way back when,
when young teenagers had a collection of 45 rpm records,
to me that was kind of exciting.
that was almost better than having
a big collection of cds,
albums, and everything else.
but imagine, 45 records, 45 rpm records
a better quality and less breakable than the 78
of ten years before,
but with all the music you ever wanted.
and you could carry it around in a little box.
that's what tower was about.
believe me.
it was the music that was meaningful
to young people's lives.
and we were how they got it.
the first record i ever bought was
bob wills, new san antone rose.
it was like 35 cents.
the year was 1941, and my dad had a drug store
called tower drugs.
it was in the tower theater building.
the drugstore was tiny,
and yet they had everything in there.
he had toys, he had liquor, he had magazines,
cigarettes, perfume, cosmetics, candy,
heh, you name it.
so we had a soda fountain in that store as well,
and on the soda fountain we had the jukebox.
one day, my dad said, "why don't we sell used records?"
he asked the jukebox operator bring in
his used records, which he brought in
and sold us the records for three cents
and we turned round and sold them for a dime.
we sold 'em out right away, so my dad said,
"if we can sell used records,
we ought to be able to sell new records."
went in to san francisco where you could buy
all the records wholesale.
200 records cost about
less than a couple a hundred bucks.
so we said, "fine, we'll spend the 200 dollars,
give us a franchise,"
and bang, we're in the record business.
during that period, my dad actually broke th rough
the wall of the drugstore into the empty space next door,
a little empty storefront, and he said,
"we'll put the record department back th ere."
so we decided to call it tower record mart.
he couldn't complain too much because he was getting some free labor,
but at the same time, he didn't like the idea
that i should've been in school.
and we realized right off the bat that this was a big deal.
i went to my dad, i said, "well, i want to expand.
i want to go in to this rack-jobbing business,
expand our jukebox, and get this and that. "
all kinds of wonderful things i wanted to do.
he says: "no way, absolutely, no way.
" don't bother me.
"you want this thing,
"you buy the record store from me,
and then you do what you want, but i'm not financing it."
i said, "all right."
he says: "fine, it's yours tomorrow,
"and here's the deal:
"you have the inventory
and you have the bills that the company owes, goodbye."
and overnight, i was the owner of this thing.
everything he did influenced me.
it's, how do you say, that one imparts
a whole style of life
just by being close to you
and you pick it up
he was a skinny guy
who liked to have a lot of fun,
loved music, loved dancing.
there was always music on in our house.
it seems like every evening
my parents were dancing and partying.
i'm sure there was some drinking.
i probably started when i was five years old.
i would go in to work with him
and sort singles.
it was quite a family affair, so my mother would be there.
i think she was doing the bookkeeping at that time.
my father had a fantasy and a dream
and a desire to open up a supermarket of records.
he then opened a record store at watt and el camino,
it was a tiny little store,
about a thousand square feet, maybe.
my wonderful friend who had been doing advertising
for the drugstore, mick mickelson,
he said, "well, we're changing your name.
"tower record mart, that's too...
"we're going to call it tower records
"and we're going to use shell oil company colors.
"and i'm going to design a letter that'll stand out,
that nobody's ever seen before."
and he literally, drew that letter.
you know, in sacramento there weren't very many places for kids to hang out.
there was, like downtown, there was places,
so it was, you know,
tower books and records were in like this parking lot
surrounded by nothing.
and for kids in high school, that's what you did.
you know, you went to tower records.
it was the beginning of the folk era,
and so we would sit in the parking lot at tower
on our little sports cars and play music.
so the guitar guys would come, and the banjo guys would come,
and we'd play music in front of the record store
and then you'd go into the record store and into the listening booths
and listen to as much as you could
because you couldn't afford to buy any records.
.p walk right in .p
.p sit right down .p
i daddy let your mind go long... .p
there were make out sessions in the listening booths,
people had sex in listening booths.
we put really big lights in there
so they'd be as hot as possible
so that you couldn't stay in there too long.
j‘ do you want to lose your mind... i
this store opened in 1961, i was eleven years old,
it was the only place i knew.
you'd walk down the aisle and you could just see
from the front of the store to the back of that aisle,
just these stacks of lps.
you know, somebody came up with that terminology,
stack 'em high and sell 'em low.
yeah, the managers and the employees were young,
they loved music, they were enjoying themselves.
they were having a lot of fun, which was a good thing,
because they weren't getting paid very much.
and that was the beginning of tower records.
j” daddy let your mind go long. .p
i worked for tower for 37 years.
i started when i was 19 years old,
and it started out at the watt avenue store.
stan was this kid that was the son
of one of the pharmacists that worked for my father.
he came to work and he said, "you gotta give the kid a job."
i said, "okay, put him to work."
i walked out in to the watts store,
and this guy george horton came running up to the counter
and looked at me and goes, "who are you?ii and i go,
"oh, uh, i'm the new guy. my name's stan, how are ya?"
and he says, "oh, great, you're here.
charlie and i are going to lunch."
and i went, "okay."
he says, "good, everything's $3.88
" except for frank sinatra, phase four, and command.
"that's $4.88, see ya later.
we'll be back in an hour."
and there i was, that was my training.
tower was like the place to work at
because it was so open.
plus, you could play whatever you want on the record player,
so you could be an amateur dj, too,
and it was definitely the place to work.
what happened in the very early '603,
'63, '64, was a couple of artists
happened on the scene that just changed the world around.
.p let's go surfin' now .p
.p everybody's learning how .p
i come on and safari with me i
i come on and safari with me....p
when the beach boys' early album
surfin' safaricame out,
all of a sudden, the business kind of shifted
from a singles business to a lp business.
then, of course, throughout the '6os
as the baby boomers kind of came of age
and there started being more and more potential buyers of these records.
the great thing for the record industry was that they cost a lot more.
so instead of spending 49 cents
or whatever it was on a single back then,
people were spending $3.99 or $4.99
or $5.99 on an album.
we could literally sell a thousand copies of a record
over a weekend, or something like that,
which was incredible.
the hits began to sell in quantity,
the kids came in more and more,
they grew up with it,
they widened their taste in music.
by the late '6os, radio began to explore
something besides top 40.
you had these really free form radio stations.
they were changing the way that everybody looked at music,
and we just rode that wave.
.p let's go surfin' now .p
.p everybody's learnin' how i
i come on and safari with me i
i come on and safari with me...i
but as the '603 went on,
you had one lp after another
that was a huge artistic statement.
sergeant pepper and pet sounds and on and on and on.
then suddenly, you started to have
more and more cash coming in to the record industry.
and that was exactly the time
that tower records really started to peak
in that first wave where russ had opened his store.
well, he would talk about it all the time,
how important it was to have a big inventory,
and how he wanted to open up a very big store.
the largest store in the world in a big city.
she was pretty. i wish i could remember her name.
she was a manicurist at a barbershop that i used to go to,
and i just accidentally ran into her in a bar in sacramento,
sitting there and saying, "why don't we take a trip?
why don't we go to san francisco?" and she says, "yes."
so off to san francisco we went.
i mean, this was early, like five o'clock or so
in the afternoon.
an hour and a half later, we're in san francisco
having dinner and drinks, and dinner and drinks,
and a little jazz.
getting pretty drunk, as a matter of fact.
later on ending up at a hotel.
and the next morning,
i was hung over, badly,
and had to do something
about trying to get well to drive back to sacramento.
so we went down to a drive-in at columbus and bay.
i could get a nice greasy breakfast and a lot of coffee,
so went in there
and i'm sitting in there with this awful hangover
and i looked across the street,
and there was this empty building.
and a big sign on it that said, " for lease."
the only thing that looked alive on that property
was a telephone booth.
i went over to that telephone booth
and i called the number on the sign,
and i said, "you want to rent this place?"
the guy said, "love to."
and i made a deal, just like that.
it actually was this huge building,
and the record company people said,
"where are you going to put the refrigerators and the washing machines and stoves?"
and he said, "it's all going to be records."
and they said, "okay, you know what? this is such an insane idea,
that you'll be gone in three months. we're going to back you."
so he basically opened that whole san francisco store
on nothing more than the record company's money.
luckily, my cousin ross
was a builder, electrical, carpentry,
and so he volunteered, "oh, i'll go down and fix it up.
put some lighting in there.
put a new floor in, and paint it. "
and that was it.
he went and did it.
there was no way we could, you know, heh,
afford a neon sign or anything like that.
so we opened a store,
and it just takes off like, like a rocket.
i mean, the day the place opened up,
people are swarming in there, literally.
