Licorice Pizza record store history now enshrined at Valley Relics Museum
Licorice Pizza was a record store chain around Southern California known for its wide selection, low prices and free licorice at the counter.
Licorice Pizza, you ask? That was a slang phrase for record albums, which are black and pizza-shaped. The silly name, and everything else, went away in 1987 after the chain was sold. Yet the store is experiencing a strange afterlife.
There was 2021’s “Licorice Pizza,” the Paul Thomas Anderson movie about growing up in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s. The store was never seen in the movie. Apparently the title was enough to evoke the era.
The same year, a Licorice Pizza store opened in Studio City on Ventura Boulevard. Owned by an admirer who bought the rights and uses the original logo, the store sells new and used LPs and merchandise with its logo.
And now, Licorice Pizza artifacts are on permanent display in, gasp, a museum.
Housed at Van Nuys Airport, the wryly named Valley Relics Museum is a collection of donated items reflecting the Valley’s past, by turns solemn or wacky. The showstopper is a vast room of neon signs from old businesses — Ben Frank’s, Pioneer Chicken, the Palomino Club — and two of western tailor Nudie Cohn’s custom automobiles.
TV tie-in lunch boxes, pinball machines, radio station bumper stickers, McDonald’s toys and memorabilia from second-banana actors Johnny Crawford and Jack Oakie all rest cheek-to-jowl in a kind of cultural cacophony.
“It’s a pop culture museum of Southern California,” docent Taylor Avarista told me. “Every gimmicky item works here. We’re not the Ronald Reagan Museum. We’re not the Getty.”
That’s true. Unlike at the Getty, I parked about 20 feet from the Valley Relics Museum’s entrance. No tram necessary.
Now, I have no experience with Licorice Pizza, having arrived in Southern California a few years after the chain expired, but record stores are among my favorite places. When I’m in the Valley, my go-to shop is CD Trader in Tarzana. I even have a stamp card there.
That’s why, after marveling at news of the Licorice Pizza donation on social media, I made a point of checking it out in person over Labor Day weekend. It struck me that a lot of you would be interested as well.
Avarista showed off the small display to me.
The centerpiece is the sales counter from the original Licorice Pizza store in Long Beach, used from the start in 1969 to the early 1970s. It’s not a fragment of the true cross — although it is likewise made of wood — but it’s a marvelous emblem of its era.
The battered counter has hand-painted images on the customer side: the logo from the Rolling Stones album “Flowers” and the cover of the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul,” both 1966 releases; Eric Burdon from the Animals in profile; and nods to Blue Cheer, Iron Butterfly and the Fugs. Heavy, man.
In the middle: a large hand making a peace sign.
“It’s so ’69,” Avarista enthused. “We were ecstatic. It blew us away. We wanted to make a special section for Licorice Pizza.”
Painted by Shirley Dewberry, the counter was saved all these years by Licorice Pizza founder Jim Greenwood. He met museum founder Tommy Gelinas, toured the museum last summer and subsequently offered up the counter and other items.
Those include the original hand-painted logo, also by Dewberry, and cash register; a tote bag, T-shirt and sweater; crates for cassette tapes and 7-inch singles; and an employee name tag with the store’s emblem, a woman holding a steaming record as if delivering a pizza to your table.
A 1970s advertisement — with the motto, “Remember, you always get your music nicer at Licorice Pizza” — lists 11 stores from Orange County to the Valley, including Canoga Park, North Hollywood and Reseda.
The chain eventually had 35 locations, including three in the Inland Empire: Upland (327 S. Mountain Ave.), Riverside (3764 Tyler Ave.) and San Bernardino (701 W. 2nd St.). My thanks to Patty Edwards, Ruth McCormick and Sue Payne, respectively, for finding the addresses for me.
The museum also got a manager’s binder with the agenda for a 1981 meeting, a personnel list with phone extensions and a sales guide for the Christmas season.
“You should see a whole new group of people shopping for pre-recorded music this year — as gifts!” the sales guide reads in part. “If you add to that the great new releases like Neil Young, Doobie Bros., Rod Stewart, the Cars, Barbra Streisand, etc., Licorice Pizza becomes one of the best gift-shopping places around.”
First a peace sign, now product-pushing corporate cheer? Bummer, man.
According to a 2021 Los Angeles Magazine story by my pal Chris Nichols, Licorice Pizza by the 1980s was making a lot more money from video rentals than from music. Greenwood sold his chain in 1985 to Record Bar. The Licorice Pizza name disappeared in 1987 when the stores were sold again and rebranded as Musicland.
Explanatory text in the Valley Relics display talks about the store’s origins.
In 1969, record albums were generally sold only in “small sections of discount stores, department stores and a few full-list-price general music stores,” the text reads. Licorice Pizza opened at 131 W. 5th St. in Long Beach with 800 square feet of music, offering low prices, great selection, no-hassle returns and a place for conversation.
Stores also had free licorice at the counter, usually one box of red and one box of black.
(The modern-day store on Ventura Boulevard has pre-wrapped licorice. Health regulations, and maybe common sense, mean you can’t paw through unwrapped food.)
Avarista said the Valley Relics display is getting good marks from visitors and that Licorice Pizza T-shirts in the museum’s gift shop are hot sellers, including to him.
The store is “so iconic to anyone who lived in Southern California, as much as Tower Records,” said Avarista. Added the 26-year-old: “I wish I could have gone to one.”
David Allen writes Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, man. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.