60's TOWER RECORDS-Sunset Strip & SF - Lennon commercial
Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2013 1:02 pm
Sunset Strip's TOWER RECORDS
...HISTORIC ICONIC ICONOCLASTIC HIPPIE FREAK Record store LANDMARK
Where You'll find...TENS OF THOUSANDS OF LPS & TAPES AND A FEW DRUNK POP STARS. -John Lennon
Tower records in Phoenix in1971 was my favorite freak hangout. -jtk
Lennon TV spot
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAVez5B0vo8
Tower Records to be scratched from Strip
Shuttered landmark has a date with the wrecking ball, angering preservationists.
January 30, 2008|Bob Pool | Times Staff Writer
Preservation of what once was the Sunset Strip's most colorful place has turned into a black-and-white issue in West Hollywood.
Preservationists complain that city leaders blocked their application to have a former Tower Records building declared a historic resource because color photographs of the brightly painted building were attached to the paperwork instead of black-and-white pictures that officials said were required.
HISTORY
Tower was founded in 1960 by Russell Solomon in Sacramento, California. The store was named after his father's drugstore, which shared a building and name with the Tower Theater,[2] where Solomon first started selling records. The area is known for the landmark Tower Bridge. The first Tower Records store was opened in 1960 on Watt Avenue in Sacramento. By 1976, Solomon had opened Tower Books, Posters, and Plants at 1600 Broadway, next door to Tower Records. It was also one of the first retailers to move online in 1995 as Tower.com.[3]
Tower Records on the Sunset Strip
Seven years after its founding, Tower Records expanded to San Francisco, opening a store in what was originally a grocery store at Bay and Columbus streets. The chain eventually expanded internationally to include stores in the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Ireland, Israel, United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Argentina. The Tower Records stores in Japan split off from the main chain and are now independent. Arguably the most famous Tower Records outlet was the one located on the north side of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, California.
In addition to CDs and cassette tapes, stores also sold DVDs, video games, accessories, toys and electronic gadgets like mp3 players, while a few Tower Records locations sold books as well, such as the Sacramento, Brea and Mountain View stores in California, as well as stores in Nashville, New York, Seattle and Portland, Oregon.
In New York City, Tower Records operated a suite of stores on and near lower Broadway. The main store was located at the southeast corner of East 4th St and Broadway, consisted of four levels, and sold mainstream items. The Tower Records Annex was in the same building, but located 'in the back' at the southwest corner of East 4th St and Lafayette, and stocked items that were older and a bit more obscure. (As the CD replaced the LP, vinyl moved from the main store to the annex.) The third store was called Tower Video, and was located on the southeast corner of East 4th St and Lafayette; it specialized in video (for a while, the second floor of this location also sold books). The main store in the East Village was famous in the 1980s for selling albums of European New Wave bands not yet popular in the U.S. and was a noted hangout for teenagers from the wider metropolitan area. Their location near Lincoln Center was a magnet for those working in the field of Musical Theater
The company published a music magazine, Pulse!, which was distributed free in its stores.
In 2005, the company began using "scan and listen" stations in its stores. These stations allowed customers to audition a CD, to listen to audio samples from the disc, and it allowed them to search for particular songs, albums and artists. This model of listening station is still used at the Arizona-based chain Zia Records.[4]
In 2006, the company introduced the Tower Insider program. The program was free of charge and allowed the customer to receive a membership card which could be scanned with each purchase, allowing the customer to receive coupons and notification of special deals via e-mail.
Tower Records entered bankruptcy for the first time in 2004. Factors cited were the heavy debt incurred during its aggressive expansion in the 1990s, growing competition from mass discounters, and internet piracy.[5] Mismanagement, managerial incompetence, and crippling restrictions from the first bankruptcy deal also contributed to Tower's demise.[6]
Some observers took a pragmatic view. As Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer, has stated: "I'm sorry if Tower Records' and Blockbuster's sales plummet. On the other hand, it wasn't that long ago that those megastore chains drove a lot of neighborhood record stores out of business."[7]
The debt was estimated to be between $80 million and $100 million; assets totaled just over $100 million in February 2004.
