finished the building, though, so I was never one of the folks whom you saw walking by the windows during a broadcast. But if what I saw is any indication, they put a lot of money into that building, and it would be odd to think of them leaving it after twenty years.

Sam’s was the centre of a “record store neighbourhood,” as someone said upthread. In addition to A&A’s next door, and Sunrise, and Music World a little further down Yonge; there was also Cheapies (which wasn’t really that cheap) a little ways up Yonge, and Vortex for used records around the corner on Dundas. If I recall correctly, Records On Wheels also had a store on the west side of Yonge, just a little south of Sam’s. And Music World had another location inside the Eaton Centre as well. If you knew what you were looking for and you were willing to walk between stores, you could guarantee yourself the best price.

Of course kids today don’t walk to get vinyl records any more. They just surf on teh Intarwebs for Empey Threes and stuff. Wish they’d come out from behind their computers so I could tell 'em to get off my lawn! :stuck_out_tongue:

12

I’m not clear on the details, but I think this is because Rogers bought ChumCity. They had to sell off CityTV (Channel 57) and the other over-the-air TV channels to meet anti-competition rules. So MuchMusic and the rest of the specialty channels will remain in that building, but CityTV itself is going elsewhere. I’ve heard rumours of CityTV’s ending up at the OmniTV building (Channel 47) at Bathurst and Lakeshore.

BTW, the actual call letters of the TV station are CITY. I always thoght that was très cool. :slight_smile:

13

Well, that’s the way it goes in business, but I’m oddly sad to hear that CITY-TV had to be sold so Ted Rogers could own more pieces of the pie. I remember when it was the little station that could!

There was other good record shopping downtown, too. There were a couple of shops on Dundas between Yonge and Jarvis. Used record stores, and one of them sold bootlegs. You could also get bootlegs at the head shop that was in the place where the Vinyl Museum ended up. And there was The Record Peddler up on College around the corner from Yonge, which specialized in imports. There were also quite a few places down Queen St., Kops Collectables near Spadina and Don’s Discs down almost to Roncesvalles. Vortex merged at some point with Kops. From time to time, there would be used stores west of Yonge on Dundas, or in the area of the University and Kensington Market. There were also a couple on Queen east of Yonge. Boy, I dropped a lot of cash in all those places!

I used to hitchhike, then take the bus, into Toronto from Hamilton, just to go to the record stores!

14

Am I out of my mind or did they use to have branches in other cities? I think there was one in Winnipeg and in Montreal (if I’m right, the store I’m thinking of in Montreal, which was on Ste-Catherine somewhere between Bleury and St. James’ United Church, closed a number of years ago).

15

Yes, Sams became a chain, with branches in malls all over the country. I used to go to the one in the Oshawa Centre all the time when I lived there, but of course it couldn’t hold a candle to the source downtown.

16

Sunspace didn’t mention it, but we had dinner the other night within sight of the Sam’s site :). I was reminiscing about how often the Sam’s distinctive neon signs showed up in “American” cities in movies.

And, despite the nostalgia for vinyl at Sam’s, it was one of the first stores to get a decent selection of CDs, which made it a crucial visit in the 1980’s.

17

I also remember when they set up a display with the two competing recordable digital formats, DCC and MiniDisc, to find out what would be most popular as another format to sell pre-recorded music in. People chose neither, which is why those formats never went anywhere for selling pre-recorded music. (I have exactly one pre-recorded MiniDisc.) I’m not sure whether they ever sold pre-recorded DATs–was pre-recorded music ever sold in the DAT format?

[sub]A great meeting, Cerowyn–we really need a TronnaDope sometime soon. Maybe this thread will attract a critical mass of TronnaDopers.[/sub]

18

That’s exactly what I did when I went looking for stuff. I had three or four stores I generally billed as my favourites because they had the best prices and selection for what I was after (including Vinyl Museum at the north end of this musical corridor.) Sam’s wasn’t usually included among them unless the other stores didn’t have what I wanted. Still, on my weekly trips for new music I always passed Sam’s. It was a waypoint; you knew exactly where you were when you saw the sign and could easily navigate by it.

Forget it. You wanna tell them to get off your lawn, you’ll have to buy a plot in WoW or Second Life for them to step on. :slight_smile:

So essentially just the station itself, and not its offspring. I suppose that’s okay – other than Breakfast Television there wasn’t much most people wanted to watch through the windows anyway. It was mostly MuchMusic’s window displays people gawked at. :slight_smile:

I suppose they could do worse than Bathurst & Lakeshore.

19

Missed this the first time around… Omni TV is owned by Rogers, so I doubt that CityTV would be moving there.

20

I’d be happy to oblige. I still buy all my music in hardcopy, so I could make a sidetrip on my way over to Best Buy :wink:

There used to be a Sam’s or two in Halifax–I remember hearing about the one there closing down a few years ago. I never got to stop there much though, as this was around the time I moved there for school. I had no idea it was considered such a fixture.