East Side Story

The sun over Firestone Boulevard is high and white and small as a dime. Parked in the lot in front of Norwalk Records are a cherry two-tone ’56 Chevy and a ’61 lowrider ragtop with a flat gray primer coat. Art Sanchez, one of the store’s three DJs, sizes you up as you enter the big square store outfitted with homemade wooden display racks. The customers--a blend of middle-aged nostalgists and fearsome-looking gangbangers adorned with multiple bullet scars and tattoos--sway to the fine melodies of Mary Wells, Chalino Sanchez, Ralfi Pagan.

Located for nearly 40 years on the southeastern edge of L.A., Norwalk Records has a potent reputation among oldies fans, jukebox owners and collectors for its inventory of 14,000 vintage 45 rpm recordings, including arcane titles like “Babalu’ by Desi Arnaz and “I Put a Spell on You’ by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

But the store is perhaps most remarkable for having been adopted by succeeding generations of Chicano youth of wide political, economic and social stripe. Even gang members, whose machismo compels them to view any neighborhood not their own as enemy turf, set aside their paranoia long enough to trek to the store. A typical customer, Richard, a young Chicano gangbanger quartered in a San Fernando Valley halfway house, bristles at the mention of any neighborhood other than his own yet drives more than 40 miles to shop for his vintage records.

What Richard and his generation seek are the raw, voluptuous rhythm and blues records created by newly enfranchised African Americans just after World War II. Where a black teen from the Valley or Compton wouldn’t know Brenton Wood (the oldies king) from Brook Benton, the Chicano kids at Norwalk Records have claimed these largely forgotten African American singers as their own and see them as troubadours of a prideful, romantic, emerging Hispanic landscape.

Such an unlikely cross-pollination is possible partly because two of the hallmarks of lowrider culture--las bombas (hot rods) and hot R&B; oldies--are universal expressions of American pop culture, its youthfulness, rebelliousness and power. When Richard, the young gangbanger, laments his estrangement from his pregnant teenage girlfriend (“I’m confessin’ a feeling; I’m in love like a motherf- - - - -’), he is accompanied by the lowrider love anthem “Confessin’ a Feeling,’ a minor hit in 1971 for the all-but-unknown black singer Tony Owens, pouring from his tape player. Neither Tony’s race nor Richard’s matters.

Richard Sneed, who co-owns Norwalk with his wife, Lillian (she founded the store in 1958), says: “Our clientele has changed in the past 10 years. Where before it was 90% Hispanic, now we’re 60% Hispanic and 40% everybody else. You can be standing here waiting on people and have in front of you a gangbanger, a cop and a lawyer. No problem. It’s like a neutral zone.

“Music is music,’ Sneed says. “It’s got nothing to do with anything else that’s going on. That’s why it’s so cool in here.’