On August 20, 2006, Tower Records filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy[9] for the second time in order to facilitate a purchase of the company prior to the holiday shopping season.
On October 6, 2006, Great American Group won an auction of the company's assets and commenced liquidation proceedings the following day, which included going-out-of-business sales at all U.S. Tower Records locations, the last of which closed on December 22, 2006. The Tower Records website was sold separately.[10]
The managers of FYE, a music store chain based in shopping malls, had negotiated a deal to acquire the two historic Tower locations in its home base of Sacramento, but they later backed out, stating that the "leases aren't what we thought they were". FYE did acquire the lease of the West End Avenue store in Nashville,[11] which eventually closed in 2011. A Tower Records in Torrance, CA was also taken over by FYE which continues to operate.
Rasputin Music, a new/used music/video store based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is expanding in the Central Valley of California by acquiring the leases for the former Tower Records stores in Fresno and Stockton. The Tower Records store in Stockton, located at 6623 Pacific Avenue, closed its doors permanently on December 19, 2006. A Rasputin Music store replaced it on April 28, 2007. Rasputin Music also operated the former Tower Records store in Mountain View as one of its own through the end of 2011, and its store in Pleasant Hill moved into the former Tower Records store in Concord, California.
The Landmark Plaza Tower Records Store in Alexandria, Virginia was permanently closed on December 18, 2006, and the Tysons Corner, Virginia, store was permanently closed on December 21, 2006. The noted 24-year-old store in Washington, D.C. (Foggy Bottom) was closed down on the next day, as was the store in Atlanta, Georgia.
On Friday, December 22, 2006, the last Tower Records store in New York City was closed down. It had been located at 1961 Broadway, one block north of Lincoln Center on Manhattan's West Side. It closed permanently along with all of the other remaining Tower Records stores in the United States. The final Tower Records store (in the Pacific Time Zone) to be closed was the one in Mountain View, which closed at mid-afternoon.
One building in Sacramento had been a Tower Records store for 40 years, and the lot across the street had been the location where Solomon began selling records in 1941.
R5 Records closed on June 4, 2010, and was sold to rival Dimple Records, which will reopen the store in mid-July 2010.
The Tower Records building in Boston, located at the intersection of Newbury Street and Massachusetts Avenue, was instrumental in the conversion of the former street's commercial value. The eight-story building, renovated by Frank Gehry in the late 80s, is prominently visible from eastbound Interstate 90. The store (which occupied the first five stories) featured gold stars of Boston artists (including Gang Starr, New Kids on the Block, and Yo-Yo Ma) embedded in the front landing. Virgin Megastore took over the store from 2002-7, and the space is now occupied by Best Buy.
Return
On-line merchant Caiman, Inc., reopened the website from Montreal, Quebec, on June 1, 2007. This company also announced plans to reopen the stores themselves—opening stores in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco within the next nine months. They hired former Tower buyer Kevin Hawkins to assist with the re-opening. Hawkins, however, along with former Tower employee George Scarlett, has since left Caiman. The website remains based in Montreal but the departure of these two employees leaves some doubt as to whether the relaunch of the brand will move forward.[13]
[edit] Culture
* The film Empire Records was written by a former employee of Tower Records store #166 (ChrisTown Mall) in Phoenix, Arizona. When the film was released and for a long time afterward, a number of her former coworkers still working, cited anecdotes and other elements of the film that related to the store. This store closed in early 2005, ten years after the film's release.
International stores
Japan
Tower Shibuya store.
In 1979, Tower Records in Japan started its business as the Japan Branch of MTS Incorporated. The following year, Sapporo Store, the first in Japan opened. In 1981, Japanese subsidiary Tower Records Japan Inc. (TRJ) was established.
