The record store formerly owned by Burger Records is now operating under the name White Rabbit Music following the label’s discontinuation due to sexual misconduct accusations against the label. It’s located in a strip mall in Fullerton, CA, near the Cal State Fullerton campus.
In July 2020, Burger Records was accused of facilitating sexual misconduct, with allegations landing on members of over a dozen bands on the label, including Phil Salina of Love Cop, who allegedly used the Burger Records store’s all-ages shows to allegedly facilitate statutory rape. Other artists accused of misconduct included members of SWMRS, The Growlers, The Buttertones and Part Time, among others.
The label attempted to restructure itself to fix the problem, including the departure of founder Lee Rickard, but when the interim president Jessa Zapor-Gray also stepped down, saying that there was no way for the label to meet her “intended goals,” the label was completely dissolved. Their Burger Boogaloo festival was rebranded as Mosswood Meltdown following the fallout, and is currently set to take place on July 2-3, 2022 at Mosswood Park, in Oakland, CA. No news of their Santa Ana Burgerama festival has come out. There was nothing stated about plans for the record store last year either, but it seems now that they’ve kept on quietly with a new name.
Pitchfork speculates that White Rabbit seems to have kept the same management following its parent label’s shutdown. They report that the appearance of the store has barely changed aside from the new moniker, and that the two cats that used to live there, Dee Dee and Queenie, are rumored to be the same two cats that still live there. While that doesn’t mean anything conclusive about the store’s management, the store hasn’t reported a change in management either.
Some more serious evidence that the management hasn’t changed is that the Burger Records’ label’s co-founder Sean Bohrman was the person who registered the White Rabbit Records name in an Orange County business filing on September 30, 2020, according to Pitchfork. Bohrman was also the co-founder of the Burger Records store back in 2009, and reportedly lived there along with Rickard. Neither Bohrman nor Rickard has commented on the Fullerton store situation at this time.
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