So sooner had the ink dried on our story about Amoeba celebrating National Record Store Day tomorrow with, among other things, an appearance by The Lonely Island Berkeley boys, than the news crosses our transom that Rolling Stone has named Amoeba the best record store in the country.
Amoeba, which was founded in 1990 by former Rasputin employees, Marc Weinstein among them, now has three stores: the inaugural Berkeley space on Telegraph Avenue, the 24,000 sq ft San Francisco space on Haight and the relatively new Los Angeles place, which opened in 2001 on Sunset Boulevard.
In its write-up, Rolling Stone sings Amoeba’s praises: “Even in the days when record-store chains ruled the music world, nothing compared to Amoeba,” write Michaelangelo Matos and Stacey Anderson.
“It was, and is, simply the most thorough and welcoming place a record lover could hope to shop. Each of its three stores features more than 100,000 items — much of it surprisingly high-grade, and with loads of surprises and rarities around seemingly every corner. Which, as anyone who’s been to any of them can tell you, is a lot of corners.”