In October, 2002, TRJ went independent from the international chain by management buyout. The bankruptcy of Tower Records in the U.S. in 2006 did not affect TRJ as it had been completely independent. As of August, 2010, TRJ maintains 83 directly operated store locations throughout Japan,[14] including the Shibuya Store in Tokyo (moved to the current location in March, 1995) which is said to be one of the biggest music retail outlets in the world, occupying selling space of 5,000 m² (9 floors).[15] TRJ also publishes free magazines Tower, bounce, and intoxicate directly and through its subsidiary NMNL.
In addition to being the leading CD retailer in Japan, TRJ is the majority stakeholder in Napster Japan, a joint venture between TRJ and Napster LLC. On March 1, 2010, Napster Japan and TRJ announced that Napster Japan would terminate all of its services on May 31, 2010 due to the difficulty in covering the costs for maintaining the required systems to continue the services.[16][17]
Republic of Ireland
There remain two Tower Records stores operational in Dublin, Ireland. These are a licensed franchise of MTS Incorporated (USA).[18] One of the stores, located on Wicklow Street, recently launched a café upstairs called "Sound Bites".[19]
[edit] Thailand
TowerRecords had been in Thailand for decades until it ran out of business. One of the biggest megastores located on the top floor CentralWorld superstore in Bangkok. It was one of the biggest retail stores that offered imported CDs and music accessories. [20]
[edit] Mexico
The first Tower Records store in Mexico opened in the mid 1990s in the Zona Rosa area featuring 3 floors and a live DJ. After international bankrutpcy, the stores were acquired by Promotora Musical, a retail company owned by Grupo Carso, the same owner of Mixup record stores. There are Tower Records stores in Mexico City (Altavista, Gran Sur and Mundo E), Puebla (Las Animas) and Monterrey (Paseo San Pedro).
United Kingdom
Originally Tower Records was just a London-based concern, with a first store in Kensington High Street in 1984 being followed the next year by a 25,000-square-foot (2,300 m2) flagship outlet at 1 Piccadilly Circus and later two more smaller outlets at Whiteleys in Bayswater, and Kingston. However by the start of the 1990s the chain had grown to encompass a number of other stores, with large entertainment stores also selling movies, books, magazines and games in Birmingham and Glasgow, as well as a number of smaller stores that had been purchased from rival American retailer Sam Goody when it had left the UK marketplace (for example of this express format—Weston-super-Mare).
However with tough trading conditions in the UK market, as well as the company's trouble in the States, the firm followed Sam Goody in retreating from the UK market.[21] The London stores in Piccadilly and Kensington were sold to Virgin Group in 2003, who for a while traded under the Tower brand at the former site until the store could be fully refurbished, while the other stores were closed. The store was subsequently renamed Zavvi in September 2007 after a management buyout of the Virgin Megastores. The Piccadilly store closed on Wednesday, 14 January 2009 by the administrators.
For S.F. rockers, Tower Records was where it was all happening -- now the party's over
Record promotion men Jeff Trager and Bill Perasso used to sit around drinking with pal Russ Solomon at their favorite hangout, the cocktail lounge at Villa Roma at the busy intersection of Columbus and Bay streets. Solomon, who owned record stores in Sacramento, would point to the supermarket across the street. "One day I'm going to open a store there," he told them.
Nursing a hangover at a nearby drive-in one morning, Solomon saw a "For Rent" sign on the lot, walked across the street to a pay phone and made a deal to lease the property. He had a cousin who was a good carpenter, and he put him to work.
"We painted the place, hung some lights and filled it up with records," Solomon says. "It was something else."
He opened the San Francisco Tower Records in April 1968. The sign outside boasted "Largest Record Store in the Known World -- Open Nine to Midnight 365 Days a Year."
It was a good time to enter the retail record business in San Francisco. The Beatles were at the top of the charts. Bill Graham was running concerts every weekend at the Fillmore featuring a never-ending procession of exciting new rock bands -- Fleetwood Mac, Traffic, Ten Years After, the Chambers Brothers. The San Francisco rock scene was flourishing with groups emerging almost daily, such as Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana and It's a Beautiful Day. Over in North Beach, disc jockey Tom Donahue was inventing FM rock radio on KSAN and playing all the great new records by these bands and more.
