"All Things Must Pass"-Tower Records Documentary

Here's a true Tower Records story that isn't in the documentary: Weezer front man Rivers Cuomo worked at the Hollywood store (the famous one on Sunset Blvd.) before they got signed. When the interviews started at the time of the first album's release, he was asked about working there, and he talked about what a nightmare it was. The word came down from Sacramento---pull all the Weezer product from the shelves and return it! Russ Soloman wasn't about to support anyone who bad-mouthed his business.

I knew a guy who had worked at the Hollywood store at the same time as Rivers, and he told me that one of their Tower co-workers took a dislike to Rivers, and being a bullying kind of guy (and physically big, while Rivers is the small, meek type), really gave the poor kid a hard time, tormenting and pushing him around. Who got the last laugh?! A few years earlier, a couple of the guys who wound up in Guns N' Roses were working in the Tower Video store.

When you start at Tower, your eight hour work day is split in two---a four hour register shift, lunch or dinner, then four hours of stocking shelves, maintaining your assigned section, answering the phone, and assisting customers. To some Tower employees, an eight hour workday seemed to take forever, Rivers being one of them.

I haven't seen the doc yet, so don't know if the following is covered in it. But I can tell you when I knew Tower was heading for big trouble, if not complete failure. The chain was always privately owned by Russ Soloman, the company borrowing it's operating capitol every quarter from it's bank, the loan being paid back from the profits from that quarter. This business model worked well the entire time Russ ran Tower. Soon after he retired (turning over the operation of the company to his son), however, Tower defaulted on it's loan, not showing enough profit in one quarter to repay the loan. When it happened a second quarter, then a third, the bank was legally entitled to take over management of the company, which it did.

First, employee hours were cut from 40 hours a week to 35. Then, the completely independent buying ability of each Tower store ended. Partial central buying was instigated, someone in Sacramento, rather than the buyers in each store, deciding which new releases, and how many copies thereof, were sent to each store. Having independent buyers in each store, buying only for the store he or she worked in, is what distinguished Tower from all other record chains.

The bank then, and IMO most importantly, asked for 365 days dating from all independent distributors, up from the industry standard 90 days. Dating is how long a company has to pay it's suppliers for the product sent to it. 365 days dating is a trick to enable Tower to pay for independent product only after it has sold. How so? The price tag on each piece of Tower merchandise included a date code which let the store buyers know when each piece was received. One of a Tower buyer's job duties was to go through the racks and pull all product that had been in the store, unsold, for a given length of time, that length left up to the discretion of the store. Some chose three months, some six. But NO store would keep an unsold piece of product for as long as a year. So, with this new dating demand, Tower would return every piece of independent merchandise before it would have to pay for it. What independent distributor can stay in business if being paid for product it sends to a retailer only after an entire year?! Many of the indi's refused Tower's demands, there product then disappearing from Tower stores. What good is a Tower record store without the product of independent record companies? None!

Oregonpapa---There was no Topanga Canyon store. You're probably thinking of the Sherman Oaks store, located at the corner of Van Nuys and Ventura Boulevards (Ventura Blvd. immortalized in Tom Petty's song "Free Falling"). The reason the Sherman Oaks store was not as good as the Sunset/Hollywood store (absolutely true) was that I had a much smaller buying budget than the two buyers at Sunset. The Tower budget system is too complicated to go into here, but the abbreviated explanation is that how many pieces of product a given store sells a month, and how many total pieces are in stock at the end of every month, determines how many pieces that store can buy the following month. The more pieces the store sells one month, the more it can buy the following one. The Sunset store sold about twice as many pieces a month as did the Sherman Oaks store, so it's buying budget was twice as large as mine. I would have to pass on product that the Sunset store could buy, as I was out of budget for the month. So they could sell those titles which they were able to buy but which I wasn't, leading to more total monthly sales, which in turn lead to a bigger budget for the following month! I had been a customer at the Sherman Oaks store (living not far away), and often would not find the indi titles I was looking to buy, but would find them at the Sunset store. My priority when I started buying for Sherman Oaks was to increase the number of individual titles the store had in stock. It took a while, but little by little the store's number improved, until we were second only to the Sunset store in all of Southern California.

You're also right about Amoeba. Within a year of the opening of their Sunset Blvd. store, the Sunset Tower's monthly sales dropped off by about 50%! Amoeba's priority is having as many titles in stock as possible, for hard-core music lovers and buyers. Tower's management was starting to be a little too concerned with the aesthetics of the stores fixtures, etc. Who cares about that?! When Tower's bank took ever management and instigated central buying, it was just a matter of time until Tower would fail. I was actually surprised it took as long as it did.

Oregonpapa---There were three Towers in the Valley---Sherman Oaks, Northridge (destroyed by the '94 earthquake), and Panorama City. There was a Licorice Pizza on Topanga, across the street from the Topanga Mall. Yep, used to go to Record Trader regularly, but didn't know about Brigg's. Rhino was a great store when they had LP's, but not when they switched to all CD's. The same thing happened to a record store up in Marin, Village Music. Great LP store, average CD store. One L.A. store that never abandoned LP's is Record Surplus, on Santa Monica Blvd, still going strong. I've gotten some great deals there.

You must be right Marty. I left in 2002, and there was no Tower on Topanga then. They had actually been closing stores, so I'm surprised to hear of that new one.

And my apologies Oregonpapa! It never occurred to me that after having filed Chapter 11, closing under-performing stores, and cutting employee hours, Tower would then open a new store in the Valley. Topanga isn't that far from the Sherman Oaks store, and would only take business away from it, I would think, gaining Tower nothing.

There's a story on the documentary and an interview with Russ Solomon in the current issue of Record Collector News, the freebie mag available at a lot of good record stores.