“I moved to San Francisco when I was 15 as one of the first wave of hippies, and I lived in Haight-Ashbury,” says Ric Addy, owner of Shake, Rattle & Read. “The way I lived out there was by selling underground newspapers like the Berkeley Barb and the Los Angeles Free Press. I helped build People’s Park, and I did the Fillmore thing. But by 1970 things started to go downhill.” He says the collective tripping at a rock concert with thousands of other would-be artists and writers who wanted to change the world had been replaced by the solipsism of addiction. “It wasn’t the psychedelic experience anymore–it was things like heroin and speed.”
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Addy moved to Chicago and started working in the record business. “I ran two Rose Records stores on Rush Street during the height of the disco years, during the heyday of all the big disco bars, like Faces and Carol’s. Later I learned the used-record business by working for the Record Exchange in Evanston.”
Underneath the store–where there are secret tunnels and rest rooms that belonged to the Green Mill Lounge on the corner when it was a speakeasy in the 1920s–Addy keeps a stock of books equal to that upstairs. He also has large collections of comic books, fanzines, posters, and rock ‘n’ roll magazines (director Oliver Stone has regularly used the magazines as props in his movies).
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/J. Alexander Newberry.
