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Wow, was I green.
It was April 1979. Magi, the band I was in at the time, got fed up with the Midwest and decided to move to Hollywood to Make It Big. We found a condo on Silver Lake Blvd., across from what is now Spaceland.
Never being independently wealthy, my arrival in Hollywood meant that I could only watch in horror as all of my savings were flying out of my wallet, with no source of replenishment in site. Hollywood has ingenious ways of separating people from their money. Time to get a job.
Since a great record store has always been heaven on earth to me, I applied to them all over Hollywood: Wherehouse, Licorice Pizza, Music Plus, Aron's, Rene's All Ears, Peaches, Tower, and probably more.
The first serious interview I had was with Wherehouse. The guy enthusiastically suggeted moving me directly into an assistant manager position. I was honored, until hearing that they say that to all of their prospective employees. They never called me back.
Lack of food money became a concern. The band was no help, and it was already showing signs that the end was near.
I found myself returning to Tower Records on the Sunset Strip via the RTD bus, to just hang and soak in the amazing collection of music and the Sunset Strip vibe. An employee there told me that they were about to do an inventory, and they always needed extra people for that. Sure enough, I soon landed a two-day inventory job with Tower.
Almost immediately after the inventory, I was hired full-time by Bob Delanoy. My hiring was probably due to my little notes on the inventory sheet - for example, under the record bins I found and noted several carrying cases for 45s with psychedelic designs. "You're hired," enthused Bob, "we can always use someone sharp like you." Wow, it was that easy? So began the next four years of my daily existence.
During that inventory, I met a devastatingly attractive young woman in the back parking lot of Tower while pizza was being served for lunch. She smiled and it was obvious. Her name was Elaine. It was a slow build, but I've now been married to her for nearly 23 years.
I can say that the rumors and stories you're heard about Tower Records on the Sunset Strip are all true, at least when I was there. There were indeed celebrities there: truly great stars, stars as normal people, stars as derelicts, along with everyone else, all the time. My mother would always ask what stars had visited lately, and I could never remember half of them. There were those who embraced modern times and those that seemed perfectly preserved from another era. All were welcome.
There was always a buzz of excitement, creativity, struggle and success bouncing off every wall, customer and employee. Industry and customers alike looked after us. Record companies would send graphic artists, who would paint the latest album covers on the large boards that draped the outside of the building. Clerks were sent by the industry to inventory their own stock. Tower's fly-off-the-shelf factor was famous, so there was big return in making sure that one's product was well-stocked at all times. Those labels reps would also give us promos of any new LP we asked them for, along with comp and drink tickets to shows at the nearby Whiskey or Roxy, and larger venues like the L.A. Forum.
My fellow employees were a motley collection of unique characters, often refined with Hollywood precision to make their familiar-to-me Midwestern equivalents seem still-in-development. Some would stay at Tower for years, some would disappear without a trace weeks later. Some were losers, some were destined for far better. The amazing networking potential was fed by the diversity of co-workers and clientele. At any moment one's life could change drastically if one could just see the door opening for that split-second.
Tower Sunset employees came from all over the world, often going on to musical, acting, film, writing careers, or just going back home. There'd be the world-wise-but-damaged California-bred perennials, East Coast transplants, Vietnam vets, oil-rich kid good guy Kaz from Iran, and naive people from who-knows-where, all successfully escaping their nowheresville hometowns, if only for a while. Just like me.
The diverse music played constantly, and it was all chosen by the employees. Everyone got their pick of one side of an LP, pulled off the shelves. We wrote our names on the shrink wrap, and placed the LP under the to-be-played stack next to the turntable behind the register. Joy Division followed by Tito Puente followed by the Sweeney Todd soundtrack followed by the latest disco mix followed by Miles Davis follwed by The Kinks. Each selection was chosen by the employee, either to hear and share music they loved, or to be used as a weapon to piss off those too narrow to appreciate the full sweep of the collection of music we sold and soaked in daily.
It's a wonder I made any money there at all. Freebies aside, we always swooped down upon new arrivals of independent and import 45s and LPs, devouring them. Great bands that I'd only read about in mags like Creem and Who Put the Bomp were in stock en masse, begging me to take them home. A little short on cash? No problem! Just sign that little charge slip and a Tower employee's records, tapes, magazines, and maybe even a salary advance for lunch money would come out of the next check. Did your piece of crap car break down again? See Bob for a small loan! Must've been an accounting nightmare, but it worked for us.
The phone rang constantly. Tower Sunset employees were regarded as musical experts, so we were often called to settle arguments and even bets. Once when I explained that it was Them featuring Van Morrison and NOT The Shadows of Knight that recorded the original version of Gloria, the caller groaned and a whoop of triumph came from the background. No telling how much money traded hands as a result.
There were in-store appearances and parking lot concerts. One of my first was The Pretenders, looking tired and edgy, signing their brand new first LP while guzzling Heinekins at ten in the morning. One could always tell what Elvis Costello's next LP would be like by the type of records he bought before. Robert Fripp sitting with his guitar performing Frippertronics, so close to me that I could kick him. While I was working the cash register one morning, there was a grumbling in line that Richard Dreyfuss, also in line with purchases, had refused to sign an autograph for a customer. I rang his purchases up, he signed his credit card slip and handed it to me. I waved that slip over my head to the people in line, declaring, "I've got it!" to applause. A diminutive Bruce Springsteen was spotted hiding in the tape department, but he still signed my copy of Born to Run with gratitude. James Brown signing customers' aging King label 45s during an in-store, always with a gracious smile. Robin Williams, worse for wear but still razor-sharp that late Sunday, giving me a hiliarious, obviously improvised routine at the info booth. Brian Wilson's, er, morning episode, with 45s having to be removed from the ceiling afterward, all with a white-coated Dr. Landy standing guard at the endcap. Why did Rick James always want to use our bathroom? Rodney Dangerfield doing an in-store, then walking to the Tower back room, firing one up and passing it around. Helping a cool and cordial Tom Waits find the first Hollywood Fats LP, misfiled in the oldies section. Father Guido Sarduci signing Devo records. An alluring Lauren Hutton bumming cigarettes off me. Rickie Lee Jones and I just hanging out early on a Saturday morning, shooting the breeze like old high school buds. David Lee Roth wishing me a Merry Christmas. Slowly I adjusted and the unexpected became routine, but never, never dull.
Larry from Magi remained in Hollywood, eventually running Music Plus on Vine Street, across town from Tower. While working the info booth I was thinking about how we hadn't chatted for a while. As if on cue, up comes a harmless but very obnoxious customer, who started asking for an album in an accent that I could not decipher. I stopped his rant and calmly wrote down Larry's name and the Music Plus address, assuring the looney that Larry could help him. Half an hour later, Larry was on the phone, livid. This began our series of "good will customer exchanges." I think the topper was when he sent Wild Man Fischer looking for me.
Remember that TV commercial about ten years ago with Daffy Duck being turned down for a purchase because he didn't have ID?
That really happened at Tower Sunset in the late 70s. To one of The Beatles.
Stars and record company folks would often bring purchases to the info booth to use a company charge. Store policy had recently changed, and anyone requesting a company charge had to show ID first.
One day, up to the info booth comes Ringo Starr, a stack of records in hand, to charge them to the Capitol Records account.
"Hi, Ringo. Can I see some ID?"
Silence. If this was a joke, Ringo was not at all amused. "You're kidding?"
"No, Ringo, I have to see some ID."
The sound of commotion filled the store. I do not know exactly what Ringo said, but the words were not pretty. He left the store, vowing, "I'll never come back here!" He never did. Said employee was reamed sideways by Delanoy, and was gone not long after.
A few years later, Harry Nilsson, a frequent flyer at Tower, bought a bunch of LPs for Ringo and wanted them delivered. My friend Regina and I gladly volunteered, and made the drive to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Ringo lived at the time. Regina and I were major Beatles fans, so we could barely contain our excitement on the way over.
But the hotel desk clerk would not let us see Ringo, only allowing us to leave the records for him at the desk. This was early 1981, paranoia was running high among a lot of celebrities after John Lennon's killing, and who could blame Ringo? We left the records with the desk clerk and went back to Tower.
I never did get to meet Ringo, or any Beatle for that matter.
