Thursday, May 17, 2007
If you were wondering what the fuck Music One is doing...
..and where your other favorite music store went, I found the answer while dining at Dulcinea and leafing through an issue of Rolling Stone.
I actually read this several months ago, but I figured it was already common knowledge; however, every time I brought it up with friends, they honestly had no idea. And since I couldn't find it in RS's archives, I typed it up for you!
Tower Records Shuts Its Doors
Chain is liquidated after declaring bankruptcy
After forty-six years in business, Tower Records will close by the end of the year. The eighty-nine-store chain, which owed its creditors $200 million and filed for bankruptcy on August 21st, was sold at auction to the liquidation company Great American Group on October 6th for $134.3 million. Great American outbid Trans World Entertainment -- which owns the FYE and Coconuts chains and had pledged to keep some Tower outlets open -- by just $500,000. After six weeks of liquidation sales, Great American will lay off the company's 3,000 or so employees in twenty states and shut the stores' doors forever. "It's a sad day," says Tom Corson, executive vice president and general manager of Arista/J Records. "Without Tower, it's one less location where a fan can feel comfortable finding new music."
Tower had been struggling since 2000, when CD sales started drying up. Internet stores such as iTunes and Amazon also took their toll, as have file-sharing sites and competition from big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Best Buy, which use discounted CDs as "loss leaders" to get consumers into stores.
Tower for stealing cassettes."It's the end of an era," says Slash, who got arrested as a teenager at the Sunset Strip "When Use Your Illusion came out, they had a special opening for it at midnight. I watched people lining up through the security window in the back office where they busted me for stealing."
The first Tower opened in Sacramento in 1960, after founder Russ Solomon spent almost 20 years selling records from the back of his father's drugstore. Solomon emphasized having a deeper catalog than his competitors -- and when his third store opened in San Francisco in 1968, it wasn't uncommon to see Steve Miller, Carlos Santana and the Jefferson Airplane scouring the racks for obscure Delta blues. Tower's most famous location opened on Los Angeles' Sunset Strip in 1970, and it became a rock and roll landmark. "Everybody came into Sunset," says Solomon, 81. "A lot of musicians worked in our stores. It was a decent job -- didn't pay a hell of a lot, but you got to live around music."
By the 1990's, the company had expanded to 200 worldwide stores and $1 billion in sales, but in 2004 the chain declared bankruptcy for the first time -- as it would one more time before being sold. Among the customers saddened by Tower's closure is Beach Boy Brian Wilson, who began shopping at the Sunset Tower in the early Seventies and still spends $100 to $200 a month there (including, recently, the Beatles' White Album). "It's stocked, and has many diversified records," he says. "It's a cool place to be -- friendly people and a good vibe."
So here's an online "Fuck you!" to Great American for failing to realize the importance of Tower Records as an institution. 'Cause it's always about money, isn't it?
I checked out the
Tower Records article on Wikipedia, and hey look! There's hope:
On-line merchant Caiman, Inc. has recently disclosed that it plans not only to re-launch the website but they also plan to re-launch the stores themselves - opening stores in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco within the next 9 months. They have even hired former buyer Kevin Hawkins to assist with the re-opening.
Say what you will about the joys of illegal downloading, but nothing beats owning an original record.