there's a picture around of me standing there
with these people all over the place.
it was unbelievable.
if you go to san francisco,
be sure to where flowers in your hair.
i mean, you know you walked through the streets of san francisco
and there were people smoking pot
and having little daisies in their hair
and hanging out, and the fillmore was packed,
and, you know, it was a change.
people were against the war, and against segregation,
and there was a lot of political feeling in the world,
and a lot of it was centered in the change
that was happening in san francisco
and that's the cauldron in which tower records was born.
so consequently, there were people pouring into san francisco
from all over northern california,
and for that matter, all over the world,
to experience what could be called
the hippie kind of movement, if you will,
but mostly the music movement that was happening down there.
all the san francisco bands
and the new music, and so many of the people
who went in to be entertained by the music in san francisco,
wanted to know where that music came from.
they want to know the roots of that music.
i like a sound you hear that lingers in your ear i
i but you can't forget from sundown to sunset i
i now now i
i it's all in the air you hear it everywhere i
i and no matter what you do it's going to grab a hold on you i
i california soul i
what was particularly unique about that store
was how much music it had.
customers were so excited,
you could almost see their eyes light up
well, i think the inventory made a big difference,
because they wanted everything to begin with.
i whistles a mellow beat i
i so the people started to sing i
the thing that was amazing to me
was just the sheer...
like, almost seemed like an unlimited types of music.
things like spoken word and comedy and sound effects
and international and jazz, trend jazz, big band,
i mean, it was unbelievable.
tower wasn't just a group of departments,
it was a group of little stores within one roof,
i mean, there was a jazz store, there was a classical store,
and you got to know those people,
they got to know your tastes, you got to know theirs,
that's how you learned about music,
and that's also what brought you back into the store.
all of a sudden, it would become fashionable
for those young people to find something
that they want to hold in their hand,
that they want to collect, that it's hip to collect,
that has music on it.
well, first, there was the thrill
of being surrounded by music.
80 percent of it is a complete mystery to you.
so when we came west, we were shocked
at the size of tower records, and simply,
how many records there were.
everybody in a record store is a little bit of your friend
for twenty minutes or so, you know?
so there was that family aspect of a real record store.
it started out as a small family
here in sacramento with just a few of us
and as time went on, the company got bigger and bigger and bigger,
it just became a bigger and bigger family.
it was my second year in college
and i didn't like college. i was moving out of the house
and i decided i needed to get a job.
i wanted to go some place and make some money.
i applied for the record store on watt avenue.
they weren't hiring girls that year,
they'd already had one and she hadn't worked out.
so th ese two gentlemen that were running the bookstore,
and the bookstore opened in '62,
so it had only been open for three years.
they wouldn't let us wear pants, either. we had to wear skirts.
so they could, of course, look up our skirts.
heidi was a girl that worked for me
in the book division, in the bookstore,
the very first bookstore in sacramento.
he walks into the store and the first thing he sees in this bookstore
is this woman in leopard skin underwear
and a mini skirt hanging desiderata posters,
and that was me.
i showed up, and i wasn't a weenie, and i worked hard,
and i wasn't going to be put down.
and learned how to swear, and learned how to drink,
i learned how to do drugs.
i think we were with some friends one afternoon,
it was late evening,
i honest to god think we stole a couple of records from tower,
and it wasn't the last one i ever took
after i started working there, of course,
but it was fun.
first day, i think i went to el chico,
which was the local bar down the street,
probably spent three hours at lunch having a few cocktails
and came back to work.
that's pretty much how it went for a long time.
mark is crazy, he's totally nuts.
but he could do anything.
viducich, sid vicious, we called him sid vicious
because he was the nastiest mother on the planet.
you know he could ream your ass like nobody's business.
i'll go drink whenever the hell i want,
and please don't ever talk to me that way again.
no, there was nothing like that.
course it helped that your best friend
was the manager of the store, too.
my dad and russ are first cousins.
my father actually ran the cafe at the tower drugstore.
and so that's where the connection is with tower drugs.
so my father actually ended up working at tower records too.
he did store development for russ for many years,
so when we built new stores, my father, ross,
was the person who built those stores,
so obviously, it was easy for me to get a job
working at tower when i got out of high school.
i went to work for the book division
as a clerk and then advertising.
so i ran the advertising for the book division.
then i went into community relations,
and bringing in authors for book signings.
virtually everyone in the company started off as a clerk.
they'd become buyers, they'd become
supervisor types in the store.
th ey'd become assistant managers and then they'd become managers,
so they learn everything they need to learn.
and the entire development of tower records
through the entire period of time it existed
was just that kind of a thing.
as a woman, i just said,
"i'm not even going to think about being a woman."
there're no excuses, no period stuff.
i mean, i went in to labor twice behind the counter.
because i was determined to be treated as an equal,
because i was the first female hired,
i was the first female vice president,
i was the first female general manager,
i was the first manager,
so i unknowingly had this responsibility
to be kind of the mentor
for these women coming up behind me.
it isn't what we as a company could teach our employees,
but what other employees could teach each other.
that family kind of thing is what made the company grow,
and what made the company successful.
i'm convinced of that.
that's my old tom sawyer theory of management.
let somebody else paint the fence.
but we had the freedom to do whatever we wanted,
i mean he literally gave us these stores with all this product in it,
and said, "okay, show up, do the job right,
don't screw me over." and then left us alone.
one key to the success of tower records,
particularly in that period,
is we had no dress code.
i really believe that a lot of people
wanted to come to work for us, young people especially,
so they wouldn't have to be told how to dress.
the people who worked at tower
were musicians in many cases.
i got a job at tower records
because that's the only place i could get a job
with my fucking haircut.
that is the truth.
i love tower records, and i love music,
and i only wanted to work at tower records
and be surrounded by these cool people and all this cool music.
i just imagined that everybody that worked
at tower was like an aficionado.
they didn't necessarily have any other kind of skills,
sometimes even people skills, but they had musical knowledge.
every music store, whether it was a place to go buy drumsticks,
or a place to go buy records,
were total snobs, total snobs.
the record store especially was,
had a reputation of being incredibly rude.
and fuck you if you can't take a joke.
so, heh, it was more of a battlefield to get music,
to get records out of the store in the earlier days.
when we opened up at sunset,
that, i feel, really put us on the mar
larry carp called russ, "you gotta see this location. the best thing in the world."
and he goes down there,
and it was a mad man muntz location,
where you could get a four track player installed in your car
right at the corner of sunset and horn.
it was 4,000 bucks a month for a land lease.
that meant i had to build a building.
so my cousin ross comes to the rescue again,
and he says, "all right, we'll just build a building on there."
i said, "okay, do it."
it was the first building we built.
it was a pre-fab building that's still standing
forty years later, fifty years later,
whatever it is.
it was a concrete slab,
and then these metal girders that went up and over
filled in with concrete block and glass,
and an orange tile floor.
and some counters, that was it. i laid the floor
at tower sunset, with these two hands.
ross built that building, the entire project for $75,000.
nobody else would do that.
you know, they have the whole process
of getting the store ready,
then getting the racks put together,
and getting the merchandise put in and so on.
stan was there from the beginning.
i would come home from working all day,
which really was digging ditches
and laying floors, and getting all sweaty,
but the nice thing was, record companies would come by
and drop off promos every once in a while,
and when i'd get home, i'd have some new records.
well, i just saw this guy schlepping albums up,
a good twelve steps to his level,
and then it was even farther to mine,
but i just saw him, and i'm a very friendly guy,
and just went down and said, "hi, i'm your neighbor."
and bob would come down from his apartment
to check out, see if i had any new promos.
he was really nice, he was very open to me,
i didn't know him, but we became very good friends.
i'll never forget, one day i came home
and my front door was open,
and i thought, "well, that's odd."
i walk in, and i hear splashing.
well yeah, i mean it got hot in la.
when stan went to work,
bob'd go in to his apartment and smoke dope
and listen to stan's records.
but yeah, he came home and i was soaking
in his tub, listening to records.
that did it, i was really pissed.
so i said, "well bob, no, but it's time for you to get a job.
