My first experience flipping through 45’s was traumatic. After getting my first portable record player, my Mom took me shopping in 1968 and said I could buy 3 45’s and she didn’t want to spend a whole lot of time. I picked Woman, Woman by Gary Puckett and The Union Gap, even though I loved the melody but have you got cheating on your mind for a girl in fifth grade, was not really what I was thinking about. My second choice, Bend me, Shape Any Way You Want To. But in junior high, my love for rock and roll in the late 1960’s began to expand and I couldn’t wait to buy records which included Spirit in The Sky by Norman Greenbaum, the newest in psychedelic rock. My girlfriend and I would travel downtown from the southside of Chicago on a Saturday on the Illinois Central, get off at Randolph, head over to Wimpy’s and then Rose Records on Wabash. My first album purchased at Rose was Blood, Sweat, and Tears, released in 1968. The building was two-stories later becoming Tower. The escalator was up and the elevator was down. Records were arranged by label and catalog number, and since most people didn’t have those memorized they had copies of the Schwann catalog in the bins so you could look up the numbers.
According to the Tribune, Rose Records is especially noted for its flagship store at 214 S. Wabash Ave., which Aaron Rosenbloom developed and ran from the earliest days of the firm. It is one of the world`s largest record stores, with 100,000 titles on cassettes, CDs and LPs. In 1931, he and his brother, Merrill, founded Rose Records as ”Rose Radio,” retailing Zenith, Emerson and Detrola models. They later added phonographs and records. They had an excellent collection of classical music. Early Chicago bands had entertained at the Rose such as the Smashing Pumpkins who played in 1991.
In the 1980’s, there were 49 outlets but by the early 1990’s, stores began to close because of the cut throat prices at Circuit City and Best Buy. Many of the stores opened during the chain’s expansion were in suburban malls with high traffic flow, but rents at those locations were high, and the spaces were too small for the stores to maintain the wide selection Rose was known for. When Rose moved into outlying markets like Milwaukee and Madison, where it wasn’t as well-known, it had trouble capturing a significant market share.
Today, a Rose Records exists in Germany which includes house music since 2011 but not related to the Rose of Chicago.