At the opening party, revelers spilled out the door, plastic drop cloths protected the record racks and the long-forgotten rock band West, which had just released an album on Epic Records, performed.
"The drummer dosed me with something," says Stan Goman, who was working in the Sacramento operation at the time, but would serve for 10 years as the San Francisco store manager, beginning in 1972. "Driving back to Sacramento that night was a trippy drive. What a store."
Solomon would eventually open more than 75 other stores with the soon familiar red and yellow signs. The Greenwich Village store spanned three blocks and was touted as the largest record store in the country. The London store was on Piccadilly Circus. The Sunset Strip store was famed for star sightings; it used to open early in the morning to accommodate Elton John while he abused his charge account. Now the international chain Solomon built is defunct.
Sacramento always remained the corporate headquarters and the heart of the chain. That was where, in 1952, Solomon had begun stocking the record department of his father's shop, Tower Drugs, a landmark retail location with a tower on the building. But the Columbus and Bay store was where the party always was.
"You couldn't have opened a record store at a better time," Solomon says. "You had the Summer of Love, the Fillmore-Avalon action, the Haight-Ashbury just starting to explode. Everybody came into San Francisco, and they were just mad about music. It was a mysterious, wonderful miracle."
"It was a new style," says Dave Haynes, who managed the store for a couple of years in the '60s. "The timing came together. All of a sudden the store showed up and fed all that. I don't know whether it was a stroke of luck or genius."
"He wanted to fill all the racks up and have turnstiles like a supermarket," says Rudy Danzinger, who went to work for Solomon in Sacramento in 1958 for a princely $70 a week. "He had this vision."
Of course, the party is now officially over. Tower was turned over to liquidators just weeks ago. Truth told, the store was never the same after CDs. But neither was the record business. When the store sold those black vinyl discs in 12-inch cardboard sleeves -- some of which opened up on a gatefold -- for around 5 bucks, there was magic in the place. Tower used to have a sign outside the store during the holidays that read "Thousands of Gifts for Under $10."
...HISTORIC ICONIC ICONOCLASTIC HIPPIE FREAK Record store LANDMARK
Where You'll find...TENS OF THOUSANDS OF LPS & TAPES AND A FEW DRUNK POP STARS. -John Lennon
Tower records in Phoenix in1971 was my favorite freak hangout. -jtk
Lennon TV spot
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAVez5B0vo8
Tower Records to be scratched from Strip
Shuttered landmark has a date with the wrecking ball, angering preservationists.
January 30, 2008|Bob Pool | Times Staff Writer
Preservation of what once was the Sunset Strip's most colorful place has turned into a black-and-white issue in West Hollywood.
Preservationists complain that city leaders blocked their application to have a former Tower Records building declared a historic resource because color photographs of the brightly painted building were attached to the paperwork instead of black-and-white pictures that officials said were required.
HISTORY
Tower was founded in 1960 by Russell Solomon in Sacramento, California. The store was named after his father's drugstore, which shared a building and name with the Tower Theater,[2] where Solomon first started selling records. The area is known for the landmark Tower Bridge. The first Tower Records store was opened in 1960 on Watt Avenue in Sacramento. By 1976, Solomon had opened Tower Books, Posters, and Plants at 1600 Broadway, next door to Tower Records. It was also one of the first retailers to move online in 1995 as Tower.com.[3]
Tower Records on the Sunset Strip
Seven years after its founding, Tower Records expanded to San Francisco, opening a store in what was originally a grocery store at Bay and Columbus streets. The chain eventually expanded internationally to include stores in the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Ireland, Israel, United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Argentina. The Tower Records stores in Japan split off from the main chain and are now independent. Arguably the most famous Tower Records outlet was the one located on the north side of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, California.
In addition to CDs and cassette tapes, stores also sold DVDs, video games, accessories, toys and electronic gadgets like mp3 players, while a few Tower Records locations sold books as well, such as the Sacramento, Brea and Mountain View stores in California, as well as stores in Nashville, New York, Seattle and Portland, Oregon.
