by Glen Livingstone » Sun Oct 08, 2006 9:38 am
The news about the demise of Tower Records is very sad.
In the seventies I drove to California once a year and spent a lot of my waking hours in record stores, most of them at various Tower locations.
They always had a huge selection, great prices, and a huge cut-out section where I always found still-sealed treasures for $1.99.
Over the years I must have spent thousands of dollars at Tower. One time at the Sacramento store I spotted a bunch of British imports from the sixties that had somehow ended up there in the delete bin. I grabbed up more than I could afford, but money is nothing and music is everything, so, if necessary, you go without food for a couple of months. What's the big deal?
In my mind, I can still smell the aroma of the virgin vinyl that permeated the air when the shrink-wrap was slit.
But the gigantic Towerstore on Sunset Boulevard was only one of my stops.
I remember wandering the aisles of the Peaches and Licorice Pizza chains and the great Wallach's Music City, on the northwest corner of Sunset and Vine, all of them gone.
Tower was like the old lady at the funeral who had out-lived all of her acqaintances and was just hanging around waiting for her own eventual demise.
I wonder what will become of that wonderful building in Hollywood? Maybe a year from from now we'll drive down Sunset Strip only to be assaulted by a new Pottery Barn or Starbucks where Tower Records used to stand.
Blame Tower's demise on people downloading music off the internet or Wal-Mart's predatory pricing policies, it doesn't matter.
Tower is gone. The bone-picking liquidation sales have started. Three thousand former employees are out of work. Come Christmas, nothing will be left but the memories.
It's a damn shame.