Membership card for “Club Rhino,” the loyalty program for the Rhino Records Westwood store in Los Angeles, circa 1989.
This week on the blog, I’ll be focusing on record stores that, while gone (sniff!), live on in our memories... and the various business and other cards that I’ve managed to collect.
Well before it became one of the best-known reissue specialist record labels in the music industry, Rhino Records was a humble record store. I learned this on my first trip to California, in 1989, when visiting there with my family. While my parents planned outings to the standard tourist stuff—Grauman’s Chinese Theater, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the La Brea Tar Pits—I was busy scouting for record stores.
To help in my quest, I’d picked up that week’s copy of local alternative paper LA Weekly. (The main feature that week? The artwork of Andreas Serrano, with a picture of his infamous Piss Christ on the cover.)
I remember hitting Aron’s and the other stores on Melrose on a blissfully parent-free break at one point. And I also ended up at Rhino Records on that trip. That’s where I must have gotten this membership card, since it would take me over 25 years to make the return trip to LA... as an adult who would plan entire days around record shopping. (Yeah!)
Alas, I never got to use my membership card for any discount, as the store closed in 2006.