Shangri-La Records

 While it’s true that Shangri-La opened its doors back in 1988, it might be forgotten that it was not initially a record store. The original founding owner, Sherman Willmott, billed the midtown hideout at 1916 Madison Avenue as a “vacation for the mind and body.” The restored house, originally built in 1900, featured sensory-deprivation flotation tanks as well as massages and “brain tune-ups” – brain-tuners were a set of goggles/headphones that played soothing music and flashed pulses of light ...