The closure of nearly all large music chains over the past ten years was a sad affair for matures like us who used to pay a visit to such establishments. Any logical reasoning can explain this – the market changes: today, for most people a huge building full of CDs, is just not a necessity as they can buy the music digitally – even so, it was always great fun to check out the new releases and the classics, talk to the employees, and more often than not just relax. Like many, my local Tower Records was the one place that my friends and I could go to before heading off to see a movie, excpeting there was enough to catch us seeking “You must have this right now!” commercial appeal. we are talking about All Things Must Pass movie here.
The actor Colin Hanks who turns out to be one more person who salutes that very yearning, namely for Tower, is one of the more talented heirs of the great Tom Hanks on whom the spice of the TV series Fargo / Life in Pieces sits down.
Hanks is able to trace the entire history of Tower and its inception, that is how Russ Solomon together with his father started selling used jukebox records out of his father Tower drug store in 1941, before Solomon went out to start his own music retail shop in Sacramento 1960. Hanks has detailed interview sessions with 90 years old Solomon himself, and also shoots interviews of a lot of important Tower Records employees who were present during the expansion of the chain into San Francisco, Los Angeles and then all over the country and overseas where many others have existed, and were sold off before the end of the original US company.
It’s the seat of your pants style of management that Solomon employed in running what turned out to be a colossal company that is pretty much what floored me. And as one learns the positions and roles of some of the people who manned the Tower slowly solidified into those of executives, many of them began as clerks in the shops and lasted with the company for almost its entire existence. It is the most accurate of home grown success stories, and the best probably the most hilarious is the story of how, in one case, one Bob Delanoy goes from a dude chilling next to the first LA store being constructed in the vicinity of his house, to working in the company for decades.
Surely, considering how the company being discussed is non-functional allows for such a hasty assessment; Solomon and his crew have generally been candid about life at Tower including the fact that staff were not exactly corporate typists, hundreds of partying after closing hours and even more drug induced all night stocktaking are some of the busy activities. But still within this, they were also very moderate relates and one can work up great fondness towards this rag tag band of disparate people who all played apart in the raising of an empire that became so gargantuan.
Speaking of Tower’s demise, “All Things Must Pass” makes some interesting observations regarding the simplicity of just saying “MP3s killed Tower,” because they also posit that large scale bad decision making also contributed to what happened. This is what I wish we got a little bit more of, in detail or pointed questions, because this is how it feels like most of the Tower interview subjects never quite address many of the issues raised – the pricing most Tower interview subjects almost all remember the significantly up there prices of CDs and how that was a real turnoff to potential buyers of the product.
Apart from Tower alum, the documentary remains unreleased and features pleasant interviews with Bruce Springsteen, David Geffen: Elton John clutches at one of the tributes, which again stands out as one of the many working with the celebrity customers in the inner circle of Barber of spirits store combs Tower Dear Dave Grohl, even before the glory of Nirvana and Foo Fighters, worked as Tower clerk He Craig Kelly. All talk of what Tower meant to the music world, to music lovers, its range of products was probably one of the, if not the, widest of any shop of that time and for attempts of musicians aiming on reaching some level of recognition by using quite steady marketing tools, like placing your records and even a cover of an album on Tower’s walls.
Watch free movies on Fmovies
