John Reynolds Music City building to be demolished and replaced with residential apartment towers
One of Adelaide’s most iconic music stores will be demolished to make way for residential apartments, and it will be a sad day for the men who ran the store for nearly 50 years.
SA News
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IT was always so much more than a shop.
For nearly 50 years, it was a meeting place and spiritual home for SA musicians – especially drummers.
But next month, the landmark building which once housed John Reynolds Music City will be demolished to make way for a sparkling new $106m twin-tower apartment building.
Developers believe the location, at 181 Waymouth Street, on the edge of Light Square, will prove attractive to residential and retail buyers alike and expect the towers to bolster economic activity on the western side of the city.
Mr Reynolds opened the store, on the site of a former church, in 1968 and was still there when it went into administration in 2017 – another victim of a sector decimated by the gradual demise of the live music scene and the insidious accession of online shopping.
He struggles to find the words to describe his emotion at the building’s fate.
“It makes me feel awful,” he says. “I don’t know what word to use. It makes me feel … uncomfortable … because I’ve been there for so long.
“It’s a bit of a hard one to take, but what do you do? You’ve got to move on.”
About 60 former staff members and customers gathered in Light Square this week to reflect on the end of an era which peaked in the 1980s and 90s when the Adelaide live music scene was at its zenith.
At one stage, John Reynolds Music City was the biggest drum store in the southern hemisphere and renowned around the globe in drumming circles.
Inducted into the SA Music Hall of Fame in 2015, Mr Reynolds, now 76, was a prominent drummer himself, playing in bands such as The Dominoes and Frank Sebastian Review. He once set a world record by drumming non-stop for 82 hours and is the first to admit that “drummers are a different breed of people”.
“Whenever you hear about a band, it’s always described as three musicians and a drummer – it’s never four musicians,” he says with a grin.
“Drummers are very unique. They all stick together, they go to shows together. They’re glorified plumbers, we call them, cos they’ve always got sticks and bits of stands in their hands … they’re a different kettle of fish.”
But generations of those glorified plumbers flocked to the nondescript building in Waymouth Street for years, to buy or have instruments repaired, attend lessons or just chew the fat with similar-minded souls.
John Stephens was Mr Reynolds’ right-hand man for 35 years. Mr Stephens ran the store’s drum department from 1978 to 2013 and co-ordinated regular drum clinics which attracted the biggest names in world drumming.
Stars such as Chester Thompson from Genesis, Gregg Bissonette from the David Lee Roth Band, Chad Smith from Red Hot Chili Peppers, Simon Phillips from The Who and Roy Burns and Dave Weckl performed and answered questions for packed venues across Adelaide.
Sometimes they would come with a band; sometimes it was just the drummer. But always the clinics would be pumping and filled to the brim.
One memorable night in 1989, more than 950 packed into the Old Lion to hear and mingle with Weckl.
Mr Stephens agrees that the store’s demolition will be a sad day.
“It was a meeting place for all of the drummers to come to – we weren’t interested in just selling them stuff,” he says. “We had a lot of jokes and we were interested in what they were doing. If they brought a repair in, the repair would be done instantly, and at no charge. That’s just service, and it’s a service you don’t get anymore.”
