Yep, that’s us. The big white building with the red awnings.
Rainbow opened it’s doors back in the easily forgotten year of 1977. The nation had just celebrated it’s bicentennial and the glorious future of the 80′s was still a few years off; Rainbow was next to the train tracks on a funny little triangle lot in a building commonly known as ‘The Grainery Station” (which was recently torn down and replaced by a “Buffalo Wild Wings”). They were happy times.
Sometime in late 1986 or early 1987 (no-one can seem to agree on the exact date), Rainbow moved up to Main Street. 54 East Main Street to be precise. Then the rest is history. Over the years, the store expanded and contracted (it resided at 58 East Main Street for a little while), product shifted from LP to cassette to CD. Laserdiscs came and took up a lot of room on the shelves until DVDs were introduced. It is all a lovely tale of love and hate, happy times and sad times, courage and despair, bliss and anguish, and swashbuckling.
Then it is August 2005. That is when Chris “Vinny” Avino (he’s the one that is always there and looks grizzly – like he should be hunting bears or foraging for berries in the woods) bought Rainbow from it’s original owner. Chris started his illustrious career in the retail music trade at Rainbow on Labor Day Weekend 1994 whilst he was still a young lad pursuing an exemplary education in Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware. He eventually moved to Detroit in early 1998 to put all that education to use (Chris often refers to this as the “Dark Time”). By mid-1999, enough was enough, so he moved to Tempe, Arizona. Ahhh, the desert. In the summertime you almost never got drunk because you would sweat the beer out walking up to the bar to order another. (Note: That’s a joke! You could get just as drunk in the desert as you could anywhere else! My point was that it was hot. Yea, yea, yea it was a dry heat, but 115 is 115 is hot.)
{the story will continue…it’s hard work trying to be witty and informative…check back at a later date – there will be more}
