Over the years, I wondered whether Sound Spectrum would survive.
I grew up spending summers in Laguna Beach, where Sound Spectrum remained a constant presence: an old-school vinyl-centric record store—set right on the lip of Pacific Coast Highway—that was a stubborn echo of a beach town’s bohemian past. It opened in 1967, a few months after I was born. Garlanded with tie-dye T-shirts and Grateful Dead posters, Sound Spectrum never lost its kinship with the psychedelic West Coast interval in American musical history, but it evolved from decade to decade. It’s where I remember buying Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and, later on, California classics by Agent Orange, the Bangles, Beck, and N.W.A. It’s where I picked up Nirvana’s Nevermind in 1991—on cassette—the morning after I saw the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” music video make its debut on MTV. Something, it seemed, was happening. Sound Spectrum is where I found out.
James Flames
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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For those who’ve never had the tactile pleasure of flipping through the stacks at a record store, and for those who dearly miss it, we hope that our music issue will connect you to that feeling—and to the unique sonic joys of our home state. California, after all, can’t help but stay tangled up with the spectrum of sound that it has produced. This region of North America is reported to have existed before the late Brian Wilson wrote “Good Vibrations,” yet something about that song, and hundreds of others before and after, crystallized and catalyzed what it means to live in our complicated vortex of gangstas and acid trippers and desperados, our dreamscape of ripples and pipelines and canyons and gold soundz. As the writers in these pages reveal, California has given the world more musical genres than we can count. Among our favorites: West Coast jazz, Chicano rock, pop punk, mystic folk, Bakersfield-style country, sunshine pop, psychedelic jams, and L.A. rap. These expressions feature heavily on the vast soundtrack of California, if not the whole country.
I moved back to Southern California two years ago after several decades in New York, and I made a beeline for Sound Spectrum—only to hear from longtime employee Wave Baker (yes, real name) that the store was on its last legs. Jim Otto, who’d co-owned it with his wife, Edith, had died. My heart plunged even though I knew it had been a miracle that the place had endured for as long as it did. Eventually, Sound Spectrum shut its doors for half a year; the closure had all the markings of a death knell. I’d drive by and wince. But as the Grateful Dead put it 50 years ago, the music never stopped, and where would we be without ambient miracles? Last winter, three young siblings—Audrey, James, and Sadie Jean Wilcox—swept in and bought the business. They reopened the following May. Nothing says “California” more than rising up from the ashes.
When I walked through the shop’s front door in August 2025, one of my seven-year-old twin sons, Jasper, asked me, “What are these square pictures?”
“They’re records,” I told him. “They’re full of music.”
He looked perplexed, so Wave invited Jasper behind the counter and showed him how a turntable works. Ah, my, my, what elation…•
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Over the years, Jeff Gordinier has contributed to publications such as Esquire, Food & Wine, and the New York Times. He recently won the James Beard Foundation’s M.F.K. Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing.