The news that Tower Records will have to auction off its assetshits me in a personal place. As a California native, the original Tower Records store in Sacramento was a touchstone of my musical education. The first LP I ever bought with my own money (Beatles for Sale) came from Tower, as did my first 45 (the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” b/w “Stupid Girl”) and I can still recall the expression on my mother’s face when she looked at the Stones in their Carnaby Street finery. “I suppose that’s how you would like to look?” she asked, rhetorically I suppose. I was only eleven but the answer was: of course!
And how she gloated when I brought home my next single by the Stones, “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing in the Shadows?” which featured a picture of them in forties style drag, the ugliest bunch of queens any of us had ever seen. Not that we saw that many in Auburn, California. But you get the point.
The other Tower stores I encountered were paragons of haughtiness. Security guards stood at the doors of the one in San Francisco as if guarding Fort Knox. The employees always viewed my purchases with disdain if not contempt (searching for a Fred Neil import at the Tower on Sunset in LA I made the mistake of asking the man behind the counter if he knew anything about folk music) and even at its flagship store on Broadway in NYC they treated me like a thief. Didn’t I realize that Keith Richards lived upstairs? Why should they bother with me?
O how the mighty etc. Brought low by Napster and all that followed — a whole generation of kids who would sooner go to WalMart than a “record store” — Tower found itself in the sad position of begging for business lately. No one asked me to check my bag the last time I went to the store here; I was looking for a last minute birthday present for my friend Bob Roe and what I found were a bunch of gray haired white guys like me, pawing over the Bob Marley boxed sets. The sad thing is that we also bought new music — from Ali Farka Toure (RIP) to the New Pornographers to the Fiery Furnaces — to keep our ears happy and the record companies in business. Now I guess we’ll have to steal our music, like everybody else.