This is stuff left over from the Eucalyptus "Back in the Day" story. Thought someone may want to check it out.
Lewis Lambert
“The difference was we had a culture, a lifestyle.”
“Part of any success as a business is the relationship between the owner and the employees. I hired some great people. We worked together, partied together, went to concerts together. It was tough, man!” (laughs)
“I shook Jimi Hendrix’s hand at the Sacramento Auditorium in 1968. I went to the Fillmore, you know. I went to the Berkeley Auditorium, the Avalon, you know, I was a fan.”
“We operated in a different atmosphere that was much more agreeable to people.”
“We had a very heavy commitment to soul music and they separated us from a lot of music stores. We encouraged it to be played in our stores. You didn’t do that back in the seventies, man. You didn’t play black music in the f***ing music store in Fairfield, California, you know? We recognized the power of soul music and we carried a deep, deep, deep catalogue. It was a staple. We prided ourselves on that. Anyone can carry a f***ing Led Zeppelin, Grateful Dead or Joan Boaz LP.”
“I remember the Harrises, the Engells and others. I have a ton of cousins who live in Fairfield. I remember growing up in the valley in a very, very small community. I remember when my dad would take the workers into town on Friday afternoon on a flatbed truck., They’d go to the bank and cash their checks and some would go to the hardware store, some would go to the clothing store or grocery store and we’d tell them we’d meet them at the end of the town which was about seven or eight blocks long back then. In three hours and they’d jump back on the flatbed and we’d go back into the valley.”
“The smoking accessories we have out here in Colorado make the stuff we had at Eucalyptus look like kindergarten stuff.”
“”It’s interesting to see the incredible power of music and what it does to people’s psyche. They remember what they were doing when a particular song came on the radio. That’s an incredibly powerful force and we recognize that.”
“To be self-employed and do something that I love, well you can’t put a price on that.”
Judy Anderson Engell
“I was their bookkeeper and we worked in the pointed attic of the building that used to be the Dari-Delite.”
“My brother started there, my sister worked there and we lived on Grant Street a hop, skip, and a jump away so my whole family worked there. I worked there for about two years in 1975 and 1976.”
“When we had free time we would hand write the names of the artists on the dividers for all the new stores. We had stacks of those white dividers and I we had to use our best handwriting and mine was horrible. Now everything is all pretty and printed.”
“The Lamberts had a ranch in the country and Lewis had a treehouse that my dad helped him build. And so yes they had all these crates and so when you walked in you could smell the fruity wood.”
Darrell Anderson
“When the new owner came in 1978 he had different philosophy whereby instead of playing records and then trying to sell them to people in the store, we had a corporate deal where we had to play a certain song, say five times a day. Later it changed to there being only twenty records you could play at all.”
“I didn’t hire anybody who I never saw in the store before.”
“Eucalyptus was special. It was a community. It was the only place where you’d see black airman shoulder to shoulder with rednecks next to metal heads and we never had an ounce of trouble. It was about music. If you had those same people in the roller rink there would be a fight.”
“I started when I was 15 and a half. The Lambert brothers were friends of my dad. I started working in the one by the skating rink and the pool hall. The original location was on the other side of town next to a bar on Pennsylvania and Texas in a shopping center. My dad had built the counters and done a big painting of a eucalyptus tree on the wall there. My mom worked for them first and then my sister Cathy.”
“The one next to the skating rink was a little tiny building and had been a dairy or something and they took out the kitchen and added counters and when you walked in the door the cash register was right there on your right. We had fruit boxes with all the vinyl in it all the way around and the counter went around the right side of the wall and we had 8-tracks on the wall and cassettes in locked cases on the counter. We sold rolling papers and pipes.”
“The beauty of working for an independent like that was they were as interested in the music as I was. So they would go to a one-stop place and buy everything that was released that week. We would dump it into a new release bin and then crack open whatever we felt like and play it in the store. It was pretty damn awesome.”
This is interesting historical stuff. Thanks for sharing.
Posted by: Nicky | October 07, 2011 at 04:10 AM