In New York City, Tower Records operated a suite of stores on and near lower Broadway. The main store was located at the southeast corner of East 4th St and Broadway, consisted of four levels, and sold mainstream items. The Tower Records Annex was in the same building, but located 'in the back' at the southwest corner of East 4th St and Lafayette, and stocked items that were older and a bit more obscure. (As the CD replaced the LP, vinyl moved from the main store to the annex.) The third store was called Tower Video, and was located on the southeast corner of East 4th St and Lafayette; it specialized in video (for a while, the second floor of this location also sold books). The main store in the East Village was famous in the 1980s for selling albums of European New Wave bands not yet popular in the U.S. and was a noted hangout for teenagers from the wider metropolitan area. Their location near Lincoln Center was a magnet for those working in the field of Musical Theater
The company published a music magazine, Pulse!, which was distributed free in its stores.
In 2005, the company began using "scan and listen" stations in its stores. These stations allowed customers to audition a CD, to listen to audio samples from the disc, and it allowed them to search for particular songs, albums and artists. This model of listening station is still used at the Arizona-based chain Zia Records.[4]
In 2006, the company introduced the Tower Insider program. The program was free of charge and allowed the customer to receive a membership card which could be scanned with each purchase, allowing the customer to receive coupons and notification of special deals via e-mail.
Tower Records entered bankruptcy for the first time in 2004. Factors cited were the heavy debt incurred during its aggressive expansion in the 1990s, growing competition from mass discounters, and internet piracy.[5] Mismanagement, managerial incompetence, and crippling restrictions from the first bankruptcy deal also contributed to Tower's demise.[6]
Some observers took a pragmatic view. As Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer, has stated: "I'm sorry if Tower Records' and Blockbuster's sales plummet. On the other hand, it wasn't that long ago that those megastore chains drove a lot of neighborhood record stores out of business."[7]
The debt was estimated to be between $80 million and $100 million; assets totaled just over $100 million in February 2004.
On August 20, 2006, Tower Records filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy[9] for the second time in order to facilitate a purchase of the company prior to the holiday shopping season.
On October 6, 2006, Great American Group won an auction of the company's assets and commenced liquidation proceedings the following day, which included going-out-of-business sales at all U.S. Tower Records locations, the last of which closed on December 22, 2006. The Tower Records website was sold separately.[10]
The managers of FYE, a music store chain based in shopping malls, had negotiated a deal to acquire the two historic Tower locations in its home base of Sacramento, but they later backed out, stating that the "leases aren't what we thought they were". FYE did acquire the lease of the West End Avenue store in Nashville,[11] which eventually closed in 2011. A Tower Records in Torrance, CA was also taken over by FYE which continues to operate.
Rasputin Music, a new/used music/video store based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is expanding in the Central Valley of California by acquiring the leases for the former Tower Records stores in Fresno and Stockton. The Tower Records store in Stockton, located at 6623 Pacific Avenue, closed its doors permanently on December 19, 2006. A Rasputin Music store replaced it on April 28, 2007. Rasputin Music also operated the former Tower Records store in Mountain View as one of its own through the end of 2011, and its store in Pleasant Hill moved into the former Tower Records store in Concord, California.
The Landmark Plaza Tower Records Store in Alexandria, Virginia was permanently closed on December 18, 2006, and the Tysons Corner, Virginia, store was permanently closed on December 21, 2006. The noted 24-year-old store in Washington, D.C. (Foggy Bottom) was closed down on the next day, as was the store in Atlanta, Georgia.
On Friday, December 22, 2006, the last Tower Records store in New York City was closed down. It had been located at 1961 Broadway, one block north of Lincoln Center on Manhattan's West Side. It closed permanently along with all of the other remaining Tower Records stores in the United States. The final Tower Records store (in the Pacific Time Zone) to be closed was the one in Mountain View, which closed at mid-afternoon.
