Requiem for a Record Store: Tower Records 1960–2000

“All Things Must Pass”, a documentary about the rise and fall of Tower Records, is worth a look. It’s one of those interesting stories that is relevant to me because it’s ephemeral, and generational. It’s like watching a doc about video rental stores, or free weekly newspapers thick with hip ads, or repertory movie theaters that showed old films, all things that were big in “our” time—baby boomer’s time—and have since faded. But whatever age you are, you may find it of interest.

I’d wondered how they managed to get interviews with people like Bruce Springsteen and David Geffen until I found out the director was Tom Hanks’ son Colin. As Colin’s dad nostalgically depicted in That Thing You Do, back when I was a kid records were sold in places like TV and radio stores, department stores, and five-and-tens (a pretty anachronistic phrase now).

A few record stores existed mostly for the classical and jazz fans (I can’t really call them ‘crowds’) and were smallish hobby and collector stores. We boomers have lived through the whole era of the giant record superstore, rock-driven places like Sam Goody in New York and Tower Records, which started in 1960 in Sacramento and made its first giant leap to San Francisco in 1967. Its early claim to fame was completeness; every record, every genre. That’s what the owners liked to see as the Tower difference, its contribution—a deep catalog, which was as much a commitment to being willing to move, inventory, and stock a lot of things as it was to fuzzier concepts that sound good in today’s interviews, like musical diversity.

It was opening a Los Angeles store on Sunset Boulevard in late 1970 that gave the Tower chain its real fame, due to its proximity to the live performance clubs as well as the area where many traveling musicians rented homes while recording in Hollywood. If it hadn’t been for the location, it’s hard to say if Tower Records would have been much more memorable than, say, Pacific Stereo or the Federated Group, both of them big California record selling businesses with few pretenses of changing pop culture history.

There are great stock shots of the Sunset Strip in the psychedelic Whiskey-a-Go-Go years, plus plenty of rare bits like a John Lennon radio promo for the store, and 16mm footage of Elton John briskly, expertly roaming every aisle. Anything he liked he bought three copies of, for his three homes. Former store employees said admiringly that he was one star who knew his stuff; if one rack of early jazz had been moved since his last visit, he asked about it.

When Tower opened in San Francisco in 1967, the founder, Russ Solomon, was a 42-year-old man in a suit and tie, serious in expression, balding on top. Five years later he was bearded, wearing tie dyed shirts, still balding on top but now with long graying hair on the sides. A side note: as far back as Lenny (1975), I’ve been struck by how much younger many already mature men tried to make themselves look in the late Sixties. Despite Russ’s (and to some degree the filmmaker’s) attempt to pose himself as a Gandalf or an Obi Wan of a musical revolution, he’s really not. He was a small businessman at the right time and place to become a bigger one, who smartly made use of the opportunities granted by a younger generation who liked music and was willing and able to spend.

Russ talks about the generations of people who started as clerks and rose through the record-selling ranks, as if he was Roger Corman, the roguish godfather of a thousand careers. But the evidence on film is mixed; some people, usually stars, praise the attentiveness of the knowledgeable staff, while less elevated personages, i.e. normal human beings, complain that to them, the staff was too often rude, conceited, lazy, stoned, or all of the above.

Like the Tiffany Theater down the street, the original home of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”, the record store had loose policies, no dress code, and no problems about being high on the job, just as long as you could still do the job. One difference is, un-like the Tiffany down the Strip, you weren’t allowed to get high on Tower premises, though I’d bet plenty found basement and loading dock spots to do so. From the mid-Seventies on, cocaine had a bigger, more menacing presence, which the movie makes light of as just one of those historical things. But this also begins decades when the earlier thriftiness of Tower management gave way to wasted money and grandiose expansion.

One top executive in particular is casually said to have hired women strictly on looks, and for closed door sex. This is the kind of thing that is regrettably not confined to Tower, or to the 1970s, but was especially acute in the cultural/historical border between the increase in public exploitation of sex, and the protections offered to women by changing laws. The documentary shrewdly or perhaps a bit cynically introduces the sexism part of the story by having it told by a sympathetic woman, sort of defusing it as supposedly being a funny thing about the old days, or at worse, well, “you know what men are like”.

This film was released in 2015; if it had been after the #metoo explosions of 2017, I doubt it would have been so (relatively) cavalier. As it is, the level of boss-employee hanky-panky described here would, unfortunately, have gotten little more than sympathetic laughs at a festival or a PBS screening.

In the Eighties and Nineties, mass merchandisers re-entered the record selling arena, companies like Best Buy, Circuit City, Walmart, and Target, willing to take losses to get people into their stores to buy other things. Their vaster marketing power, meaning larger orders, got them cheaper wholesale prices than Tower. The bigger retailers said in their own defense that they were selling only a mere fraction of Tower’s much-vaunted wide selection, but they knew as well as anyone that Tower counted on selling the mass hits just as much as everyone else did, in order to keep up the profit margins that allowed them to boast of stocking the complete Muddy Waters discography.

If you ask, finally, “What killed Tower Records”, “the internet” is a reasonable two-word response, but it’s a little more involved than that.