"we need a receiving clerk. why don't you be a receiving clerk. "
in november, actually, they opened the store.
so i had hung around for quite a bit,
he said, "come in the store and apply,"
and i did, and charlie shaw, the manager at the time,
hired me, immediately.
and then once i got in the door,
i just fell in love with being in the building.
i had no clue about the record industry,
but it was, to me, right up my alley.
this is like being home with a bunch of friends,
and much more fun than i'd ever had
in any of my previous jobs.
again, now here,
we hadn't opened a store since san francisco,
and the same thing happened in los angeles.
we were in the midst of a marvelous audience,
i mean you had this variety of people
with all kinds of musical tastes and money.
i mean, i knew sunset was like the focus
of the whole record industry, there.
if you didn't get it in that store,
their whole rest of their marketing crew
thought you were doing a shit job.
but imagine where we were.
we were within walking distance, virtually,
of the entire record industry, in the l.a. area.
i think that was a good strategy, i mean,
if you're about music, you go to where the music's being made.
in los angeles, especially in san francisco,
so many of the artists lived in our neighborhood.
i mean, we were the local record store for them, so it was great.
i remember david geffen coming in to the store one saturday,
and i was chatting with him, and he says,
"hey, you gotta come listen to this record.ii
i go, "okay." so i hop into his car
and we drive up into the hollywood hills somewhere
to where he was living,
and he took out an acetate test pressing,
he put it on, and he played it,
and it was the eagles' first record.
you had the troubadour, and you had the roxy,
and you had the whiskey,
and lots of clubs that they played coming up,
so those artists would look through tower
wonder when their records were going to be there,
and would they have piles, that kind of thing.
if you loved music, and having a record collection,
which, i did, it was exciting to walk through the store.
i went there three or four times a week.
we just drove down sunset boulevard...
and we were just eyeballing everything we could see,
and there was a huge record store.
it was that place where your dreams
meet the listener.
that's where the final connection was made.
that audience you dreamt of
is walking through the door right now.
and you can stand there and watch that happen.
they are your listeners.
and the place also served
as kind of a lost boys club,
so if you were a young musician,
you came into town and you didn't know what to do,
the first thing you did is you went to tower records.
artists who were in california and in los angeles
would go into tower records to find out where their records were.
and if there was a pile of elton john
and there wasn't a pile of the eagles,
the eagles weren't happy, or vice versa.
i mean there were a couple people that came in
to the store that i was so in awe of,
i couldn't even, you know, i couldn't even approach them.
eric clapton, when he came in,
jimmy page, pete townshend, it was a constant flow.
and nobody ever bothered them.
i mean, they had a place there where they could go
and maybe a few people, "oh, look over there.
there's elton john," or whatever,
but they kind of knew,
that was a place where you could hang
and not really worry about anybody hassling you.
tuesday mornings i would be at tower records
at 10:00, 9:00 in la.
the store'd open at nine and they'd let me in.
and it was a ritual, and it was a ritual i loved.
it was, you know, my music center.
yeah, i knew where everything was.
and if they didn't have something in one week,
or the next week,
i told them, i said, "you need to get this in."
well elton was one that used to come even during business hours.
he'd come in with his limo driver.
his limo driver would just stand there with bags
and he would come through with a long, long list,
and go through the record bins, picking out
all the new releases that he had seen.
i mean, tower just had everything.
those people knew their stuff. they were really on the ball.
they weren't just employees that happened to work in a music store,
they were devotees of music.
that's what i loved about the tower.
i could talk about music to them, and they'd say,
" have you heard this?"
it was just... they were like friends.
i knew the guys in the store pretty well
because i was so, you know, regular.
no, that's stan. - that's stan.
he was my main man. yeah, he was great.
and he would go through every single aisle,
every single bin, and he had an incredible memory
from what records he had,
and he'd get like two to three each.
one for each one of his houses.
it was comfortable and not intimidating at all.
it was inviting, it was like going to your favorite cafe.
and eventually we said, "elton, we'll open early
for you if you want to come in."
so, we started opening like at 8:00 am.
i can honestly say this without any exaggeration,
i spent more money in tower records
than any other human being.
once the word's out
that's where the stars are, it really clicked.
and then it became the place to go in la.
did you know
the world's largest record store
in the known world, and universe, et cetera,
is here in los angeles?
it is and it's called tower records.
and tower records is located in the heart of sunset strip.
at tower you'll find tens of thousands
of your favorite lps and tapes,
and you'll find that they're all super discount priced.
tower'll always save you money on the lps and tapes you buy.
you'll find more rock lps than you ever thought existed
and that includes more imported rock lps if you need that stuff.
you'll find more jazz, more classics,
easy listening, more country, more international,
more spoken words, and more words.
more of everything than you've ever seen
in your whole life in one store,
at one time.
and you'll find thousands of 45 rpm singles.
in short, the largest record store in the known world, hmm,
lives up to its name.
shop tower records in the heart of sunset strip tonight,
and every night of the year, until midnight.
and tower will have my latest album
walls and bridges, this afternoon, so go get it!
i d00, d00, d00, d00, d00, d00 i
i living in the u.s.a. i
i d00, d00, d00 d00, d00, d00 i
i living in the u.s.a. i
part of the concept with tower
was as much social as it was retail,
you know, before social networking
and social media, people went outside.
people would spend hours together just digging through the bins.
you know, and people would meet at tower records.
i mean, we were a destination. people would hook up at tower.
and that kind of oaptured my,
wow, this is a really cool place to work.
and then of course, once i got in the back room,
i really started to see what went on in that store.
there was drinking going on.
abso—fucking—lutely, just hammered.
there was a culture that you could drink as much as you want,
you can do whatever the hell you wanted, but you know, you had to come to work.
there was a guy who slept in the office
and washed his pits with comet cleanser
he'd slept in the office all night,
and had to get up for work the next day to open ur
sometimes you could even come to work
say for an hour and go home with cocktail flu.
but there was thing about showing up,
manning up, coming to work,
and even if you threw up, you had to show ur
the rules were don't smoke dope on the premises.
and certainly don't drink on the premises.
that didn't mean that once in a while there wasn't a party back there,
but you know, you do your job during the day,
had a good time doing it,
and you'd go out and play the way you wanted to at night.
hell, there were many nights we just came to work
and never went to bed for christ's sakes.
that's not cocktail flu, that's a lifestyle.
when you hit the late '6os, early '7os
you start to get to kind of the hookers and blow era
of the record industry and this continued
all the way through the end of the disco era.
yeah, '708 is when we started doing...
hand truck fuel, yes.
hand truck fuel is a controlled substance
that you ingest th rough a small straw
in your nose
seems like tower records people always ended up in a bathroom.
either in a hot tub, you know, probably drinking,
maybe smoking a little pot or whatever.
we used to do inventories overnight or we would work late,
doing whatever project we were doing, and we needed hand truck fuel,
which, by the way, we took paid-outs for.
no one even caught it.
there was hand truck fuel, yeah.
you understood you had a lot of latitude
to do what you wanted, to manage the way you wanted,
and there wasn't going to be any real repercussions
if things went terribly wrong,
because the whole thing was an experiment
from day one until the end.
but... the store always got opened.
we always covered the shifts. no matter what.
a party atmosphere, it was never work.
russ was the free-swinging guy, man. he enjoyed life.
he liked to buy drinks for people after work, especially the girls.
there was nothing more common than russ rounding up all the babes
and taking them to the bar, and you're stuck behind the counter,
the only guy in the store, you know.
my father was always a ladies' man.
he was attracted to many a beautiful woman,
and they were to him.
but he always respected the women,
i mean, when they were working, it was one thing,
when it was partying, it was altogether different.
i can remember one night,
it was about five in the morning and we had been partying,
and for some reason the alarm went off at tower broadway,
and bud martin at the time, he was the vice president of the company.
he shows up, and we were actually
in the back room still drinking.
well, he got a little pissed off that night.
bud martin didn't have the same loose feel
for management that russ did.
bud was the one that was that glue, so to speak,
that was able to hold this thing called tower,
and this culture that started rolling,
and russ would have never ever been able
to keep it together without bud, no question.
bud martin, he was my dad's accountant,
and when tower opened, he had a little private office,
so that became our office.
bud controlled most of all the divisions--
the accounts payable, sales audit,
all those areas. i mean, he was--
when they had a problem, they'd go to bud.
i was not a financial manager,
i certainly wasn't a cpa.
i had no business school training,
so i had to trust him, and i did.
bud was at one end of the hall, mr. no,
and russ was at the other end of the hall, mr. yes,
and so you could go to russ and get a yes,
then you had to go down the hall to mr. no,
and tell him, mr. yes had said yes,
and then you had to justify to bud
why russ had said yes.
yeah, it was a constant battle.
bud became almost like partner with russ.
they were yin and yang.
he was the antith esis of russ solomon.
russ was like a very carefree, if you will,
entrepreneur who loved music
and bud was actually a businessman.
i would make it work
by hiring my people to go out and do it.
he would make it work because he had to pay for it.
i suppose there was a rather serious
love—hate relationship going on between russ and bud,
because again, russ would say, "spend the money, get it done,"
and then bud would say, "no, you can't spend the money."
we would go to lunch every day
and i would get... at lunch, we would argue.
he was the keeper of the money,
and he didn't let anything go.
and he and russ would have battles
about russ wanting to open up a store
and bud said, "i don't have any money,
and we're going to go to the poor house."
russ'd say, "bud, i'm doing it.
figure out how to get it done."
but if you get two drinks in him,
he would be literally hanging from the lampshades.
you know whati mean? or swinging on the chandelier.
he had a conservative monetary policy
but a liberal social policy.
it was dangerous to go out with him and get him drunk.
we've been thrown out of a few restaurants, you know.
it was just that he was living another life,
dating and things like that, buying splurges.
just do, probably just do normal things you do with money.
you spend it.
bud loved cars.
he would buy at least one new car every year.
sometimes more than one car,
continuously trading them in.
he was also the most random woman chaser on the planet.
he literally had an extra office out of his office
where he took women to wink them.
he'd hire them as secretaries.
and i mean, it was so flamboyantly bad
that it had to be a joke.
i having a fling again i
i younger than spring again i
i feeling that zing again wow i
he was straight laced with a secret life.
i think he was intrigued by the idea
that we could race along too,
because he'd never have done it himself.
so i had to kind of lead the charge.
we use to call it the russ bus, yeah.
you know he was so fearless
and he was so enthusiastic
about what he-- i don't think he had a clue
what he was doing, seriously.
russ just had a special way of living.
he didn't play golf, he didn't go hunting,
tower records was what he did. that's what he...
he breathed that.
you were part of his family. you were part of
the tower experience, as it were.
the record companies and narm
would have conventions in los angeles, mainly.
so, for fun, i would start stealing ties.
i said you're going to feel much better without this.
you'll be much more comfortable. what are you doing?
coming to california, big shots from new york
for crying out loud.
you come out here, you put on your suit,
you put on your tie,
you know, and you act like big shots.
i said, "we're here in california.
"we have a lot-- everything's loose.
take your tie off."
so they walk in and frannie, who was his secretary,
would grab the scissors and chop a tie.
and after a while, it became the stuff of legends.
so it was like, people would walk in
and just give him the tie.
the tie thing just got part of his reputation, you know.
don't wear a good tie in there, or leave it in the car.
he never collected any of my ties,
because i had heard those stories
and of course, when i became a national guy,
i was going out there.
they had a big plaque on the wall,
must have been this big,
and it was an array of neckties
that had been cut off, right about here.
i would steal the whole tie. i got a bad rap, you know,
for cutting the ties off. never cut a tie.
always stole the whole tie.
made the guy give me a card, usually,
if they were friendly.
sometimes they weren't very friendly
when you steal their tie, really.
but they all felt
a lot more comfortable not wearing 'em.
i think his leadership and his vision
and the way he dealt with his people
really was significant.
if it hadn't been for these people
being able to do these things for me,
we could never have done anything.
we didn't do anything in a formal way.
we did it on the fly.
it was the russ bus.
with tower records,
you had an idea, a thought,
you either went to russ or bud with it,
and flew with it, it was that simple.
that was the fun part.
you never fucking knew
where it was going to take you.
russ solomon, because he was tower records,
there wasn't all these layers of management.
you sat down with russ and that's how the company ran.
it ran that way for a long time.
you'd grow your people out of the stores,
send them to a new store,
they'd grow a whole crop of new people
that would go to the next store, and so on.
back then there were few enough people
that we all even went to all the store openings.
so we'd go to a town for two or three weeks
and literally a team of us put the stores together.
obviously, as tower got very big, we had a team
whose job that was to do it separate from the retail,
but this was the retail team, you know,
we'd take our classical buyer, and our assistant manager,
and our favorite rock buyer, and a couple managers,
and go camp out for a couple of weeks in a store.
bringing the racks in, marking the records,
putting the records in the shelves,
setting everything up so it really helped
make you feel like you were part of a team,
but it also made you feel like you were personally successful
because you were able to be part of this.
so by 1979,
we were really a west coast operation.
we'd opened stores all the way from seattle
to san diego,
and then we went over to phoenix and tempe.
so a couple of guys came over and visited me,
hugh sazaki and akehana zowa.
they said they wanted to start up tower records in japan.
these two gentlemen, aki and hugh,
had come to sacramento, met with russ,
and russ would fall for any idea,
and then they went back to japan,
and then a few weeks later called up and said,
"come on over. we want to show you around."
so they sent us a couple of tickets.
we traveled all over japan, saw the sights,
saw the existing record retailers over there.
but one guy up in sapporo,
which was a little island on the northern border of japan,
i think had stolen the name tower records,
and literally had a tower record store.
we said, "oh, no."
so we went up and we saw this, and said,
"that's not very nice, you've stolen our name.
you shouldn't have done that. "
but at least, if we open our wholesale operation here,
will you let us sell you the imported records,
and you guys run it?
so that's how it started.
russ was always enthusiastic about something new.
everybody else on the record side hated it.
they said, "we're an american record company,
we sell retail in america."
they didn't know anything about japan.
russ didn't have any kind of attitude like that.
and they had no desire to do it.
they didn't care, it was just one of russ' little projects.
i was just a nobody receiving clerk, and i said,
"hell, i'll help you out. whatever you want to do."
our job at tower broadway
was we would pull the records out of stock from broadway,
and ship them to japan,
and that's when i first got involved with russ,
as i was the shipping and receiving clerk
making probably five bucks an hour.
that's how russ and i became friends.
nobody else would help him.
this goes on for a few months,
and things are not really looking all that good.
we don't know what is going wrong,
but sad but true, they didn't know what they were doing,
and they weren't very good at it.
i think it was a friday evening,
and probably russ and i, i know i was in russ' office,
and we had been drinking,
had a few cocktails, you know, as you would
wind down after a tough day.
somehow the subject came up,
"who am i going to send to japan?"
and he asked me that question, "who am i going to send to japan?"
and i said, "the only guy to send is me."
and he goes, "what do you mean, you? you're not a store manager,
you don't know anything about it. "
and i said, "well, i'm the one
who's been doing all this work for japan."
he goes, "do you think you can do it?"
i said, "sure." he goes, "then go."
you didn't have to go through a bunch of people
to make a decision at tower records.
he was the worst person to send
i would ever think in my life.
i mean he had the social skills
of a warthog in heat, you kidding me?
but i think the reason that they did,
is he knew a lot about shipping and receiving,
he'd learned about international shipping.
they needed somebody to know about how to get the product in and out of there.
i'd only been there two and a half years.
i saw it as an opportunity to do something.
we had no idea what we're doing.
i'll be honest with you, we had not a clue.
but we did it anyhow.
i had literally no idea what to expect.
i'd never been to japan, i had to go get a passport.
we had a warehouse in akasaka,
which is like the beverly hills of tokyo, for god's sakes.
we had this little warehouse,
and i was supposed to be there for six months.
that was my deal, you got six months
to go either fix it or close it.
shibuya was a little like times square,
laginsu was a little like times square.
tokyo was like times square.
i mean the place was always lit ur
at nighttime, tokyo came alive.
shibuya was a very hip, more of a younger area
for stores and kids and people to hang out.
the japan ese at that time were very much
into the culture of american music.
so i called russ, and said, "russ, we're not closing
the wholesale operation,
we're going to open up a retail store."
and that set off quite a firestorm
of controversy to say the least.
the push back from stateside was,
"you guys are crazy, you're not going to do it."
that was probably bud's first impression.
bud wanted to be profitable.
he didn't care so much about being big.
if you don't take advantage of a new idea,
if it makes any sense at all,
then you've lost something.
russ wasn't omnipotent
and he couldn't tell you, "here, you go play with this,
it's going to work, go play with this, it isn't."
this was russ' company.
russ loved japan, he loved the culture.
and he said, "you know mark, i think that's a great idea. "
because he was so cutting edge. you know, he was so hip.
he was always taking that next step forward
before the forward was there.
i saw this location and loved it.
called russ, and i think he was in japan
within two weeks to look at the location.
it took six to eight months of legal wrangling to do this,
because it hadn't been done before.
in japan, in order to open up a business you had to have a partner.
there was restaurants, shakey's pizza parlors
and mcdonald's, but those were all franchises.
there was no retail establishment in japan
wholly owned by an american company.
