Two Bay Area record-store hands, a yellow pad and a derelict supermarket on Telegraph Avenue.

Amoeba Music began with two men who had worked behind other people’s counters. In a long interview with Wax Poetics, published online on 14 February 2021, co-founder Marc Weinstein told the writer John Kruth that he had worked at Rasputin’s on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley after arriving in California in February 1980, buying used records at the front counter and making signs and displays, and later spent about six and a half years at Streetlight Records on Twenty-Fourth Street in San Francisco. In 1989 he met Dave Prinz, a record collector who had recently sold a chain of video rental stores called Captain Video. Weinstein said the two sat down at Prinz’s house with a pencil and a yellow pad, worked out what a shop would cost to run, and decided to open one together. English Wikipedia describes the founders as former employees of Rasputin Records and lists a third founding member, Mike Boyder.

The site they chose was a building on Telegraph Avenue, a few blocks from the University of California campus. Weinstein told Wax Poetics that it had been built in 1927 for Lucky Supermarkets, a California grocery chain, that it had stood empty for two years, and that its wide, open floor had no posts or pillars. The partners took out the lease in January 1990, and the store opened on 17 November 1990, with lines around the corner on the day, Weinstein recalled. Berkeley, he said, was already the record row of the Bay Area.

The name came out of a brainstorming session. Weinstein told Wax Poetics that the partners did not want to call it a record store at the dawn of the CD era, and settled on something followed by the word “Music”. Prinz, he said, insisted that the name begin with the letter A, so that it would sit at the start of the alphabet in the Yellow Pages. When Prinz offered “Amoeba”, it sounded right next to “Music”, and Weinstein called it a wonderful metaphor, adding that the partners did not yet know they would spawn other Amoeba stores. SF Weekly quoted a partner in 2017 saying that trading in used stock was one of the main reasons the business had lasted.

A logo drawn as a favour, a bowling-alley sign kept on the roof and a store in Hollywood.

The Amoeba logo came from the world of record-store signage. Weinstein told Wax Poetics that Prinz was friends with Shepherd Hendrix, who was making the signs at Tower Records’ second San Francisco store, known as Tower Two, and asked him to design a logo for the new Berkeley shop. The partners had only a small budget, Weinstein said, and Hendrix did it anyway. English Wikipedia, citing Los Angeles magazine, describes Hendrix as a comic book artist. Photographs published with the 2021 interview show the logo being painted on the side of the Telegraph Avenue building in September 1990, two months before the doors opened.

The second store crossed the Bay. SF Weekly, in a piece by Joe Kukura dated 17 November 2017 for the store’s twentieth anniversary, reported that Amoeba San Francisco opened on 15 November 1997 on Haight Street at Stanyan Street, at the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park, with people lined up around the block. The building had been the Park Bowl bowling alley, and the paper noted that the old “Bowling” marquee still sat on top of the store. Partner Joe Goldmark listed in-store shows by Elvis Costello, Tenacious D and the Raconteurs. Wax Poetics says the San Francisco store, like the Berkeley one, became a venue for free in-store performances.

Los Angeles followed after customers kept driving north to shop, Weinstein said. He told Wax Poetics that the partners chose Hollywood because it sat in the middle of the city, and that they bought an unfinished building on Sunset Boulevard that had been meant for a camera store. Amoeba Los Angeles opened in November 2001, and English Wikipedia gives the date as 17 November 2001, at Sunset and Cahuenga. Weinstein named two partners who ran the store, Karen Pearson, who had managed Leopold’s in Berkeley, and Jim Henderson, who started as a teenager doing odd jobs and became general manager.

A wall painting in 1990 and a store-wide aesthetic of high ceilings and bins.

A record shop’s identity is carried less by a logo on a screen than by the objects that pass across its counter. The carrier bag is the object many customers keep: a printed bag sized for a twelve-inch sleeve leaves the shop under an arm, travels on buses and ends up in wardrobes holding records for years, so the mark on it does the work that a billboard does for other retailers. Inside, the browser bins set the grammar of the room. Dividers and genre cards, often cut from card and lettered by hand or with a stencil, tell a visitor where reggae ends and soul begins, and their lettering becomes as familiar as the sign above the door. Price stickers work as small typography too, with their colours, codes and handwriting telling regulars how a shop sorts new and used stock.

Much of the rest of the visual language comes from events. In-store gigs bring posters, flyers, wristbands and listings boards, and a shop that books bands into local halls and churches builds a printed calendar around its name. Some shops run their own record labels, so their name also appears on sleeves, centre labels and catalogue numbers, where it reaches listeners who have never been through the door. Record Store Day adds a yearly set of exclusive releases, queues and window displays, and shops often make their own posters and bags for the day. Taken together, the bag, the bin card, the sticker and the gig poster give a shop a recognisable look that is built from use rather than from a single brand book.

Sunset Boulevard sold, a closure in 2020 and a new Hollywood store in 2021.

The Sunset Boulevard building did not stay in Amoeba’s hands. Weinstein told Wax Poetics in 2021 that the partners sold it and leased it back in 2009, later bought it back, and sold it again in 2015. English Wikipedia says the new owners announced in 2018 that the site would be redeveloped and that Amoeba would be moving, and that on 27 April 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Amoeba announced that the Sunset store had closed for good ahead of schedule.

The new Hollywood store opened on 1 April 2021 on Hollywood Boulevard at Argyle Avenue, a block east of Hollywood and Vine, inside a new apartment complex called the El Centro. Variety’s Chris Willman, reporting from opening day, described it as essentially one big space, with a mezzanine for books, magazines and posters and a few steps separating the vinyl half of the floor from the CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays. The most valuable collectible LPs, which had stood behind the counters on Sunset, were posted up the support pillars. Henderson, by then the store’s longtime manager, told Variety that the staff moved the stock themselves rather than hiring movers, and that the team had wanted high ceilings and the open, industrial feel that, in his words, shoppers identify as the Amoeba aesthetic.

The store kept its habits after the move. English Wikipedia says the Hollywood Boulevard shop continued the free in-store shows, and that the Red Hot Chili Peppers played there on 31 March 2022 after receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame near the store’s entrance. Amoeba’s YouTube channel, created on 27 January 2006, carries interviews, in-store recordings and the series What’s In My Bag?, in which musicians show what they picked up while shopping in the store. Wikipedia lists Berkeley, San Francisco and Hollywood as the chain’s three locations.

For a design guide, Amoeba Music shows how a record shop can build an identity out of a name chosen for the phone book, a logo drawn by a sign-maker friend and buildings that keep their past, from a 1927 supermarket to a bowling alley with its sign still on the roof. Compare Tower Records, the chain whose San Francisco signage shop produced Amoeba’s logo artist, and Waterloo Records, another American independent record store. For this guide we use violet, marquee red and sleeve paper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Amoeba Music’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.