Tower Records Toast

[tuned]

Tower Records has been sold to a company that plans to liquidate it. Even the landmark location on Sunset Boulevard in LA will disappear as the property has been sold for $12 million dollars. Tower has been operating under bankruptcy for several years and was finally auctioned off for 134 million dollars.

[Glen Livingstone]

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.

[tuned]

The Sunset location was featured in dozens of movies. I was there in June and they were closing the store early to make a music video. The store is so much a part of the Sunset Strip that it won't be the same without it. The next highest bidder for the chain lost out by half a million bucks. They were planning on keeping it going.

[kat]

Love Tower Records. They'll be missed.

[radiofan]

Like everyone else I was a big fan of Tower Records from the time I first discovered the Sacramento location in 1972.

Once Tower arrived in Seattle in the mid 70's, there was something to do on Sundays.

Even after the arrival of CD's, Tower still had a good stock of vinyl into the early 90s.

I don't think I ever went on a holiday to see the scenery and relax, they were usually record buying trips.

Here's that all time favorite Tower on Sunset Strip in L.A.