it was something nobody else had ever done, for christ sake.
this was a 3,000 year old country and nobody could ever think
of another american company
opening a retail store without a japanese partner.
getting all of the racking, the records,
the employees, everything in place,
that went without a hitch. that was no problem.
the hardest part, once again,
was all of the legal maneuvering
that had to go on just to open the store.
but he did open up the shibuya store.
literally, the morning we opened,
we had over 300 or 400 people
standing in line to get in to the store.
people were literally squash ed against the door,
waiting to get in, and they poured in.
you never saw anything like it.
i mean, it was amazing.
i remember, the store was packed
from the moment we opened till we closed,
we did like 65, 70 grand that day.
it was like that for the first month
the store was open. that store was just
a huge success from day one.
the japanese culture was really into american music,
and the fact that it was an american import
and not a japanese pressed...
it wasn't the eagles pressed in japan,
it was the eagles made in the united states
brought to japan and sold,
and that whole vibe really sold well.
we just happened to literally be
at the right place, at the right time.
you want to call that luck? then call it luck.
what would you call it?
luck. ha!
we weren't shoving americana down japanese th roats, for god's sakes,
it was a culture, it was a music culture.
so he went and found a second location in yokohama.
he got it, we put it together,
opened that damn thing, and it was a success, heh.
all we had to do was open the doors.
people flocked in the joint.
expansion was obviously, once ya do it,
russ can't wait to do it again.
so then we started finding
these kind of stores all over the country,
one right after another.
and i think russ, seeing the success it was
globally, or nationally, or internationally,
i actually think that gave him the impetus
to move to new york.
first met russ solomon in the early '803.
at that point, i was the new york branch manager
for what is now sony music,
it was called cbs records at the time, and of course,
everyone knew about tower records,
but it was not an east coast phenomenon, at that point.
we started with a conversation i was having
at the narm convention in florida.
we were talking about, "gosh, you know,
"i'd love to open a classical store in new york
because that's the place where people like classical music."
russ called up and said,
"hey guys, i want you to come to my office."
we go in there, and russ says,
"how would you like to open the store
"in the middle of the hippest city in the united states
by a college?"
we had no idea what he was talking about.
and we go down into the bowels of lower manhattan
to the village, 4th and broadway.
there wasn't even a particular neighborhood.
we started calling it the village, and it became part of the village.
but it really wasn't part of the village.
but you spend enough money in marketing and things happen.
it was terrible, it was like i kind of thought,
"what the fuck is he thinking?"
there was a dead dog in the gutter.
i'm in shock, i thought we were...
in the bowels of hell.
and it was really cheap rent.
i mean the whole deal was like 10 bucks a foot.
literally, there was nothing else there.
empty office buildings, empty storefronts,
there was nothing around it. i can't emphasize that enough.
there was nothing around it at all.
you know, it was like a massive four stories,
m ezzanines, escalators, you know,
very, very expensive store to build. very risky.
we took it, and then we fixed it up
everybody thought we were totally crazy.
that nobody would ever go to broadway and buy records,
and we open up, and the people are lined up to get in.
and here is this cavernous store,
half a block footprint, four stories,
had an elevator it was so tall.
god knows how much inventory was in there.
it looked fantastic, of course,
the vinyl with the 12-inch artwork.
i mean, it looked great, and it was everywhere.
their singles department alone
was probably bigger than any other store
in my whole new york tri-state area.
and it wasn't three years later
when that whole part of town became vibrant again.
tower records opening there literally revived
those eight or ten square blocks of manhattan.
everybody that worked there was a character,
but russ was the face
of the company in every way.
i worked at polygram records in new york.
as happens in any entertainment company
there was a change at the top and so a whole bunch of us got blown out as a result.
new management coming in. i was senior vice president of marketing.
and it feels pretty bad to get fired.
and you're on the outside of this business
you've been in your whole life,
and your phone's not ringing,
you worry about your family, and all these things.
russ used to have this big christmas party
in his major markets,
and the one in new york was really big.
probably 500 people.
and out of the blue i get an invitation
to go to the christmas party at my home,
and i was, of course happy about that,
i thought, " do i really want to go
have people looking at me, feeling sorry?"
but i finally decided to go.
and i go in that night,
and you sort of walked in and walked down some stai rs.
when you first walk in you could see the whole place,
and it was huge, and shoulder to shoulder.
and russ was like the pied piper in the middle.
where russ went, there were throngs of people.
as russ made his way around the room,
there was always a throng of people.
everybody wanted to shake his hand, touch him.
so, umm...
i, uh...
i finally shook his hand,
said, "hi, thanks for inviting me", whatever.
he leaned over to me and he said,
"a couple of us are going out for dinner afterward. do you wanna go?"
and, uh...
let me start that again.
"a couple of us are going out to dinner. do you wanna go?"
and i said, "well, golly yeah, russ, if you really want to have me."
so he told me where and i went.
and it was russ, and four other people, and me.
and, uh...
and at that moment in my life,
that meant... a lot.
because i was down.
and that russ solomon would care enough,
and do that personal little touch...
means something to me now, 20 some years later.
he could have used it, i mean, most guys would have used it
as a business opportunity and grabbed
a couple record company presidents and whatever,
instead of some out of work guy.
but that's not the way russ sees life.
the whole magic of tower as a chain
was that it was a chain of independent stores.
book stores as well as the record stores.
so when you walked into a tower record store,
you thought it was the only one on the planet.
the l.a. people always thought the l.a. store was the first store.
the new yorkers always thought the new york store was.
the san francisco people thought that their store was.
because they all had the individual flavor
of the people who ran it and who worked there.
which made them very unique.
there was no cookie cutter going on at all.
until we got into some of the larger markets
on the east coast, then we started buying
national tv for ads, so we became a national brand.
but you had to have
the credibility in the larger markets
before you could go into the suburbs.
probably in about late '703,
we established our own advertising department.
that was chris hopson who ran it.
farrace was just working in there
as one of the advertising people, the assistants.
farrace also was one of these thinkers.
and he came to me one day and says,
"we ought to have a magazine for tower,
i've got an idea what to call it: pulse."
i said, "great, let's do it."
working with chris,
we hammered out this way that the magazine would exist
and when people advertised in it,
they would get a sale price in the store,
positioning in a rack,
just the things that really gave it the teeth.
pulse was another credibility thing for us.
we could not only sell music,
but we could write about it, we could communicate about it.
i mean, there was nothing and no one
with the exception of your rock fanzines
and small columns in maybe a few of the major newspapers
that were interested in what you were doing.
there weren't that many people interested
in what 25—year—old kids were doing with music.
so you made your record, you gave a few interviews
to music publications, and some daily newspapers,
that was all there was to do.
it was a very credible music magazine,
and it was a national music magazine
because of all the markets we were in.
and the magazine grew and it was a really good magazine.
but it was a great idea.
i remember him saying more than once,
"just don't lose too much money on it."
and try to make something.
it was the first time he really focused on an idea i had.
you'd listen to the people who had ideas.
the kids in the store,
who i say invented all kinds of ideas.
everything we ever did was invented
by the kids in the store.
the art on the walls, the way they displayed things.
their attitude about what to buy and what not to buy.
was all things happening at the store level.
the whole "no music, no life", came out of japan.
we adopted it, brought it in, and used it.
so we're using their creativity.
going, "wow, this is interesting."
or, "ah, that's too dark."
and i'm going, "no it's not, it's fun."
no music, no life, in this sort of
snoopy, peanuts kind of script,
i'm going, "this is very cool."
it was famous for the record cover paintings
that was jammed on its walls outside.
but that became prominent.
all of a sudden, that became the norm
for anywhere we had windows.
they'd expect us to put some displays.
you aspired to have your album
part of that big mural out there, you know.
i mean, the board thing was really cool,
and then we took it inside where we had an art dept.
that was all foam core, it wasn't just people stapling albums up.
people went to great lengths,
like they'd get that weird foam cardboard stuff
and make a baby, and then there's
an actual dollar bill dangling in front of it,
and it looks like water behind it, you know,
and when you'd see people go to that much trouble for you,
for your band,
we were just... we were just shocked.
i think that really influenced and enhanced
the experience people had when they came in the store.
the presentation of music...
was physically exciting.
they branded it, they made
those red and yellow logos and signs.
and turned the idea that this was your local record store
into a national thing.
tower was growing at a faster and faster rate,
was becoming more successful,
and was becoming more known or renowned.
the employees at tower felt proud about that.
we helped each other make it work.
we tried to get the person below us promoted
so that they could move on.
i became a store manager.
i became the regional director,
i became vice president of operations for the usa,
i became vice president and director
of in—store design and development.
we were really getting into an expansion mode.
it was quite a transition from being store-centric
to having to look at the whole picture.
but all those years weren't wonderful years.
i only remember this because i was a young guy,
and had to lay some people off for the first time.
