Flip Side Founder Recalls Days When Record Stores Were Hallowed Ground
CHICAGO — If you’re of a certain age — we won’t say what age — you probably experienced the joy of camping out in front of a Flip Side Records store waiting for the Ticketron outlet to open so you could buy tickets for The Who. Just in time for Record Store Day 2025, Larry Rosenbaum, 81, recalls the glory days of Flip Side Records, the greatest record store chain in Chicagoland history, that he co-founded with his brother, Carl, 83, in “The Flip Side: Where Chicago Rocked” (Eckharzt Press). From 1968 to 1995, Flip Side ruled Chicago’s record market, with locations tucked away in strip malls and storefronts across the city and suburbs. The concert arm of the Rosenbaum brothers’ enterprise was Celebration Flip Side, which produced all the big concerts of the 1970s and 1980s. Carl and Larry weren’t necessarily into music, growing up on Chicago’s North Side in West Ridge (West Rogers Park). They just wanted to be their own boss. “We were working for an electronics parts distributor in 1968,” Larry, 81, told Patch. “We were interested in going into business ourselves. Our choices were narrowed down to a record store, Vienna hot dog stand and a dry cleaner. Our dad was a CPA and one of his clients owned a lucrative dry cleaning business.” Both brothers were in their early 20s, married and with babies, because that’s what you did back then. “We decided on a record store,” Larry said. “Interestingly enough, we weren’t into music. We were just looking for a business to get into.” The brothers made a deal with the landlord for a former bakery on Foster Avenue between Kedzie and Kimball. “We were in the record business,” Larry said. Their stiffest competition was another record store four blocks away called Little Al’s Records that had been around forever. One day, when Larry was working on turning the bakery into a record store, he saw a big fat guy staring through the window. It was Little Al. “He took us out for coffee. He said he was going to do stuff to make us fail, but figured we’d just fail anyway,” Larry recalled. “At 22, it scared the crap out of me. From a competitive angle, here’s a big fat schlub coming in and telling us we were going to fail. We were each married with one kid. This was how we were going to make a living.” The brothers would go on to prove Little Al wrong. Looking for a name for their new venture, a young marketing executive, who lived in the apartment next door to Larry, came up with the name Flip Side. “The timing was great,” Larry said. “It was a great time to be in the music business, especially in the 1970s.” People line up in front of a Flip Side store in 1975, waiting to buy Rolling Stones tickets. Feeding the rock-crazed young consumers on Chicago’s Northwest Side, Carl came up with the idea to go over to the Aragon Ballroom in Uptown to sell records when rock acts were playing at the venue. “We made a deal with the owner,” Larry said. “Every weekend during shows, we’d pack up an old station wagon and set up in the corner.” Among the many innovations Flip Side contributed to the music biz was bringing Ticketron outlets — the original computerized ticket company — into the stores. The cover of the music business bio features a line of people outside a Flip Side store in 1975 waiting to buy tickets to see Rolling Stones at the Chicago Stadium. "Because of the contacts we made at the Aragon, we ultimately got into the concert business ourselves, promoting concerts. Back in the 1970s, we were the premiere concert promoters in Chicago. We worked with the Loop, WCKG and WXRT. “We would contract with bands, sign the bands from the first step to the stage, from the Rollling Stones to the Who to Cheap Trick to Steve Martin,” Larry said. At its peak, Flip Side had 21 stores in Chicago, Hoffman Estates, Schaumburg, Buffalo Grove, Downers Grove, Naperville and Wheaton, to name a few. The Rosenbaums kept Flip Side going until 1995 when they closed their last store, after Best Buy and Circuit City entered the record biz. “[Best Buy and Circuit City] wanted to get people in their stores and used CDs as a loss-leader,” Larry said. “Within three years, they put every privately owned regional chain out of business. They killed the market. If you go to a Best Buy now, you can’t find any records or CDs. After a few years, both got out of the music business.” “The Flip Side: Where Chicago Rocked,” by Carl and Larry Rosenbaum, with Ken Churilla, is available through Erkhartz Press and Amazon. The oral history covers the life spans of the iconic record store chain as well as their concert business, encompassing the classic rock bands of the 1970s and 1980s. “The best way to sum it up, at least for my brother and me, to use the words of the Grateful Dead, 'what a long, strange trip it's been,'” Larry said. “It was a great run, the friends we made, the lives we impacted, there just isn’t any words.” In honor of Record Store Day Saturday, April 12, Larry Rosenbaum will be signing copies of the book from11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the legendary Val’s Halla, 239 Harrison St., Oak Park. After Oak Park, Larry will be zooming up to Scratched Vinyl, 119 Barrington Commons Court, Barrington, from 2 to 3 p.m. Record Store Day is a global event that celebrates the vanishing independent record shops, hallowed grounds that once flourished on street corners and downtown shopping districts during the pre-digital and streaming age. Special vinyl and CD exclusives and various promotional products are also made for the day, released only to independently owned record shops, along with RSD first and small run/regional releases. View the RSD 2025 list, and a list of participating Illinois record stores.
Apr 11, 2025 | www.patch.com
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