Goodbye To Canada’s Greatest Record Man

By Doug Draper 

For someone who loves records, it was like my inner child walking into the world’s greatest toy or candy store.

Sam the Record Man founder Sam Sniderman

Walking through the doors of the flagship Sam the Record Man store on Yonge Street in Toronto, Ontario in the 1960s and 70s was, for me, like the doors swinging open to the Emerald City. Inside was a treasure trove of delights for anyone immersed in pop culture at the time. I bought the first album by the Jimi Hendrix Experience there when it was barely released, after hearing  Purple Haze blaring from the store’s intercom. As I recall, I also picked up one of the earliest editions of Rolling Stone, with Hendrix on the cover, when the now-slick magazine was still being rolled out like a street sheet, on cheap newsprint, and you could barely find it anywhere else in Canada, except for that store.Somewhere above the cash registers hung photos of the store’s owner, Sam Sniderman, usually with members of Canadian bands who owed a lot to the man for being the first to promoteand sell their records. How many of us picked up our first copies of records by Canadian groups like The Mandala, The Guess Who, Lighthouse and Dr. Music at that magical store? Piles of the earliest records by Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell could also be found in that wondrous chaos of a store that had an upstairs/downstairs and so many other caverns in between, where you could find Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, anything exotic by John Coltrane, and many other delights. 

Sam Sniderman died this September 23 at age 92 and with his passing is a reminder that those days of walking through doors to shelves full of records or CDs you might never have discovered any other way appear to be coming to a close.

Sam the Record Man, from Yonge Street, in the old days when walking through those front doors was a magical mystery tour.

 Sniderman’s Yonge Street store and his chain of more than 100 outlets in shopping centres across the country disappeared last decade and many other music retailers modeled after his stores are now struggling to survive too, and I fear that only a dying breed of record buyers like me seem to care. 

A generation of young people now used to downloading music from the internet will never know the experience of walking into a store like this with the idea of possibly buying one album and discovering another , and that is too bad.

I can’t count the number of times I’d walk through those doors at Sam’s and they’d be playing an album over their sound system and I’d say; ‘Wow! Who’s that?’ and someone on staff would say that’s Stevie Ray Vaughan, and I still have a copy of that album – his very first – I grabbed up that day and still have in my record collection. It was a place where you could always go to discover the newest sounds going down. I think I was the first to return to my hometown of Welland, Ontario with an album called ‘Chicago Transit Authority’ (the first album by a group from then on known as ‘Chicago’) after discovering it there, stacked up in a pile on a table near those wonderful front doors.

Sam Sniderman, in his own way, was as responsible as any record company in introducing generations of Canadians to the greatest of musical artists in this country and other parts of the world, and bless him for that. When I heard of his death, I searched through my shelves of old vinyl records and found that Chicago Transit Authority album with a note I scribbled at the time, ‘Found at Sam the Record Man, 1969.’ 

I can’t believe, in a way, that I am giving up so much space here for a guy who ran a store. Except this store was a mecca for music lovers, and its owner was a true promoter of some of the best Canadian artists, and their kin in other countries, for good chuck of the last 50 or more years.

For that, and for all you have done to contribute to Canada’s musical heritage and to share with us the leading musical artists from around the world we should all wish you a stairway to heaven Sam.There ‘ll never be another record man like ya.

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