A Pasadena Record Store Wants to Move Into the Beastie Boys' Old Studio

Healing Force of the Universe is raising money to leave Pasadena for G-Son Studios in Atwater Village, nearer Northeast L.A.'s venues.

Austin Manuel doesn't dress up the Pasadena corner his record store calls home. "We're kind of in a dead corner," he told LAist, which reported Monday that his shop and music room, Healing Force of the Universe, is raising money to get off it.

The place it wants to land has a past. It's G-Son Studios on Glendale Boulevard in Atwater Village, the converted ballroom where the Beastie Boys made Check Your Head and Ill Communication and Beck cut tracks for Odelay. The Pasadena room, at 1200 E. Walnut St. not far from Pasadena City College, closes after its last events on Halloween weekend.

The building has been handed from one crowd to the next before. On its own fundraising page, Healing Force says the space opened in the early 1900s as the Atwater Community Center, a ballroom where the neighborhood got together. The Beastie Boys took it over in 1991, after the bill for Paul's Boutique persuaded them to stop paying for studio time and make a home base, somewhere to rehearse, record, skateboard and shoot hoops.

Healing Force wants it to be a gathering place again: a record store that changes with the hour, from morning wellness classes to late-night dance parties, with a licensed bar to help carry the business. Manuel told LAist the move would triple the venue's concert capacity; the store's page puts it at nearly double. Either way, he said, it would put Healing Force nearer the rest of Northeast L.A.'s music venues.

What he'd bring along is a mood. Manuel told LAist he grew up in church in the South and built the room so "a Southern church lady could come in here and feel welcome." The name sounds like a cult, on purpose, he said, but it's borrowed from a 1970 record by the saxophonist Albert Ayler.

For some regulars, the room has been more than a mood. Jazz trumpeter Bobby Bradford, who lost his house and his archive in the Eaton Fire, plays there regularly, LAist reported, and Manuel said gathering there after the January 2025 fires felt like the community healing together.

The store's page is frank about the math: the Pasadena room can't fit a lot of the acts the store wants to book, and the business model won't hold up over the long run. Manuel's version of the goal was simpler. "If 1,000 people gave $25, we would get there," he told LAist, adding that most donors have given more.

The team has also put the other outcome in writing. If the money doesn't come through, the page says, they'll be proud of what they built and treat these final Pasadena weeks as a farewell run of their best nights.

Source: LAist, retrieved October 20, 2026. Other sources: healingforcerecords.com.