“I liked seeing that there was a story behind the store,” he continues, “but that was never my perception of Tower, ever. “I liked the documentary,” says Tom, age 25, whose own fond memories include our father-son bicycle rides to Tower to shop for CDs in the early 2000s-when the chain was already on the ropes-but not necessarily the shopping itself. I know this because I sat them down the other evening and forced them to watch Hanks’ film. Here’s the thing about music in 2016, though: While it’s easy for me to get all nostalgic about Tower Records because I have so many fond memories of the place, my youngest son, Tom, and his friends couldn’t care less. Imagine if iTunes was an actual store you could wander around in for as long as you liked, with music blaring the whole time. It was 5,000 square feet of wall-to-wall vinyl, as far as the eye could see. ![]() I bought plenty of records at other places-the Record King in San Rafael and Village Music in Mill Valley got a fair amount of my pocket money-but Tower was always the most fun. I get that, because as a kid in the late 1960s and early ’70s, my favorite place to buy music was the Tower in San Francisco, which consumed the corner of Columbus Avenue and Bay Street. In Hanks’ film, grown men and women, who as twentysomethings had gleefully hopped aboard what was called “the Russ Bus,” openly weep at the memory of their beloved company’s catastrophic demise. Two years later, in 2006, Tower’s assets were unceremoniously liquidated. ![]() But in 2004, the company was forced into bankruptcy, a victim of its own unchecked appetite for expansion, cutthroat competition from consumer-electronics retailers, tone-deaf marketing decisions on the part of the record industry, and viral file-sharing applications like Napster. As with the locations in San Francisco, L.A., and throughout Japan, the New York City Tower was an enormous success.īy 1999, Tower was operating more than 150 stores in almost two-dozen countries, generating annual revenues of a billion dollars. The first of a string of immensely profitable stores in Japan followed in 1979, and then, in 1983, the company opened a four-story temple to music in one of the most run-down sections of New York City. In 19, Tower opened larger locations in San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively. In 1961, the younger Solomon opened the first official Tower Records, complete with its famous red-on-yellow signage, on Sacramento’s Watt Avenue. Hanks’ subject is his favorite hometown record store, Tower Records, which began its climb to global dominance in 1941, when a Sacramento teenager named Russ Solomon and his druggist father, Clayton, sold used 3-cent jukebox 78s to their soda-fountain customers for a dime.įrom these humble roots grew the international empire of Tower Records. Turns out that working in a record store was equally personal for the folks behind the counter, in the stock room, or out at corporate HQ, as the 2015 documentary, All Things Must Pass, directed by Sacramento, California, native Colin Hanks, so movingly explains. If you were an asshole, then you got treated like an asshole.” Physical effort was required, as well as time and-ahem-money. ![]() ![]() Incredible as it may seem today, the mundane act of acquiring music also used to be personal, or at least required a personal investment: You’d hear a song on the radio or see a band at a local dive, decide you want more, and then make your way to your favorite record store to buy an LP or 45. Some songs will always make certain people happy, while those same tunes will just as reliably make other people cry. Listening to music is a deeply personal experience.
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