Sometimes, business isn’t as stupid as people like to assume. Well before the web was used to distribute digital audio, the record chain was innovative enough to use a new medium, a website, to sell records. This was a time when internet commerce was still new, and like other, similar sites it didn’t have massive success at first. Tower knew it could be a force for selling and someday, even, home delivery, but they had no way of guessing that music would end up being exchanged for free. It never occurred to them, because despite decades of (by then) nearly everyone having an audio tape recorder, home re-recording of music, though not exactly welcome, or technically legal, had never caused much of a dent in revenue. Tape copies had to be done in real time (real slow time), and second or third generation copies of those copies already sounded terrible.

What made the MP3 files so steal-able and exchangeable was the simple fact of being digital, making copies that were nearly as good as studio originals, something the record industry chose to do. It wasn’t the only way they screwed up strategically. Once the web was used for outright theft, the record companies would spend years and millions of dollars in legal expenses in a futile attempt to try to shut it all down.

At the same time this digital door to piracy opened, millions of younger record buyers were being squeezed out by the industry’s unwillingness or inability to come up with a successor to 45 rpm vinyl singles. There was some (very) limited success with cassette singles. CD singles were tried but failed in the marketplace. That suited the record companies and artists just fine, because they’d long wanted to funnel everyone into buying albums, which by the late Nineties cost $18; say, $24 now. This had creative elements, ego, and pretention going for them besides the money; over decades, albums had become the symphony, the novel, the feature film medium of rock. But younger people, deprived of the cheap way we Sixties kids had of entering their record buying age, were ready for Napster, which did what the industry didn’t think possible: give away everything they owned, free. So, it was either free, or $18. A lot of people took “free”.

David Geffen admits the industry made a huge mistake by not simply cutting the prices of records, and the semi-proof was the success of the standardized 99 cent download at the Apple online store. I resist the hero-izing of Steve Jobs when it’s excessive, but I have to admit that his fame, and ruthless reputation, gave him the clout to bluff the record companies, who all felt that their own individual artists deserved a uniquely better deal.

As late as 1999, Tower was still a billion dollar a year company with global ambitions. By 2004, it was bankrupt. All in all, Tower Records had quite a 44-year ride.

 

A couple of my notes in the comments thread:

I always like slipping a tech history note in somewhere, so here’s one: One of the forgotten delights of boardwalks, fairgrounds and amusement parks was the “Record Your Own Voice” booths, which recorded you onto a thin acetate record (78 rpm, IIRC). Until the ’60s, not many people had tape recorders, so this was hot stuff, a tech “miracle” you could bring home from Rockaway or Jones Beach.

The 78 rpm records that had been the world standard for decades were full sized by today’s standards, but only played for a few minutes per side. Originally, “record album” was quite literal; looking like a thick, old fashioned photo album, it had paper sleeves for a half dozen two sided records.

CBS invented the long playing 33 1/3 record, which became the standard of the industry. The term “record album” was retained although it wasn’t a true album anymore.

It’s forgotten now that RCA was directly competing to replace the 78. But RCA took a different approach, keeping the short playing time of a 78, but on a much smaller, thinner record–the 45–combining it with a record changer. They weren’t thinking of pop singles; originally even the NBC symphony was expected to release their music on 45s. Sure, there’d be breaks in the music, but people had been used to that for decades. Besides, the lighter weight meant a thick stack of them could be set up to play for a half hour.

In a second-hand store in Baku, Azerbaijan, I saw an album of a Stalin speech on five 78s. The speech took up nine sides. The tenth? Nothing but applause.

Odd fact, confirmable by anyone with an old vinyl record: For more than a decade, the companies charged more for a stereo record than a mono (usually $1 more). But to avoid the cost of printing two separate labels for the album jacket, every one had stereo and mono printed at opposite ends, top and bottom. They were offset when they were glued to the cardboard so only the proper one showed.

Ampex, inventor of (practical) videotape, all but bankrupted themselves when they invested heavily in manufacturing pre-recorded open reel tapes. Most ran at 7 1/2 ips, so the signal to noise wasn’t too bad, but the Dolby system allowed even 1 7/8 ips compact cassettes to sound good, so cassettes (and their sneered-at cousins, 8 track) became the prerecord format that succeeded. I was able to pick up dozens of Ampex open reel tapes for about a buck each, circa 1973.

I was a recording engineer, about 40 years ago. The job by then was considered creative; bands sought out the best engineers, much like directors asking for favored cinematographers. There are really two big parts of engineering: First, the original recording session must be recorded flawlessly, with expert mike selection and placement, and an experienced eye on riding gain (too low, you get tape hiss; too high and you risk cutting out and distortion that can’t be corrected later).

Second, the creative part, mixing. This could be done again and again, searching for a “sound”, and usually was. The musicians were in charge, and many of them were experienced enough to do it expertly, but not all, and newer ones especially were often grateful for the help of a creative engineer.

That’s changed. Nowadays, the professional status of the recording engineer has settled back to approximately what it was in the Fifties, a respected but minor player. Digital recording eliminates the problem of hiss and “fast” electronics reduces the problem of clipping at the high end, so most musicians can record their own basic tracks. Accompanying tracks can be done remotely, via the internet. Want a steel pedal guitar, or a skilled Guatemalan flutist? They don’t even have to leave home. And mixing can be done at home, though smart musicians will bring in someone if that someone can do it better than they can.