On Sunday, Montrose’s Soundwaves announced on Instagram that the chain’s last remaining location at 3509 Montrose Blvd. will be closing its doors. Soundwaves didn’t specify a reason for the closure, and the store’s owners couldn’t be reached on Monday for comment by email, phone, or Instagram direct message. The shop’s website appeared to be down as of Monday. It’s unclear when the store’s last day will be, but Soundwaves posted on Instagram that everything in its store will be half off until closure.
“HURRY IN AND GET SOME GREAT DEALS,” the post announcing the closure read.
Commenters on the post were dismayed.
“End of an era. HTown legends,” one commenter wrote.
“Devastating news. A Montrose legend! We are… flat busted,” Houston Sound Exchange, a similarly legendary East End record store and sound equipment shop, said in a comment.
Soundwaves’ closure is a sad end to a once mighty music, surf and skate empire. The chain opened its first store by the Astrodome in 1976 as a hub for audiophiles, skaters, and, somewhat quixotically, surfing. Once upon a time, the chain boasted locations all over Houston, including spots in West Houston near the intersection of Hillcroft and Voss and a store by Hobby Airport. All, however, have now closed.
A hub for hip-hop loving Houstonians
In the 1980s and ’90s, Soundwaves was an integral part of Houston’s hip-hop scene. The original Astrodome location on South Main was, by some reports, frequented by the late DJ Screw and was said by Chron contributor Craig Lindsay to have “moved more hip-hop than any other outlet in the city.” In the book Hip Hop in Houston: The Origin and the Legacy, author Maco Faniel called Soundwaves the first record store to really meet “Houstonian hip hop aficionado demands.” Soundwaves sold everything from new rap by giant artists such as Jay-Z and Kanye West to Houston natives.
As influential as Soundwaves was for Houston’s rap scene, it was also an important cultural hub for Houstonians looking for movies and music they couldn’t find at other local record stores. Jimmy Patiño, a professor of Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, penned an entire scholarly essay in the Journal of South Texas about the Soundwaves location in Houston’s Northside neighborhood, which shuttered in 2013.
“The critical role Soundwaves stores played in the rise of hip-hop culture in Houston, bringing outside influences in while honing local manifestations of the culture, was critically significant,” Patiño wrote in a 2017 essay.
Soundwaves also endeared itself to a generation of Houstonians through its zany and memorable commercials, though videos of them are hard to come by. In 2002, the Houston Press crowned Soundwaves as having the best commercials of any business in town and called them “the Quentin Tarantinos of local TV ads.”
Besides music, Soundwaves sold surfboards and skateboards as well as apparel. On its website, viewed via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, Soundwaves boasted itself as the largest surfing retailer in Texas. At the end of the chain’s life, it appeared more dedicated to surfing than music; the last remaining Montrose store, in this reporter’s experience, boasted a much more impressive selection of surf stuff than music.
Soundwaves’ closure leaves Houston with one fewer record store. While places such as Cactus Records, Vinal Edge and Sig’s Lagoon are still going strong, it’s undeniable that even as physical media and records in particular have a resurgence of interest, it’s not an easy business to run. And Soundwaves is yet another institution of “old Houston” that is fading, a relic of a time when our city was a little quirkier, a little more interesting than it is now.