One building in Sacramento had been a Tower Records store for 40 years, and the lot across the street had been the location where Solomon began selling records in 1941.
R5 Records closed on June 4, 2010, and was sold to rival Dimple Records, which will reopen the store in mid-July 2010.
The Tower Records building in Boston, located at the intersection of Newbury Street and Massachusetts Avenue, was instrumental in the conversion of the former street's commercial value. The eight-story building, renovated by Frank Gehry in the late 80s, is prominently visible from eastbound Interstate 90. The store (which occupied the first five stories) featured gold stars of Boston artists (including Gang Starr, New Kids on the Block, and Yo-Yo Ma) embedded in the front landing. Virgin Megastore took over the store from 2002-7, and the space is now occupied by Best Buy.
Return
On-line merchant Caiman, Inc., reopened the website from Montreal, Quebec, on June 1, 2007. This company also announced plans to reopen the stores themselves—opening stores in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco within the next nine months. They hired former Tower buyer Kevin Hawkins to assist with the re-opening. Hawkins, however, along with former Tower employee George Scarlett, has since left Caiman. The website remains based in Montreal but the departure of these two employees leaves some doubt as to whether the relaunch of the brand will move forward.[13]
[edit] Culture
* The film Empire Records was written by a former employee of Tower Records store #166 (ChrisTown Mall) in Phoenix, Arizona. When the film was released and for a long time afterward, a number of her former coworkers still working, cited anecdotes and other elements of the film that related to the store. This store closed in early 2005, ten years after the film's release.
International stores
Japan
Tower Shibuya store.
In 1979, Tower Records in Japan started its business as the Japan Branch of MTS Incorporated. The following year, Sapporo Store, the first in Japan opened. In 1981, Japanese subsidiary Tower Records Japan Inc. (TRJ) was established.
In October, 2002, TRJ went independent from the international chain by management buyout. The bankruptcy of Tower Records in the U.S. in 2006 did not affect TRJ as it had been completely independent. As of August, 2010, TRJ maintains 83 directly operated store locations throughout Japan,[14] including the Shibuya Store in Tokyo (moved to the current location in March, 1995) which is said to be one of the biggest music retail outlets in the world, occupying selling space of 5,000 m² (9 floors).[15] TRJ also publishes free magazines Tower, bounce, and intoxicate directly and through its subsidiary NMNL.
In addition to being the leading CD retailer in Japan, TRJ is the majority stakeholder in Napster Japan, a joint venture between TRJ and Napster LLC. On March 1, 2010, Napster Japan and TRJ announced that Napster Japan would terminate all of its services on May 31, 2010 due to the difficulty in covering the costs for maintaining the required systems to continue the services.[16][17]
Republic of Ireland
There remain two Tower Records stores operational in Dublin, Ireland. These are a licensed franchise of MTS Incorporated (USA).[18] One of the stores, located on Wicklow Street, recently launched a café upstairs called "Sound Bites".[19]
[edit] Thailand
TowerRecords had been in Thailand for decades until it ran out of business. One of the biggest megastores located on the top floor CentralWorld superstore in Bangkok. It was one of the biggest retail stores that offered imported CDs and music accessories. [20]
[edit] Mexico
The first Tower Records store in Mexico opened in the mid 1990s in the Zona Rosa area featuring 3 floors and a live DJ. After international bankrutpcy, the stores were acquired by Promotora Musical, a retail company owned by Grupo Carso, the same owner of Mixup record stores. There are Tower Records stores in Mexico City (Altavista, Gran Sur and Mundo E), Puebla (Las Animas) and Monterrey (Paseo San Pedro).
United Kingdom
Originally Tower Records was just a London-based concern, with a first store in Kensington High Street in 1984 being followed the next year by a 25,000-square-foot (2,300 m2) flagship outlet at 1 Piccadilly Circus and later two more smaller outlets at Whiteleys in Bayswater, and Kingston. However by the start of the 1990s the chain had grown to encompass a number of other stores, with large entertainment stores also selling movies, books, magazines and games in Birmingham and Glasgow, as well as a number of smaller stores that had been purchased from rival American retailer Sam Goody when it had left the UK marketplace (for example of this express format—Weston-super-Mare).
