Today’s guest post is from Mr. Bill.
He remembers when the image of the old railroad warehouse was a form of nirvana for people across the United States.
When my family had moved away from California in the 1970′s we would get odd windows back to the Central Coast. A story about the Madonna Inn shows up on TV, an advertisement for California Cooperage redwood hot tubs or a picture of the railroad warehouse in San Luis Obispo, home of Warehouse Sound.
Today the building is being earthquake retrofitted, one of the few surviving buildings from San Luis Obispo’s railroad era.
In the 21st century we can accidentally leave our music players in our pockets and run them through the washing machine. I’m not saying this happened, just saying it is theoretically possible.
And now Mr. Bill will turn the clock back to 1974:
I grew up in Birmingham Michigan, a Detroit suburb, back in the 60s
and 70s. When I was a sophomore in high school in 1974, I was very
much into the high fidelity stereo and electronics scene. I regularly
received catalogs from Warehouse Sound Co., and dreamed of one day,
not only being able to afford to buy everything in the catalog, but to
live in sunny San Luis Obispo.
Were stereo systems important in those days? Oh my gosh, yes!
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, music enjoyment was far less
portable than it is for today’s iPod generation. Radios, record stores
and friends’ homes were my only means of discovering the latest bands
and songs.The 1970s brought many technical innovations, including ubiquitous
stereo, music synthesizers, and electrostatic loudspeakers.
Transistors replaced vacuum tubes in the equipment, eliminating the
hum, noise and distortion in the sound. “Hi-Fi” was all the rage.I was what you’d call an “enthusiast.” I had an ever-growing pile of
Stereo Review magazines in my room (so I knew the difference between
RMS power and peak power), and about four times a year, I’d receive a
catalog from Warehouse Sound Company of San Luis Obispo, California. I
could only dream of owning the equipment I read about — with names
like “Phase Linear”, “McIntosh”, and “Bang and Olufsen” adorning the
softly-lit, brushed metal faceplates of tuners, amplifiers and
turntables, and with price tags that approached an average family’s
monthly income. Still, I managed to get a part-time job working in the
service department of “World, Camera & Sound”, a high-end audio
retailer in Birmingham, Michigan, so I was frequently able to liberate
myself from my proletarian, tinny, monaural world of vacuum tubes, and
listen at close to 100 decibels with near-zero distortion the awesome
synthesizer lead in Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s “Lucky Man”… or the
intro in Stevie Wonder’s “Living For The City”… or the booms of the
cannon in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture…Memorable.
The kids today don’t know how good they’ve got it.
It took me another 13 years to get to SLO County…. but sadly, by
that time, Warehouse Sound was long gone, and I was doing other
things, like software development.The first and only time I’d set foot in that building was when the SLO
Blues had their office there.I scanned my last surviving catalog, which I still have.
If you have a photo you think other readers would be interested in attach the photo to an e-mail with a few sentences we can use as the caption. By sending me the image you give The Tribune/Photos from the Vault permission to publish the image but you would retain ownership of the image.
Contact me at: dmiddlecamp[at]thetribunenews.com
(Replace [at] with the usual symbol, trying to make it hard on the spambots.)
Related posts:
If I remember that concert right, it was early Van Morrison.
Warehouse was the coolest place ever, not just being a record store.
That pic looks like a heckuva party. I especially like that there is a naked dude running in there.
Yup, I purchased my first stereo system from Warehouse Sound in 1974, for $258. I still have the Harmon/Kardon receiver that was the heart of that system.
I very much remember the Warehouse Sound Company and their great catalogs, which I got my first one also as a sophomore in high school in 1970. What clever marketing they had back then, you know just a bunch of nice cool hippies trying to get better sound for your tunes at a good price. They were not the lowest prices by any means but they had a great shipping department and you could actually talk to those cool salesmen over the phone they had pictured in the catalog, if you asked nicely. I even got to talk speakers with “Brillo Bob” once! Though all I ever could afford to buy from them was a very cheap cassette deck it worked great until I gave it to my teen nephew (!). I miss those days so much though, even being broke for almost the whole 70′s!
I just stumbled into this via a google search for Warehouse sound co. in san luis obispo.. ha. my first stereo, and many more, came from there too. i still have most of that first stereo found here:
http://www.adayandalife.com/sherwoods.htm
enjoy, and thanks for the above memories, i know them all, brillo bob etc. i have 2-3 of the WS records too. a few catalogs as well, ads too
They had absolutely the best written/illustrated catalogs for the target market–ever. I still have my (1973)Pioneer SX-626, EV 14a speakers, and Dual 1215 turntable–all working and cranking the tunes (tough to afford on a grad student stipend at the time). Ed Riordan (B’ham Seaholm ’63).
I completely remember Warehouse Sound. I too used to love to page through the catalog, wishing I had the scratch to buy some of the gear that I coveted. I swear, I had many of the pages memorized – yes, I was that big of an audio geek. Between the Warehouse Sound Company catalog and the Speakerlab catalog, it seemed I was always thumbing through one of them (I truly do not remember buying anything major from Warehouse Sound as I was in high school in those days, so not much disposable income), but again, seeing all that gear in a catalog…being sold by ‘very cool’ people who were ‘all about’ music made me want to buy from them…even if their prices weren’t rock bottom.
Anyway, I built several speakers during those years – some of my own design, some from Speakerlab, and I’ve never lost the audio bug (thankfully). What things, pray tell, on this planet are better than great music and great sound?
Not many.
Thanks for having posted the picture of WSC; you made my day.
Mark
Hey – The collective unconscious at work. I live in Berkeley, CA now, but I grew up in Bellevue Nebraska and Ft. Worth Texas in the 70s. I was talking with my wife about Warehouse Sound this morning and decided to google it. I would stare at the Warehouse Sound catalog to this magical place in the sun. The girls and dudes hanging out of the brick window…the speakers hanging in a weaved hanging net from the ceiling.
Was pretty magical visual of what life could be. Thanks for posting. Any chance you’d can an entire catalog and post?
Scott
Thanks for the question, I won’t be scanning catalog pages for a few reasons mainly because I don’t have one and this is not the central subject matter of this forum.
However if anyone has one and wants to post a link that would be a great thing to post here in the comments.
Your article brought back memories of 1973… i was in the Army(one of the last to be drafted) & came up with the catalog of Warehouse Sound, probably from Rolling Stone magazine. I spent the year pouring over their merchandise & near the end of the year sent them my order for a Pioneer Quad receiver, 4 JBL speakers, an Empire turntable, a cassette deck & a Koss quad head set. I had it shipped home & in Febuary of 1974 i went home on leave & set my new system up in my mom’s tiny living room, no bigger than 12′x14′! I was in heaven! I had dreamed of owning a nice stereo for many years & i had to sacrifice having other things, like a car, to get it. How much would $1600.00 be in today’s money? Atleast 6-$8,000.00. It only had 20 watts per channel (80 total) but would rattle the windows. My neighbor called the police a couple times! I had an album put out by the musicians from Warehouse Sound, it wasn’t bad.