In the 1940s, Russ Solomon began selling records from the back of his father's drugstore in the Tower Theatre building on Broadway. He opened the first Tower store on Watt Avenue in 1960, and really put Tower on the cultural map when his San Francisco store opened in 1968...The legendary music retailer, born in the rear of a Sacramento drugstore but brought to its knees by the Internet and discount chains, was sold Friday to a liquidating firm after a court-supervised bankruptcy auction that spilled over two days.
The liquidator, Great American Group of Woodland Hills, agreed to pay about $134.3 million for Tower's inventory, money that will go to Tower's creditors...
Solomon's family still owns 15 percent of Tower but will walk away with nothing from the bankruptcy. Solomon could not be reached for additional comment.
That's the price of progress.
6 comments:
It's obviously Bush's fault.
It's obviously Bush's fault.
LOL
Nice
I used to buy many albums and 45 rpm records at Tower....when ever I got to a town that had Tower records. They almost always had what I was looking for.....but that was 25 years ago and prior to the advent of the recording companies forcing retailers to sell their whole line or not get anything. Stores/Chains like Tower got stuck with stores full of crap that no one wanted to buy. Then the internet came along and the rest is history.....bye bye Tower Records.
Wow, this really is the end of an era. On the one hand, I have lots of high school memories associated with the Tower Records where I grew up, in Nashville, TN. On the other hand, a lot of those memories consist of Cd's costing $20 a shot where you could get them at Wal-Mart for $14, and the unabashed snottiness of the staff there. So I guess Tower is/was just a sign of its time.
Here's a manual trackback with some more reminiscing.
http://www.castingoutnines.net/2006/10/08/farewell-tower/
I hope my husband doesn't find out. He's a music nut and we already have way too many albums on vinyl and disk. It sort of sounds like the premise of the movie "Empire Records" but without the happy ending. I guess everyone has their price. Which means that the premise in "The Magic Christian" was correct.
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