'79, '81, and like '83 were years
where the record companies were actually laying people off.
rock and roll, which had been so exciting
just 10 or 15 or 20 years earlier,
kind of got to the point where it was a little bit stagnant.
the record labels, many of them,
had put all their eggs into the disco basket.
a lot of radio stations immediately changed formats
in every big city there were two or three disco stations
that replaced other formats of radio,
and i think hurt as disco didn't sell that well.
there were a lot of layoffs, record sales went way, way down,
and some in the industry that were really worried.
it was all disco, and then disco just one day crashed.
you would up having these djs to get attention,
take advantage of it.
"disco sucks, man."
and so there was a recession.
three things happened that pulled the music industry
out of its recession, out of its doldrums.
one thing was mtv.
turn it on, leave it on.
america, see the music you want to see.
i want my mtv.
artists who'd been somewhat successful
could add a whole new visual part of their careers.
if you got your video on mtv,
that directly had a huge impact on sales.
hi, mtv.
i can remember clearly signing off on
video budgets that were $700, $800,000.
it was all important that we get that thing on mtv
and if we did, boy we were off to the races.
call your cable company and say,
"i want my mtv!"
the second thing was michael jackson's thriller album.
in the record industry, there's a saying, "hits save everything."
and so thriller was the proverbial rising tide
that lifted all the boats.
so many people went into record stores,
including tower, tens of millions of them at a time.
and when they were in there, they'd say,
"oh, how about also this lionel richie album,
"and how about this madonna album,
and how about this springsteen, and prince album?ii
then the whole thing started to lift.
and then the third and final thing,
which was much more of a prolonged thing
was the adoption of the cd.
it's hard to remember now, because they seem so antiquated,
but cds for a while were cool.
they were shiny and silver, and state of the art,
and they sounded perfect.
they sounded pristine, and that was something
that we couldn't get from our big, cumbersome lps.
that was exciting because it was digital
and as much as i like the sound of lps,
the ticks and pops when you were listening to classical
used to just drive me up the wall.
so this thing was coming out, and you'd go,
"okay, well how do we explain this to people?"
how do we tell them there's a whole,
not only that there's a whole new technology out there,
but there's also a reason to buy it,
because there are enough cds out there for you to buy.
but you didn't know
if the people would adopt it or not.
the executives at labels resisted the cd,
they wanted no part of it at all.
they were worried that it'd create piracy.
but russ persevered th rough that,
and he was the first, biggest, best champion of the cd.
it is so clean.
i'm very conscious of high quality sound.
he always said that that was going to be
the savior of the retail store.
these new, innovative, high end,
super great sounding discs.
everybody, it turns out,
was getting tired of the lp,
and they were ready to replace their record collections
on this more expensive product called the cd.
i mean that was a huge piece of the record business
was people replacing their catalogs with cds.
look at this cool new thing.
where can i buy it? tower records.
as an experiment, the tower store
on sunset boulevard in los angeles
has installed a bin full of cds.
they realized the cd was much more expensive.
and it would push up that price point
up to maybe $15.99 or $16.99,
which was a god send for the record industry
at that time, and tower took advantage of it.
i pump up the volume, pump up the volume i
i pump up the volume, check it out... i
by 1988 though, cassette sales nearly doubled,
cds had exploded, and the market for vinyl lps
had shrunk by nearly two thirds.
so it was exciting for the record company,
it was exciting for the consumer,
and for the artist.
all of a sudden, you sold you were rich.
all of this flowed from the fact that
the cd was selling so well.
and tower, of course benefited from that,
they were part of that culture too.
in response to this consumer defection,
a number of major record stores have removed vinyl albums
from their shelves altogether.
so, is vinyl dead?
today's popular music
is more diverse than ever before,
and selection is at an all-time high.
but the cost of pre-recorded music
has also reached new levels,
causing customers to be wary
of purchasing unknown artists and musical styles.
tower and the record labels were doing this dance on price
that suppliers and wholesalers often do
which is sort of: "where will the consumer break?"
to combat this problem,
tower has introduced their new cd listening stations
in its retail locations worldwide,
and the public's reaction has been tremendous.
but i think where russ said and where tower records said, they were just like,
" every christmas the records cost more, and they're selling more."
what's not to like?
our stores are bigger, they're better stocked,
they have more knowledgeable people.
competition will take care of itself.
that's it, russ, you can open more stores now.
i pump up the volume, pump up the volume i
i pump up the volume, dance dance... i
russ had a serious amount of power, for a long time.
there were always a lot of record chains,
but tower was, i think the most powerful one
for a long period of time.
recently, tower records was again recognized
as u.s. music retailer of the year by narm,
the national association of recording merchandisers.
this makes the fourth time that tower's received
this prestigious award.
the honor was bestowed in recognition of tower's
high profile image, marketing and merchandising strength,
and fiscal responsibility.
so starting in 1984, you had michael jackson,
and madonna, and bruce springsteen, and prince,
and then you had the hair metal bands
and then you had the grunge era,
and then you had hootie and the blowfish,
and then you had this entire period
'84 to 2000, it's no coincidence
that hip hop had its booming growth
during this period.
then you had boy bands and britney spears
and christina aguilera, and all th ese acts
that took advantage of teen pop stuff that was big.
so it was just one bomb exploding
after another in music.
tower was the center of it all.
if they're paying by credit card,
the register sets the charge in a matter of seconds.
you make that kind of money,
you want to hang on to it.
tower, tower again, and again.
all the music is stuck
in this completely warped galaxy,
but then tower goes and gets it back,
and opens stores all over your planet.
tower records, more music for less money.
and it was just overwhelmingly big. everybody knew the logo.
everybody knew the red and yellow bag.
when the digital revolution came,
you know the record business jumped on it
with the cd, not realizing that they were
really causing their own demise.
but i definitely think that tower was optimistic,
and they felt like the good times would last
for a good long time.
i mean they expanded during this period.
well, by the early '9os, we were having
pretty good success in our foreign operations.
again, it was driven by japan,
which was extremely profitable.
maybe more so than the domestic company in america.
we moved the old shibuya store
to this new shibuya store, it was an eight story building.
84,000 feet.
each floor was a segmented store.
and the place was doing hundreds of hundreds
of thousands of dollars a month.
i mean, it was a huge success.
you couldn't stop 'em.
it gave us a lot of confidence.
somebody came from england and said,
"why don't you have a store in england?"
howdy, i'm russ solomon.
i want to take this opportunity to welcome all of you
to our little spot in central london,
and i hope you're going to have a great time tonight
seeing what is tonight, the marriage of wembley and tower.
two great names in entertainment.
so drink up and have a great time.
i'm doin' it.
and then in japan, the guy that we sent to japan
a few years later, makes a contact with somebody in taiwan
to make a partnership
for hong kong and taiwan and singapore.
the company was really getting big.
we were doing business on a very high level.
but you never escaped this thing that
wow, it's like, i'm sitting in an ex-pat bar
at 2:00 in the morning in taipei,
you know, and i'm from sacramento.
how cool is this?
moving to countries outside of japan
was a risk.
they expanded in latin america,
in asia, and all over the place.
can you give the fans message tonight?
no music, no life.
we were becoming famous worldwide,
and we enjoyed that.
why, i suppose it stroked our egos
to a certain point.
it was fucking awesome.
i mean, come on.
i mean, my gosh, it was a mind blower.
it was really fun.
we got to know more about music
going in to mexico city, going in to colombia,
and buenos aires, it allowed us to know
a lot more about latin music.
but we weren't really successful
in any of the other countries we went into.
therein lies the tale.
you know sometimes, i guess, one can get
a little too big for their britches.
like i said, there was this culture
that was growing that wherever we wanted
to put a store, build it and they will come,
field of dreams bullshit.
there was no due diligence, for christ sakes,
done on buenos aires or mexico city.
i said borrow all that damn money.
i'm as guilty about that as anybody else.
i'm stupid for saying yes
to partnerships in argentina
even though i didn't totally believe in 'em.
bud did not want the company to go in to so much debt.
he would succumb to the pressure that russ
put on him, although he was happy enough,
especially because he was making
a lot of money, personally.
