Wednesday, September 29, 2021

1973 advertisement for Licorice Pizza music stores

Licorice Pizza is not just Paul Thomas Anderson's highly anticipated new movie. It was also a real place. Licorice Pizza was a chain of record stores that operated in California from about 1969 to 1986. To those who grew up in the San Fernando Valley circa 1971, the place and time in which the new movie is set, Licorice Pizza definitely means something (just like those mashed potatoes meant something Richard Dreyfuss, but I digress.) 

Pictured above is a Licorice Pizza music store advertisement from the December 2, 1973, edition of The Los Angeles Times. Coincidentally, one of the albums pictured in the advertisement (Pin Ups) is by David Bowie, whose iconic 1971 song "Life on Mars?" serves as the music for Licorice Pizza's trailer, which I promise I've only watched about a dozen times.

(A further fun twist: The trailer includes a scene in which Bradley Cooper's character attempts to give Cooper Hoffman's character a lesson in the pronunciation of Barbra Streisand's name. In 1974, Streisand covered Bowie's "Life on Mars?" and Bowie later called it "Bloody awful. Sorry, Barb, but it was atrocious.")

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