A mile and a half down the road from Amoeba Music, San Francisco’s Record Row of Groove Merchant, Vinyl Dreams, I Hate Records and Rooky Ricardo’s Records serves as a quadruple threat to record collectors’ bank accounts. But in what could be considered the city’s epicenter of music shops, anchor tenant Rooky Ricardo’s has fallen on hard times, with a GoFundMe asking for donations to pay for treatment for Stage 3 pancreatic cancer.
Dick Vivian, 78 years old, has run Rooky Ricardo’s Records since 1987. He’s about as classic a fit for the Record Store Guy archetype as you can imagine, quick with a sarcastic greeting and even quicker with a recommendation. A 2013 GQ profile clocked Vivian’s home record collection at 75,000 vinyl 45 RPM records, plus 40,000 for sale in his store.
“Dick doesn’t know anything about rock or punk or jazz or classical, and he doesn’t care to know,” wrote GQ’s Byard Duncan. “What he does know is soul and oldies, and especially girl groups from the 1960s — acts like The Marvelettes, The Chirelles, Dolly and the Fashions and Maureen Gray. It is within this time period, with its bouffants and heartaches and brittle, delicately suggestive harmonies, that Dick prefers to linger. You are welcome to join him.”
According to the GoFundMe, Rooky Ricardo’s has recently weathered two recent rent hikes, but Vivian has managed to sustain himself and the shop, partly due to a rent-controlled apartment and insurance that has helped with some of the cost. But his March 2025 diagnosis has required weekly chemotherapy treatments, with a potential surgery looming…