Then & Now: Strawberries, 10 Front St., Worcester

WORCESTER — In its 1980's heyday, Strawberries Records & Tapes at 10 Front St. in downtown Worcester was the region's one-stop shopping for all its musical tastes.

Whether it was Boston’s “Third Stage” or ZZ Top’s “Eliminator” — and everything in between) — Strawberries gave people reason to shop downtown.

Strawberries had two floors, enough for hours of browsing. A bulk of the first floor had white wooden bins with red trim full of vinyl records from new and established pop and rock acts, from Aerosmith to ZZ Top.

Popular with the disenfranchised youths, a table in the back center had an eclectic section of indie punk rock albums, including artists like Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Hüsker Dü, Mission of Burma, Social Distortion and Suicidal Tendencies.

Something for everyone

Other sections on the left wall catered to movie soundtracks, comedy albums, country music, spiritual and international albums.

And plastered on the walls were posters of rock stars promoting their music catalog or latest record.

Target for pranksters

Strawberries would also get its share of prank calls. For example, Caller: "Do you have Cory Hart's 'Boy in the Box'? Clerk: "Yes." Caller: "Well, you better let him out before he suffocates." Click.

While upstairs looked like your typical retail record store, downstairs was like a pulsating, beat-heavy nightclub in daytime.

Longtime Strawberries employee and part-time DJ Eric Brandt (who was one of the few workers not forced to wear the chain's signature red vest) would spin the hottest, high-energy dance music while keeping the 12-inch dance remix bins stocked with the latest and the best club music.

Downstairs also housed the cassettes and cut-out bins of older recordings that the record companies have deleted from their sales catalogues.

Cassettes were stacked on shelves behind plexiglass with cutout holes big enough to place your hand in but too small to remove a cassette that was secured in bulky plastic contraptions to curb potential thievery. When a customer chose the cassette they wanted, they dropped it on a conveyor belt that traveled to a cashier who waited with a key to twirl open the cassette.

A worthy reference guide

You always knew when there was a hot show in town at the then Centrum. Not only did concertgoers often stop at Strawberries before a show with their teased hair and tight-fitting spandex, but reviewers from the Worcester Telegram and The Evening Gazette, long before the internet, would regularly come in to copy down the proper spellings of band members and proper names of songs off the back of records.

And with many big acts performing at the Centrum and E.M. Loew’s (now the Palladium), Strawberries also held its share of in-store promotions with recording artists signing albums for fans. Some notables to cross the threshold of Strawberries on Front Street included Rex Smith, Robert Hazard, Kiss (in full makeup), Molly Hatchet, Poison and The Tubes.

Competition grew

In the 1990s, Strawberries (later Strawberries Music and Video) started seeing some serious competition.

With locations on Front Street and Webster Square in Worcester, White City in Shrewsbury, and stores in Auburn and Leominster, Strawberries was the eighth-largest music and video retailer in the U.S. and, with a 26% share of the New England market, the leading music merchandiser in the six-state region.

During this period, there were 14 Newbury Comics stores in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, including one on Route 9 in Shrewsbury. Also, Media Play and Lechmere became the anchor stores at the Worcester Common Fashion Outlets and the Greendale Mall, respectively, while independent record stores Mars, Revolutions and an expanded Al-Bum’s moved onto Highland Street, and Reaction Records was tucked away on Mechanic Street.

Today, all are gone, but Newbury Comics still has 28 locations throughout New England and New York.

Now a beauty store

Today, where Strawberries once ruled 10 Front St., Main Beauty Supply has been providing cosmetics, perfumes and hair products at the location since 2004.

So what happened to Strawberries, once the most sought-after part-time job for any area teenager?

According to Donna Halper, professor of communication and media studies at Lesley University in Cambridge, the demise of Strawberries can be contributed to several factors, including the switch from comparatively inexpensive vinyl albums to higher-priced compact discs, the technological innovations made in file sharing and downloads, and the tarnished reputation of Morris Levy, the controversial owner of the record chain.

Levy, who died May 21, 1990, of cancer at 62, was facing a $250,000 fine and 10 years in prison for a May 1988 conviction on two federal counts of conspiring to extort $1.25 million from a Pennsylvania record wholesaler.

In 1989, as the principal shareholder of BeckZack Corp., which owned all 81 of the Strawberries record stores, Levy sold the chain.

Today, though vinyl has made a comeback, CDs and cassettes have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Then & Now: Strawberries, Front Street, Worcester