My first job was at the Tower Records at Columbus and Bay in San Francisco in 1969. (It was also the first job I ever applied for, so for a long time I thought that job-hunting was really easy.)
Yes, I have stories… but you can just watch the video.
The Tower that some of the comments here disparage seems to be very much the Tower of later years. Early Tower had the best selection around, and employees who created an atmosphere of freaky revelry. The fairly stodgy management didn’t really try too hard to control the staff as long as the records kept flowing out the doors. Fortunately they never caught on to our practice of giving huge, unauthorized “discounts” to attractive women.
Tower records in central London used to close after midnight.
Getting drunk in town on a Friday night and buying a handful of cds at Tower to listen to on my discman on the long tube journey home was a perfect payday night out.
The only time I’ve had easy access to a Tower Records, it was around the corner from Amoeba’s and Rasputin’s and was comparatively quite disappointing.
Ymmv, of course, but I was responding to the (purported) surprise of the comment above. A lot of people loved that place, and from my perspective it’s a bit of being too cool for school to pretend to be surprised by that.
In the old days, Tower was the only place to get concert tickets out here in the tules. It wasn’t so much that Tower itself was cool. It’s that it was our connection to something great.
Used to go to the aforementioned Sacramento Broadway location and also the one off of sunrise. Lived in LA for a while and would walk to the one on sunset… we didn’t have an amoeba where I was so tower was the destination (briefly supplanted by virgin megastore for like 2 months until I got tired of it). Virgin went away and became a urban outfitters. Tower went under and was replaced by a dimple that replaced by a pile of rubble. Sad to say that my vinyl purchases come from Amazon nowadays. Every once in a while I do a big purchase from third man…
didn’t have Tower in Dallas or Austin… Bill’s or Record Exhange & Waterloo. by the time i got to california Tower was lame. Only stopped in for the toys. For music it was Amoeba, Rasputins or Streetlight
All depends what you’re comparing it to, and when it was.
My recollection of Tower is from back before they opened one in every damn town. Coming from the sticks, the L.A. and N.Y. locations blew me away. All the things I’d heard of but never seen, everything that I would have had to special order in my small rural town was in stock!
Also unknown to me before Tower visits: being able to listen to something before buying. And pre-recorded DAT tapes are part of my memory of the NY location.
It doesn’t seem to have changed. I just searched for a few things i wanted and they were either not listed or out of stock. The prices higher than ordering direct from the label.
Ha! I worked at Tracks, the crappy mall chain that had the misfortune of opening up shortly before Tower decided to move in upstairs just above us in that mall that used to be the Campus Theater. It was of course insulting that the mall owners would do that, but we took it in stride, no one could really argue they weren’t the better store (even though they weren’t that great as you say).
Google tells me Wazoo is still open, which makes me happy, and that Schoolkids closed a while ago, which makes me sad.
I mean, when you have Amoeba or Rasputin nearby, most anything else will feel like a disappointment.
Back in the day my dad and I had a Saturday ritual where would go to Amoeba and sometimes Rasputin on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley to shop for music and movies.
I grew up in New York in the 80s and 90s, so can’t speak to the many Tower Records anywhere else. But Tower was a force where I grew up. And calling it “The Walmart of Record Stores” seems pretty spot on to me. It was where we begrudingly went when tickets weren’t available anywhere else, since this was before the various Ticketrons or whatever.
I’m sure some people loved Tower Records, but it strikes me as being as mainstream as mainstream got back in the day. And it was also what was trying to kill all the beautiful, quirky, dysfunctional, super independent underground record stores. There were a hundred better record stores in the East Village of NYC back when Tower was making its name. I don’t know if it was corporate or not, but it was certainly big business.
Maybe it was great in the 70s, but by the 80s and 90s it sucked all kinds of ass. At least in NYC. Maybe it was better in later years after all the alternatives were out of business.
