A few weeks ago I was heading north on Central Avenue when I glanced over and noticed that Circles Records was all dark inside and that a big chain link fence had been put up across the entrance to the parking lot.  Even though this was not completely unexpected, my heart sank when I saw it.

Back in the 70s and 80s, Circles was the place in Phoenix to buy records and tapes.  (You remember records and tapes, right?) Simply put, if they didn’t have it in stock, you couldn’t get it.  I remember more than one occasion hearing some new song at the clubs and finding the record at Circles the very next day.

Having been absent from Phoenix for nearly 20 years, upon my return in 2002 I was delighted to see the store was still in business.  My delight quickly turned to disappointment upon my first visit, however.  While I knew the stacks and stacks of vinyl were sure to have been replaced with CDs, I wasn’t really prepared for how empty the place actually looked. Yes, they still seemed to sell just about any title I could think of, but the prices ($19+ for everyday CDs) were ridiculous.

Then came construction of the light rail and years and years of torn up streets and limited access to their parking lot.  Still, Circles persevered.

I stopped in there about a year or so ago looking for the soundtrack of The Hours, an album I could have easily ordered online, but wanted now.  I knew it was the kind of off-the-wall, unusual thing that Circles would surely have in their huge classical/jazz inventory.  From the moment I walked in the store however,  I knew this was not going to be the case and that Circles’ days were surely numbered.  The separate classical/jazz section (that was once hermetically sealed off from the rest of the store) had been closed, and what remained of their extensive collection was shoved in a small open area off the main store.  And for the first time since I first walked in that store in 1972, they did not have what I was looking for. “We can order it for you.”  Well, I can order it too.  That’s not why I’m here.

I’m sure light rail construction and the resulting labyrinthine street access to parking had something to do with the store’s demise, but it’s not the only reason.  The advent of online purchasing and an entire generation growing up owning music that has no physical form whatsoever (never mind vinyl albums—even I have come to view compact disks as relics of the past), it was only a matter of time before Circles—and its brethren across the country—would be forced to close.

If the passing of Circles wasn’t enough, yesterday Ben and I were driving along east Camelback Road and I saw a similar fate had befallen another of the treasured icons of my youth, Jerry’s Audio.

Jerry’s had once been the premier audio salon in Phoenix. Though outwardly unassuming, originally located in a nondescript strip mall, for audio-obsessed geeky high-school kids like me the moment you walked through those double doors you were entering a world of wonder.  My friends and I would spend many a weekend drooling over the likes of Yamaha, Sony, Klipsch, Advent, Sansui, McIntosh, Phase Linear, Luxman, Rotel, Mark Levinson, Dual, Thornes, Akai, Teac, Celestion, Martin Logan, and Micro-Seiki, filling 3-ring binders with whatever sales brochures we could get our hands on.  (Jerry’s never considered Technics, Pioneer or Kenwood to be sufficiently high-fidelity to carry; for that you had to go to Bruce’s Audio—also long shuttered—down the street.)  They eventually branched off to several other locations, even opening a store in Tucson where I spent several hundred dollars in the 80s:

Damn, I wish I still owned that stuff.

But I digress.

To be honest, I never ventured into Jerry’s new digs (an imposing, rather off-putting stand-alone building apparently built on site of the previous strip mall) since my return to Phoenix.  I was quite happy with my current audio setup and when the time came to buy a flat screen television, I (like apparently so many others) just went to Target.

Since the market for consumer audio (at least the big-iron stuff that was ubiquitous in the 70s) has disappeared, and box stores like Best Buy and Fry’s Electronics have taken up the slack to sell the plastic crap that now passes for it, I am again not at all surprised that Jerry’s (and stores like it) have disappeared from the scene.  Still, I find it incredibly sad that you can no longer go to places like Jerry’s or Circles (or Bruce’s or even LaBelle’s) and dream.