However with tough trading conditions in the UK market, as well as the company's trouble in the States, the firm followed Sam Goody in retreating from the UK market.[21] The London stores in Piccadilly and Kensington were sold to Virgin Group in 2003, who for a while traded under the Tower brand at the former site until the store could be fully refurbished, while the other stores were closed. The store was subsequently renamed Zavvi in September 2007 after a management buyout of the Virgin Megastores. The Piccadilly store closed on Wednesday, 14 January 2009 by the administrators.
For S.F. rockers, Tower Records was where it was all happening -- now the party's over
Record promotion men Jeff Trager and Bill Perasso used to sit around drinking with pal Russ Solomon at their favorite hangout, the cocktail lounge at Villa Roma at the busy intersection of Columbus and Bay streets. Solomon, who owned record stores in Sacramento, would point to the supermarket across the street. "One day I'm going to open a store there," he told them.
Nursing a hangover at a nearby drive-in one morning, Solomon saw a "For Rent" sign on the lot, walked across the street to a pay phone and made a deal to lease the property. He had a cousin who was a good carpenter, and he put him to work.
"We painted the place, hung some lights and filled it up with records," Solomon says. "It was something else."
He opened the San Francisco Tower Records in April 1968. The sign outside boasted "Largest Record Store in the Known World -- Open Nine to Midnight 365 Days a Year."
It was a good time to enter the retail record business in San Francisco. The Beatles were at the top of the charts. Bill Graham was running concerts every weekend at the Fillmore featuring a never-ending procession of exciting new rock bands -- Fleetwood Mac, Traffic, Ten Years After, the Chambers Brothers. The San Francisco rock scene was flourishing with groups emerging almost daily, such as Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana and It's a Beautiful Day. Over in North Beach, disc jockey Tom Donahue was inventing FM rock radio on KSAN and playing all the great new records by these bands and more.
At the opening party, revelers spilled out the door, plastic drop cloths protected the record racks and the long-forgotten rock band West, which had just released an album on Epic Records, performed.
"The drummer dosed me with something," says Stan Goman, who was working in the Sacramento operation at the time, but would serve for 10 years as the San Francisco store manager, beginning in 1972. "Driving back to Sacramento that night was a trippy drive. What a store."
Solomon would eventually open more than 75 other stores with the soon familiar red and yellow signs. The Greenwich Village store spanned three blocks and was touted as the largest record store in the country. The London store was on Piccadilly Circus. The Sunset Strip store was famed for star sightings; it used to open early in the morning to accommodate Elton John while he abused his charge account. Now the international chain Solomon built is defunct.
Sacramento always remained the corporate headquarters and the heart of the chain. That was where, in 1952, Solomon had begun stocking the record department of his father's shop, Tower Drugs, a landmark retail location with a tower on the building. But the Columbus and Bay store was where the party always was.
"You couldn't have opened a record store at a better time," Solomon says. "You had the Summer of Love, the Fillmore-Avalon action, the Haight-Ashbury just starting to explode. Everybody came into San Francisco, and they were just mad about music. It was a mysterious, wonderful miracle."
"It was a new style," says Dave Haynes, who managed the store for a couple of years in the '60s. "The timing came together. All of a sudden the store showed up and fed all that. I don't know whether it was a stroke of luck or genius."
"He wanted to fill all the racks up and have turnstiles like a supermarket," says Rudy Danzinger, who went to work for Solomon in Sacramento in 1958 for a princely $70 a week. "He had this vision."
Of course, the party is now officially over. Tower was turned over to liquidators just weeks ago. Truth told, the store was never the same after CDs. But neither was the record business. When the store sold those black vinyl discs in 12-inch cardboard sleeves -- some of which opened up on a gatefold -- for around 5 bucks, there was magic in the place. Tower used to have a sign outside the store during the holidays that read "Thousands of Gifts for Under $10."