The power of tower

pulse

March 7, 2018 4:42 AM

Russ Solomon, who died Sunday at 92, created what for many music fans was the ultimate music emporium: Tower Records, whose yellow-and-red color scheme, “No Music, No Life” slogan, and wide aisles stocked with LPs and CDs defined the retail music business in the pre-digital era.

Starting at his father’s drugstore in Sacramento, California, where he sold used jukebox records as a teenager, Solomon built a retail empire that became known as much for its selection — vast by brick-and-mortar standards — as for the culture that surrounded it.

Employees were opinionated aficionados, and Tower stores, open till midnight, were gathering places for fans. The locations on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and on Broadway in Greenwich Village became tourist meccas.

The shops even made devotees of the stars. Bruce Springsteen and Bette Midler were regular visitors, but Tower’s most famous patron was Elton John, for whom the Hollywood store would open early. “All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records,” a 2015 documentary, includes footage from the 1970s of John briskly walking the aisles and tossing brand-new vinyl records into a cardboard box.

Solomon relied on debt to fuel Tower’s expansion, creating a burden that weighed heavily on the company’s finances by the early 2000s. By that point, the stores had also been hit by an industrywide plunge in record sales precipitated by online piracy. The company lost $10 million in 2000 and $90 million in 2001.

Tower’s parent company declared bankruptcy in the United States in 2004. Two years later, after liquidation sales had emptied its miles of CD racks, Tower shut down its 89 American stores. Workers left a message outside the first store, in Sacramento: “All things must pass.”

Sales of physical albums in the United States, which peaked at 785 million in 2000, fell to 103 million last year, according to Nielsen, as music consumption shifted to digital formats.

Despite Tower’s disappearance from most of the world, it still has a major presence in Japan; the company sold its Japanese locations in 1999 to raise cash. The flagship store in central Tokyo is like a time warp for travelers, with nine floors of music, in-store performances and, out front, a comforting sign in yellow and red with a familiar message: “No music, no life.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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