RECORD STORE TALES #1138: ‘Twas 30 Years Ago, at Stanley Park Mall
(Story & Video featuring Robert Daniels)

Since 1991, The Beat Goes On was the easiest place for me to buy new music. The selection wasn’t great, and the prices were high, but it was just a 10 minute walk from my house. When Motley Crue released their long-awaited new album in the spring of 1994, I just grabbed it on my way to school. I bought a lot of important music at that store in the early 90s. Mr. Bungle was my first purchase, as I recall, $14.99 on cassette. I picked up the debut by Fight, the Very Special Christmas compilations, and the Wayne’s World soundtrack.  No, wait – I got Wayne’s World at Zeller’s because the owner was too busy talking to a girl to help me!  When I finally got his attention, he was sold out of Wayne’s World, so I bought it at Zellers down the hall!

I wasn’t the most regular customer for the first three years, because of the pricing.  As a small independent store in a mall, rent and overhead was high while margins were low.  Then came used CDs.

The owner likes to tell the story.  “I came in with a single tray of used CDs and put them on sale,” he said.  Initially our prices were $9.99 and $11.99 for used CDs.  I walked in one day in early July and bought Kiss My Ass, which was two or three weeks old (June 21 1994 release date).  What a steal!  I didn’t want to pay new prices for a handful of songs that I wanted.  I was impressed.  I planned on making my visits much more regular.

Two weeks later, I was working there behind the counter.

Stanley Park Mall was an important location to me, all my life.  I had worked there in 1989-1990 at the grocery store Zehrs, and my dad worked at the bank there through pretty much all the 1980s.  Now I was calling it home again, as I worked the summer of 1994 at The Beat Goes On, learning the used CD trade and rocking the suburbs.  The mall was an ever-changing landscape of stores.  When I started, many were already long gone, such as the comic book store and video rental place.  Today it’s even more of a wasteland, with very little to attract teen mallrats today.  There was once an A&A Records; that closed in 1990.  There were once two banks, a diner, a liquor store, a camera shop, a Zellers with a restaurant, even a video arcade once upon a time.  The mall is barely recognizable from that day I was hired in July of 1994.

When I started at The Beat Goes On, there were just two of us.  I was replacing a part-timer named Craig that was leaving for school.  It was just me and the owner.  It was a pretty incredible time to be at the start of something.  Used CDs were taking off, and we had two tables of them as opposed to one little tray.  Grunge was still powering the charts, with Soundgarden and Alice In Chains lingering near the top.  Kurt Cobain was dead but the music was still selling like mad.  On the other side of the ailes, MuchDance was popular, and there was a new rapper named 2Pac that was making waves.  The soundtrack to Forrest Gump was selling steady despite its high (2 CD) selling price.  “Somebody’s getting rich off that Gumbo thing!” said an old man who didn’t buy it.  It wasn’t us getting rich!  April Wine had a new album, there was a ZZ Top blues compilation hitting the shelves, and it was just generally a brilliant time to be alive.

30 years is an eternity, and the mall has changed, but here we are!  Recently, Rob Daniels joined me for a stroll around Stanley Park Mall, to see what has transpired.  We strolled the hallways, remarked on the stores now long gone, and explored what’s there now.   Enjoy this video documentary on the changes endured by Stanley Park Mall over the last 30 years…three decades to the week since my hiring at The Beat Goes On!