Tower Records was the store in my suburban town where all the ‘weirds’ worked… It was a nice intro to 90’s subculture for someone who was a little too young to actually participate in and gave a square tween like me a place to interact with it… Piercings are scary! There was a hot rod meet up in the parking lot… It was the place where people stood in line to get concert tickets before the internet. Some fond memories to be sure, but I never felt like it was special… I’m sure every record shop had a similar vibe. Now you have to go to the vape store to get that experience of being an outsider while you shop.
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I found out about grunge because Soundgarden opened for Guns ‘n’ Roses on a tour, and so the classic rock station (not local, but I could just barely get it with my antenna placed carefully near my window) felt obligated to play a song of theirs a couple of times that week. Eventually, of course, Nirvana and Pearl Jam made it to MTV. I didn’t find anything else until I got to college and happened to have studio classes with a guy from LA.
But I found a lot by subscribing to BMG and Columbia House and waiting patiently for their 3 for 1 deals, then buying things that sounded or looked interesting. Surprisingly, there’s more crap in my CD collection that I’m embarrassed about that I bought from my classic rock radio days than from my “that’s a weird album cover” purchases. Then I got my hands on the TVT/Wax Trax! catalog, and bought probably 25% of their inventory.
And then I moved to San Francisco, where I never went to Tower Records because I could go to Amoeba and Rasputin instead. I did hear about their final clearance sale, which I kicked myself for missing.
Weirdly, years later I did buy a bunch of CDs at Tower Records…in Naha, Japan. No idea how, or if, they were related, but definitely had the same logo.
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I used to visit the one that was in Point Loma San Diego and don’t recall anything particularly unique about the place. It was a music store that wasn’t shitty like Sam Goody but nowhere as awesome as Amoeba Records in LA.
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It was a great store. Huge amount of music. Great location.
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OMG, I completely forgot about a (physically) distant college radio station I discovered towards the end of high school, 88.7 KBVR. Same situation as you with reception. I had to work to get the station but it was like a transmission from another universe. I wrote down every band they played and then would search like crazy to find the bands. Several years later I met a dude that was a DJ on KBVR and he had me come on his show and I got to play whatever tracks I was obsessed about at the time. I cant tell you how strange it was to be on the other end of the once faint signal. Hopefully I exposed some young kids to new music as repayment to the radio gods.
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There was always Columbia House, where you could get ten albums for a dollar, and a mortgage.
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Actually, the vinyl market is where growth in the recording industry is coming from right now. Lots of chain stores now have vinyl sections to cash in, mostly made up of remastered classics in the heavier vinyl. Whether that can be sustained, who knows. But a smaller record shop tends to have different concerns than a chain place like Tower.
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Yes, I am well aware of this, I was addressing what went on in the 80’s and 90’s before the big chains like Tower crashed. Growth in the vinyl market has hit a brick wall because the remaining vinyl plants are a bottleneck-- they have more orders coming in than they can fill, smaller labels and DIY projects wait in line for six months or more. Plus, nobody makes the equipment anymore, so if a machine breaks the part has to be cannibalized from another machine or hand-tooled somewhere.
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By 2000 there were also countless online stores advertising CDs at cost. Physical stores couldn’t compete with that.
(Of course after you decided to make your purchase in the online store, you encountered the shipping fees. Which is where the store made its money.)
Definitely the vinyl scene is a huge mess right now. I’ve seen a lot of huge delays on vinyl releases from indie labels, with the LP often coming out months later than the CD version. Delays from those backlogged pressing plants causing release dates to keep getting pushed back. Meanwhile, major labels are flooding the market with cheaply done reissues of their catalog titles. Multiple reissues of the same record, with varying quality, are often available simultaneously. Pressing plants often have terrible quality control now and buying a brand new record full of pops and clicks isn’t that uncommon nowadays.
It’s a very cool time for vinyl fans, but at the same time, it’s very frustrating.
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Full disclosure - I worked for Tower for years.
One thing about Tower, is despite being a somewhat large record store chain - over 100 stores at its peak - it never had that much of a corporate structure. The main office was surprisingly humble, and the individual store’s managers had a bit of freedom in how their stores were run. Each store had its own product buyers, so the stock varied greatly from location to location. The idea was to cater to the local community, rather than having the same product in every store. At my local store, we had a really great jazz buyer for a while. If you heard about some new avant-garde European jazz CD, there was a good chance a copy would be in stock. Our local classical buyer also kept that section very well stocked. For classical music aficionados, there was nothing in the region with a selection even close to ours. If you were looking for anything remotely off the wall, the odds of finding it were far greater at Tower than at a chain store or even the local indie record stores.
Of course, this philosophy hurt Tower quite a bit. 75% of the weird stuff we stocked would never be sold. The majority of the sales came from recent top 40 releases and catalog stuff like The Beatles. Having these huge stores to keep all that stock took a financial toll on the company. Once retail music sales started dipping in the late 90s, this business model just wasn’t feasible any more.
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At least for the 4th & Broadway Tower in NYC they actually did stock lots of unusual and obscure music. Sometimes it got stocked on the aisle cap feature display racks.
The one near SDSU on El Cajon Blvd. was my nearest one . . . one of my favorite places to go as a teen every time I had a few bucks. Almost as much fun as Off the Record, down the street 
It had a huge selection, including some pretty unusual stuff; one of my friends once bought a record that was packaged in a pizza box (heck if I can remember the artist now). I could spend a couple of hours there, easily: browsing every aisle, accumulating an armful of records, then calculating how many I could actually afford to buy and putting the rest back (sob).
Remember the one by the Space Needle? … siiiiigh
Beck released an album entirely in sheet music form. All of the songs have since been professionally recorded in album form, but I refuse to listen to the “official” versions, as I hope to one day actually buy the damn folio and learn the songs myself.
…someday.
I really enjoyed the concert Beck and friends put together along with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for that album. I haven’t looked lately, but I can’t seem to find any recordings of it though.
Physical media will live on because it makes for keepsakes and gifts and you can sell it if you want to. Discogs is one of the biggest sites on the internet (possibly the biggest) because people want to be able to buy and sell recordings.
There wasn’t a Tower Records in Carlisle, and what I knew of it I just thought of it as another chain.
The magic was at Pink Panther Records (I still don’t know how they got away with using that name for 40 years). The owner, Keith Jefferson, blamed the store’s closing on supermarkets, discount music stores and internet sales. He didn’t mind competition as long as they cared about the music too.
Sadly, I never found out that Keith was an Earth and Black Sabbath roadie until after it had closed and I had left Carlisle.
Other than that there were a few places in Newcastle I would go to occasionally, like Bass Generator Records.
About 3 years ago I went looking for a “record shop” in Chicago. Found something way up on the north side and after a bit of searching found the store. They had an interesting window display, but no foot traffic and the front door didn’t even open. Eventually a nice gentleman opened a side door and let us in. He asked what we were looking for and I told him nothing in particular, we just wanted to look around. He was cool with that, but also really awkward, like he’d never had a customer come in to just check out records. And, the place was not what I expected. Though it had a large floor with labeled sections, the records were in super inconvenient stacks, not the bins you usually see. After 30 strange seconds where he sort of hovered as we walked around, we figured out what was going on.
This was a record label and not a retail shop! We all had a good laugh and left.
So yeah, music stores? R.I.P.
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I kept the un-fixed page open in a tab to look at it later. There was a <del> tag wrapped around the article.
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