Back in the fall of 1988, on that corner, was what used to be an old service/filling station, and off to the left of it, a tire shop. When we first moved into that area that April, it was Eagle Radio & Appliance Repair, but sometime in the summer, they’d moved over to Yakima Avenue. In November, Dad had something interesting to tell me when I got home from school one day. Seems the place was now a “junk” shop, with lots of second-hand stuff antiques and whatnot. But what made it interesting was that they had records there. And boxes of them!
Next thing I know, we walked up there together, and in the old place where he’d gotten his Kenwood receiver serviced about six months before, was a really cool place with...well, like I said, but there were a number of tables set up, with cardboard boxes of albums in them, filled to the brim. It was still in the “work in progress” stage, but welcoming, and the boxes of albums had all kinds of interesting stuff in them. Dad found a copy of the Beatles’ Let It Be, I found Jethro Tull’s Repeat: The Best Of, Vol. II for a buck, and also snagged a paperback copy of The Amityville Horror for fifty cents.
Well! This place instantly became my go-to place on weekends, or late afternoons after school. They had a nice-looking, colorful parrot in a large cage, alongside furniture, toys, car parts...you name it. One thing I was happy to find there was a Fisher-Price Movie Viewer, with a couple of cartridges, notably a “Sesame Street” one, and the Mickey/Donald/Goofy cartoon classic “Lonesome Ghosts”.
About that tire-shop...sometime after the turn of 1989, they branched out and put all of the records in there, leaving that section pretty much to itself. I can’t imagine how many hours I spent in there total, looking through them, finding ones I wanted or had heard about. If I knew then what I would know about in a few years’ time, I could have made out like a bandit, since they generally charged only a dollar apiece for the albums, maybe a little more if it were a double-LP set, or something in nicer condition than the usual stuff. I was heavily into Grand Funk Railroad at that point, and I found Mark, Don & Mel there for a couple of bucks, E Pluribus Funk for a dollar, and even Shinin’ On for a dollar, but with the poster and the 3-D glasses still intact. I also found a really good copy of The Greatest Of The Guess Who, with cover art by MAD Magazine’s Jack Davis. I also came across a Richard Pryor album I’d never seen or heard of before called Who Me? I’m Not Him, which I got for fifty cents, since it had seen happier days, but it became a long-running favorite at home.
I made a couple of really good scores there. One was a sealed Quadraphonic copy of Ten Years After’s A Space In Time, for just one dollar...and on another visit, we found a German pressing of the Quad version of Dark Side Of The Moon, which had seen happier days, but was still playable...one dollar!
And, it must be noted, I still have all of these albums in my collection to this day.
As my 7th grade year wore on, my visits there trailed off after a while, as I wasn’t finding anything “new”, and hadn’t really discovered anything I needed to be looking for at that point. By the time school let out, the place closed down. But what I didn’t know was that they decided to move the place downtown, on 9th and Broadway. We visited there once, as we saw that they had the boxes of albums on the outside, set up like it was in the old days, but they didn’t last very long there, and Faubion’s closed up for good after that.
It was a good ride while it lasted, though, and I made some lifetime scores that I still have, and not only do I still remember the place fondly when I play the albums, I still think of it whenever I pass by the Starbucks, sitting on where it once stood. As for the old location, it became a beauty salon for a few years, but burned up sometime in the mid-’90s, and was torn down in 1996.