if you look at the music industry
at any given point during that period
from '84 to 2000, you wouldn't really go,
"oh no, there's choppy waters on the horizon."
russ, what about these new technologies
like the mini disc, dcc, or beaming music and video
right in to my house?
are my cds history, and will your inventory
at tower become obsolete?
there's so many new technologies
we simply get involved with them.
we get involved with them
at the early part of their development
and we grow with 'em, or when they die,
we throw them out like d.a.t.
as for the whole concept of beaming something
in to one's home, that may come along someday,
that's for sure, but it will come along
over a long period of time, and we'll be able
to deal with it and change our focus
and change the way we do business
to deal with the situation as it really is.
as far as your cd collection,
and our cd inventory for that matter,
it's going to be around for a long, long time, believe me.
when you look back on all your mistakes,
and you make 'em, that's for sure,
it just, it catches up with ya,
is what the truth of it is.
you think you're going to be all right,
and when it catches up with ya,
then it's too late to do anything about it.
the business had grown significantly.
it was an international business.
sales were running close to a billion dollars by that time,
and bud the accountant was possibly
a little bit over his head.
we had to hire a guy from the outside.
fellow by the name of dee searson.
because i had complete trust in bud,
i had also complete trust with dee.
by the early 19903, the relationship
between bud and russ had become a little bit strained.
bud stopped going to the daily lunches,
they were giving him ulcers.
bud's job became less and less important.
he finally had to leave.
so it was around 1995 that bud decided to retire.
russ will, even to this day, will say
that that's one of the things that went wrong
when bud was kind of eased out.
! think bud was that kind of person
they felt as though something's going to happen.
the company won't, will not be the same.
when bud left, dee took over as the cfo.
i'm developing a company and expanding a company,
he's managing the money, and it was a surprise to me
that i couldn't use all that money
to open new stores.
dee was put on a mission to go out
and get money by tower selling bonds.
well, it made it easier for tower
to borrow more money.
things became much more tense.
we had pressure from creditors,
from bond holders, from banks,
and there was pressure in the business in general.
a perfect storm of events was developing
in the music industry as a whole.
we'd gone from vinyl singles, to cassette singles,
to cd singles, but we cut that out
because we felt like, rightfully so,
why were we letting people buy
the best song off an album,
let's just not make that available,
and they'll have to buy the album.
and at that day and time, it was true.
an eventually, i think people were kind of
crying foul about that,
like okay, i like a couple of britney spears songs,
but do i really want to buy her whole record for $18?
you know, it was the peak of that.
there was no need for a whole generation
of kids to even go in a record store
to get their music.
if you haven't got kids coming into record stores
to buy records, heh, you've lost a lot.
but then a whole bunch of other things started to happen.
you had all these mass merchants
getting into the music business.
and there were horrible, horrible price wars.
everybody and their brother started selling cds.
you know target, wal-mart, all these companies.
and they would sell 'em at cost.
what that took away from us was the traffic created by the hits.
if you had a tower records in some market,
and a best buy moved across the street,
the music consumer would go, "hey, here's the tower
on my right where i can buy the cd for 20 bucks,
and here's the best buy on the left
where i could buy the cd for 10 bucks."
even before napster, that was a big problem.
the industry as a whole didn't respond appropriately
to what was happening.
what they should have done was make the records cheaper.
they could have, but they didn't.
and i remember vividly the very first story on,
"what is an mp3?", you know, that we ever did.
i wasn't depressed the first time i saw napster.
actually, i remember it very clearly,
and i went on and there were 800,000 people on it.
and i thought, "wow,
this is unbelievable. this is fantastic."
i wasn't thinking that those 800,000 people
were stealing from me, heh.
it was the most amazing
piece of software in history.
there was community in it.
you could look at each others lists, playlists.
it was just a natural.
mike farrace literally had
the first record store online.
but we didn't know what to do with it.
in fact, our store was on aol.
talk about lame.
developing that into retail
wasn't really something that was on my radar.
but when you realized how easy it was
for people to share files and just literally
take music for free, that's a problem.
how do you compete with that?
if you could get coca-cola for free from your faucet,
you wouldn't buy a bottle of coca-cola.
on one hand, you go, okay, well what's the big deal?
singles are cheap,
we don't really need that much money anyway.
on the other hand, when napster came out
the big issue was, "how do you compete with free?"
on one hand, you have all these people
who are stealing music for free,
on the other hand, we have this $18 cd,
which is our main product. not really a balance.
but if you have a single, if you have a 99-cent single,
or a cheap way of, an alternative way
of selling music, that's a little easier
to compete with free.
and we of course saw that later because itunes kicked in,
and songs cost 99 cents and it did very well.
they think music is available on the computer,
go google it,
and they think they can just get it for free.
and that was something that was discussed
at nauseam with russ and tower.
he believed that there would always be people
wanting to buy records to have a collection,
a library, if you will, of product.
those people died off and went away,
and the generation that followed
believes that having an ipad, that's your music collection.
that's what it is today, and that's the truth.
there's no records. go buy a record, are you nuts?
and so that kind of started leaving
the terrestrial retailers behind
because that kind of stuff,
it's just too easy, too convenient.
i mean i still enjoy going in to a record store,
but i can't tell you the last time i did.
did the industry push people a little bit
to piracy by forcing them to buy albums
when they only wanted a song?
i can't say that that is true or not true
but you could certainly make that argument.
and so what became apparent was the music industry is changing
and we are not able to adjust to that change.
you could couch that as we're not adjusting to that change,
or we don't know how to adjust to that change,
but i think you're doing all of those things at once.
right when...
we probably could have changed,
in my mind, it was out of my control.
but my getting sick didn't help matters any.
in 1998, a couple of things happened.
one, my father had
an eight—way bypass heart operation,
and he was out of the picture most of that year.
i was appointed ceo.
russ was kicked up to chairman.
stanley, chris hopson, dee searson and i
were equals, then all of a sudden,
i'm kicked up to ceo.
that created some strain and difficulty.
i knew michael somewhat. i didn't like it.
he didn't come up from-- you know, the one thing
that historically that was about tower records,
is we all started and came up, and learned it
by living it, and doing it.
and that was pretty much the case
working for tower before i went to law school.
when i came back to tower in 1988,
i came in as a senior vice president and legal counsel,
and i was immediately tagged
as the boss' son.
there were people who wanted to sabotage me.
and mike was good, but the truth of it is,
he wasn't me, in the same sense of
being able to run what we wanted to run.
russell had a persona about him
that people embrace, michael didn't.
it was a challenge to...
...get the trust and cooperation
of my executive colleagues.
another thing started happening around 2000.
sales were flattening.
we had had growth from 1960 to 2000.
there was never a year that there was
no steady growth in sales.
this became problematic,
having a large debt and a large interest payment,
and that's sort of where tower started going down.
everything you've touched worked,
and then it stops.
it was just dumb.
the business plan didn't work.
there was no population to support it.
it's that simple.
you've borrowed all this damn money,
and all of a sudden, you become aware
that you've gone too far.
everything's working well in japan,
but because you've lost money
in all these other places,
and the bank is forcing you to do something,
the bank is forcing you to sell japan.
japan was making all kinds of money.
i mean, selling japan was a terrible loss.
they expanded too much.
that hurt them whether there had been a napster or not.
the fact that there was a napster later
sort of was the death blow.
well, here's russ now.
i'm being interviewed.
bud martin.
if bud had not gotten sick and died on me,
for crying out loud, and i'd have listened to him,
i wouldn't have been in the problems
that i had later on, i'll tell ya.
people appreciated what bud did eventually.
bud was a cool guy, and i know when a few drinks,
the old story about him swinging on chandeliers
at the red lion, putting lampshades on his head
running around, but they felt like he was the rock
of the company also.
he was the guy that took care of business.
he got older and sicker is all.
he had an illness, which he had for a long time.
he had not really told anybody by the early '9os,
but he was suffering from a debilitating illness,
leukemia, which, unbeknownst to most of us,
he had had for... maybe 15 years.
he had a good life.
it was sad at the end when it ended.
he didn't have much at all to speak of.
it was only a couple of years later
that he passed away.
anyway, i have a couple things i want to say about bud.
i may not get this out right, excuse me.
i wasn't going to do this.
he really taught all of us, us young kids
who are now vice presidents
to take a look
at what we were doing with our lives
as far as our morality was concerned.
he was a wonderful teacher to us.
he was an incredible sexist pig,
but at the same time he was entirely fair.
so after that, i only have one thing more to say.
if i can get this out.
sorry.
okay. bud, baby,
this one's for you.