Meanwhile, full-tilt life went on at Tower. For sanity's sake, I'd have to detach myself from the swirling, intoxicating chaos every once in a while, just to observe rather than being caught up in the movement of the herds of people from everywhere passing through the Tower doors with dizzying relentlessness. They'd line up outside for our opening early in the morning, and we'd be throwing them out of the doors after midnight. Stars mingled with street people, Broadway lovers lined up with punks. To see it through the eyes of a cashier, Tower and the music business brought everyone together, and was an unstoppable money machine. There was no end in sight, or so it seemed at the time.
Then trouble started in 1983. Business suits from the outside somehow came into control of Tower and started making jarring changes. The first thing they did was to freeze our salaries. More changes loomed, and none for the better. It was a clampdown. What were they thinking? These guys were proudly out of touch with what made Tower great. Knowing how quickly things can fall apart, I immediately started searching for a new job, as others did at the same time. I soon found one at an import LP distributor in Santa Monica. That business got red hot when we started selling imported compact discs. The hype for CDs was devastating in early 1983. None were being made in the U.S., but compact disc players were arriving with much fanfare at U.S. hi-fi dealers. Those dealers were starving for compact discs of any type. Having shelves of CDs to sell and a major untapped market at the waiting, I bought stacks of metro yellow pages, made cold calls and got orders for thousands of compact discs within days. Of course, that boomtime had a built-in poison pill as labels soon cracked down on such imports. I was safely in The Long Ryders by the time that business died, and you may well know the rest of my story with The Long Ryders.
Why is Tower no more? I've heard the long debate. The emergence of the compact disc and forced demise of the LP from music retail was the most obvious "beginning of the end" marker. Strange coincidence that the suits at Tower had come into the picture just months before. Compact discs were expensive from the start, and promises of cheaper CDs in the future were never fulfilled. The labels kept quietly increasing the wholesale price of a compact disc to stores, forcing retail to take the bullet. Also, a CD will never have the soul of a record album. Relative to an LP, everything on CD is miniaturized and squeaky-sounding. Forcing customers to re-buy their music in an inferior package for twice the price resulted in old-time customers not going along for the ride. Many loyal customers never returned to their former buying habits, including me.
Slowly but inevitably, karma happened. The next generation of music lovers emerged. Those music lovers never knew the joys of buying cheap LPs by the dozen. As prices went up on music CDs, prices went down on CD burners and blanks. This little thing called high-speed Internet allowed music downloads to flourish. Internet music downloading was going to happen with or without the record labels, and the labels showed no leadership in propelling this emerging music delivery system. As a result of that lack of leadership, it was left to the public to perfect the system, and perfect it they did, throwing music downloads into a weird de facto public domain state. Instead of embracing music downloads, the industry response was raising compact disc prices yet again, whining to legislators, signing even fewer new artists and offering us even less in terms of excitement, innovation or diversity in new music. Artists found it harder to survive on their label deals and were often forced into bankruptcy. Then the record industry started suing their own customers via their pitbull, the RIAA. Nice PR move. The implosion of the music business has been the saddest, slowest suicide that I have ever witnessed in my years on the planet. And the downward spiral is still in full horrifying slo-mo descent.
There are glimmers of hope today for music fans. MySpace is one, despite of all its flaws. You can hear new music from brilliant artists like The Last, who have not yet been able to secure a traditional record deal, but three of their new tracks are here. Steve Wynn has released three killer albums in a row, and you can hear songs from them here. How else would I hear Jenny & The Belmont Boys? The list goes on...
As for the future of music and music distribution, I truly believe that there are huge things on the horizon that haven't emerged yet. iTunes is a start, but that's not it, mainly because DRM is yet another way to make war on paying customers and restrct the free use of paid-for music. Despite the hostile tactics from the old guard, there will always be ways to get our favorite tunes and support artists. All ways are welcome, but any music distribution system that expects to survive must exist to the benefit of artists, industry and customers alike. When all three aren't synchronized, we lose wonderful institutions like Tower Records as a result.
There are so many lessons to be learned with Tower's demise, but I'm done philosophizing. Mostly, I'm more than a bit sad right now, and the full impact hasn't hit me yet. I do know that my world without Tower, particularly Tower Sunset, will be a lesser one.
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