bud martin.
bud, of all people, was making things possible to do.
you know, after all of those 26 years,
probably the last three years were spent
feeling that the whole idea of tower records
was not going to be around much longer.
at the end, for me, it was just a matter of when.
when the banks came in,
we knew that things were going to change.
it was, it was...
my father...
when the banks started putting pressure
on the company and insisting that we hire
a restructuring officer to run the company,
my father
became very upset.
the bank broke me that news.
and i said, "i don't think it's a good idea. "
they said, "well this is your choice,
"you either bring in new management
or we don't loan you the money."
so i say, "okay, we need the money.
we have to have the money, or we can't operate at all,
so okay, we'll try to bring in new management."
mike goes down to hire this woman,
betsy burton, he wants to hire her.
these new bodies were in. i think it was betsy,
i didn't even know
what was going on in the company at the time.
her idea was to spend all this
marketing money on branding, and you're just going,
"why are you going to spend this money on branding?
we're already established as a brand.
what you need is retail ads.
you need ads that are going to move product.
you need to move product. that's the bottom line."
and then she closed down pulse magazine.
losing pulse, firing 30 or 40 employees,
was heartbreaking.
if i ever came close to wanting to kill somebody,
with my hands, it was her.
we closed our print shop, i believe,
and to lose 30 employees.
we closed our sign shop and lost 30 employees.
we had to make cuts every place. we had to fire people.
and that is where you just had the two feelings of,
"i'm so good, i'm not going to be gone, i hope."
the restructuring officers were coming in and saying,
" look, you gotta cut your expenses
because you don't have any money."
in a way, they were saying the same thing
that bud was saying for the last four decades.
you know, i had the one side of my mouth
sit with him and try to figure out
growing the company and how to get out of this mess,
and the other side of my mouth,
deal with th ese guys that want to just tear everything down.
for me, i was conflicted.
they don't understand the product,
they don't understand the people that worked for the company,
they don't understand the systems,
they don't understand anything.
the seeds of failure are built in to it.
and it can't last.
he basically fought the restructuring officers--
there were numerous of them that came in.
and i remember so vividly going to the first meeting.
i talked to them, and i say, "well now, i'm on the board,
"and i've still got the officially
"the chairman of the company.
i mean, that's a chairman without portfolio,"
i said, "what do you want me to do?
"who's going to be the visionary?
"who's going to think about what we should be doing
in this industry in the future?"
and this idiot woman says to me,
"we don't need a visionary."
i can't control anything anymore.
so what was i to do? just shake my head and walk off.
betsy had interviewed the group,
and if i remember, most of us individually
who were in senior management, so we knew what was going on.
and mike solomon was promoted to president,
and he had to do what th ese bank guys wanted to do,
and so everything just kind of had stopped.
somebody who was an outsider
was taking it away from us.
i was caught in the middle, really.
we needed to be profitable, basically,
and we needed to pay our debt. but to do that,
we basically had to cut the heart out of the company.
in 2004, they got rid of me and dee
and mark viducich,
i guess they decided, i think then,
to liquidate the company.
they didn't say it,
and it took 'em a few years to do it,
but they were no longer
interested in trying to either grow the company
or save the company, in my opinion.
they told us, and instructed us
what we had to do to cut costs, save money,
increase profits if we could, or at least decrease losses,
so if we can fire someone making
200,000, we can hire someone making 100,000.
i was in mike solomon's office
with he and a lady we call betty boop,
and you know why you're there.
it's not a secret, i told him and betty,
"you guys are the ones that shouldn't be here.
you guys are the people that should be fired, not me."
firing people that you had hired 30 years ago.
people that you know, were started as clerks
that were now regional managers or vps or whatever.
it's just, you know, awful.
stanley and i were up at lake tahoe.
we're having a drink after doing some gambling at the bar,
and out of the blue, he says, "oh bob, by the way,
we're restructuring the company."
"we need to structure the company
because of growth or whatever,"
and i was just like, stunned.
because, i mean, this little private setting.
so, i mean, i was hammering down some scotches at that point.
the day heidi fired me, you know,
she called me in one day and she says,
"rudy, this is hard for me to say,
but i want a divorce."
it was really hard, and i knew it was hard for her
as it was for me, you know, and so,
i went to russ, he said, "now what the fuck
are we going to do with you?" like that.
he never fired anybody in his life.
let alone his whole executive committee for christ sakes.
— it's not who he was. - he took me out for lunch.
actually called me and he said, "want to go to lunch?"
and i thought, "this is not boding well.
"russ doesn't call you and ask you to lunch.
this is not..." you know. and he was in tears.
i mean, it was as hard for him as it was for me.
it was probably harder, i felt worse for him.
russ and i are cousins, and mike solomon,
who was also the ceo at one time, and i are cousins,
and to see family members just thrown aside too
was harder than just losing a 30-year career.
and at the end of 30 years, i got a watch.
just shortly after i left the company.
in fact, i'm wearing it right now, today.
and it says,
" bob, thank you, we love you, tower records."
and uh, it was mutual.
! wish probably that i could say there was more
survivor's guilt, but, um,
there was a lot of relief too.
and then as more layoffs happened...?
no?
cutting the essential parts of tower
that made it so successful was heart wrenching.
that was the heart of the company.
i mean, the company wasn't going to run
without this team.
and sure enough it didn't.
tonight, the founder of tower records
is closing his last retail record store.
it's the end of the line for an icon
that put sacramento on the map.
one of several chains
closing its doors nationwide.
! was in new york at fourth and broadway,
and we had an apartment in the same building
and i was staying there, looking at the store
when it closed that night.
stood across the street and watched, yeah.
what are you going to do? it's over.
they all shut down at once, and a bunch of people
lost their job at the end.
it was one of the greatest tragedies of my life,
to be honest with you, when it closed down.
it really, really upset me.
and i missed it, i missed that routine of going
to buy my records or my cds or whatever.
it really was this organization,
this camaraderie, this group that coalesced around russ
and was able to feed off
and build on russ' vision.
in the early '708, i took a job at tower broadway
here in sacramento, at 16th and broadway,
and in 1992,
i actually ended up here at watt avenue as the manager.
we have a marquee out on the front of our store
that we just advertise what's going on
in the store and what's happening.
when we got the word
that the liquidators had won the auction
and it was imminent that it was going to be the end,
we wanted to put something up on the marquee.
one of my employees, dale, came up with:
all things must pass. thanks, sacramento.
i went home, and the next day i came in to work,
they had taken a huge banner
that was like 100-feet long it seemed like,
that said basically going out of business.
and they put that banner up across
the whole top of the exterior of the building,
covered up our sign that said "all things must pass",
and you know, it was pretty deflating.
it was like, you know reality slaps you right in the face.
when they were finally gone, they took down the sign,
and exposed our message one more time.
it's really sad.
the skeleton is still here.
and the parts are still here, even though they're not working.
and it was filled with records.
and the music was playing.
and the people were running around and shopping.
but then again, that's the past.
there's no way you can change that.
let's think about what to do in the future.
i sunrise doesn't last i
i all morning... i
driving though shibuya or shinjuku or herajuku
or wherever it was, and i see the tower records
fucking logo on a building.
i was like...
you guys have tower records? hell, yeah.
i it's not always going to be... i
so we went in.
it was fucking tower records, man.
every floor i went to, there was another different cd,
and there's displays everywhere,
and there's people shopping and buying music.
listening on listening stations,
and you know, it was amazing.
to see japan flourish like it does,
i'm really proud of them. i really am.
i'm as happy as can be.
because it just proves that it can be done.
'cause they're doing the same thing we did all along.
tower was russ' baby.
he built it, he nurtured it, he expanded it.
it's very special, it's very unique.
the feeling that they all have for russ,
for tower, for each other.
people went to music stores,
they listened to music, it was an experience
going in to a store and browsing
through tens of thousands of records.
it was here, we were part of it,
we all fell in love, and then it went away.
having a job doesn't have to be tedious,
it doesn't have to be boring, it doesn't have to be a place
that you hate to go every day.
it certainly wasn't for me, and probably everybody who worked at tower.
it was a family.
and that family ideal stuck with everybody
up till the end.
wasn't a job, it was just a way of life.
i think tower to me was
a vision of one person
who knew what they wanted to give to the world,
or offer to the world, and us spending
30 years both following
and trying to refine that vision.
we were part of people's lives
because music was part of people's lives.
i all things must pass i
i all things must pass away... i
it was the music that was meaningful
and we were how they got it.
what's the matter? did you run out of questions?
no.