TOWER RECORDS MEMORIES I know Tower Records may not be that "cool," but man, I'm feeling pretty damn emotional about their going out of business. I heard the news over the weekend and today I went to the Village store (the one in the pic below), which is close to my work, to see what the vibe there was like. It was a sad scene -- emptier-than-usual shelves, cheap-looking blowout-sale signs everywhere, a somber mood all around -- and it affected me more than I expected.
Getting vaklempt over the fate of a retail chain seems weird, for sure, but what can I say? I should be mourning CBGB, I suppose, but to be honest I've never been there. Tower, on the other hand, has been a big part of my life, bigger than I realized, for the last three decades. I've always lived in cities, so I never bought my music at suburban malls or anything like that. For me, it was a mixture of small hip record stores and big ones like Tower where I could spend hours roaming the aisles.
And I did spend a crazy amount of time at Tower. It was probably around 9th grade (1988-89) that I went totally music-crazy. The CD revolution was in full bloom, and my best friend JW and I devoured rock criticism and rock history books. Reading about all this great music from the 60s to the present was a mixed blessing because we realized how much we had to catch up on -- and our pocketbooks were limited. But whatever money we had, we used up on CDs. And when we weren't actually buying CDs, we were at Tower flipping through the racks, memorizing titles, familiarizing ourselves with entire bodies of work, thinking about what we wanted to buy.
This was in Seattle, by the way -- and it was mostly at the Tower store on University Avenue (known as "the Ave"), though there is also a great Queen Anne location near the Seattle Center. What I realize now is that this huge CD emporium was crucial to our musical awakening, more so than the little hip stores. The geography of Tower is forever etched in my brain, because it really was my brain: it was like a bricks-and-mortar version of the massive catalogue of music in my memory.
In the college years, I became even more obssessed with music, but Tower wasn't on the scene for me during this time. I was in Berkeley, CA, and as anyone who's been there knows, nothing compares to massive Amoeba Records on Telegraph Ave, which somehow manages to combine the appeal of the megastore and the boutique.
But in New York, there is no Amoeba equivalent. And when I found myself in 2000 working at a company in the Lincoln Center area, suddenly Tower (the one at Broadway & 66th, see the pic at the top of this post) was my second home again. I hung out there almost every lunch hour for the next five years! The staff was friendly and knowledgable, and I had some fun musical conversations with them. Again, like when I was a kid in Seattle, I soon memorized the layout of the store and kept mental lists of everything I hoped to buy someday.
The purpose of this post is primarily nostalgic. I'm not going to get into the causes of Tower's financial failings and what it all means for the music industry, because every blogger is probably writing about this stuff and I'm sure they know a lot more than me. Moreover, I don't really have any right to complain because I have hardly been buying CDs myself lately. But I can say that for me and many other men and women of my generation, Tower was where we grew up, where we listened and learned and got excited about music. I will miss it.
posted by MC @ 6:37 PM
2 Comments:
Well, ok. I'm not about to roll around pissing on graves, and certainly Borders and Virgin are a deep and festering pustule on the face of humanity. I wonder though, whether large non-specialty stores haven't been vastly superceded by electronic resources, not only in quantity and depth, but also in quality of information and insight. For a short moment a few years ago, Napster created an exciting forum for expanding your music collections beyond anything you could listen to in a lifetime. Much more importantly, it was an arena for chasing down rare variants and covers of tunes, and exploring related music and enthusiasms in other users' collections. For me, it was a means of discovery which couldn't be matched even if i was allowed to rip the ridiculous carboard boxes off of all the cds in all of the Towers and grill the staff 24/7. A few knowledgeable folks prowling the floor of Tower was a considerable improvement over a purely record co. radio payola infested music scene. However, the access to people, music, and opinions online blew the walls off the church of music. You could see for miles in every direction, and instead of the few gurus preaching from atop their hills with the faithful gathered around, there was mad drunken orgy of a house party, with thoughts, insights, and tracks hurtling about. You know how much musical discovery, any kind of discovery really, is driven by accidental exposure. Well there, everyone got fluids on them whether they were looking in that direction or not. There was a dry spell when Napster sank, which the sterile halls of iTunes couldn't (and I think, will never) fix. Like Virgin, iTunes sells music, lots of it, and has a decent selection, but loses the connections and substance behind the music. Music, to many people, is about more than just the studio-recorded and sanctioned music of a small fraction of the people on the planet who create. There are back stories, opinions, covers, scratchy old versions recorded on wax cylinders in southern fieldhouses, brilliant medleys and impromptu collaborations recorded by a drunken sound engineer on an unforgettable night in some bar at the crossroads. Fortunately, the vacuum is being brilliantly filled by a diversity of deeply explorable resources: the internet archive with live concerts, hype-machine allowing the combined access to music and the back commentary on a litany of music blogs, youtube linking music with comments to video, myspace presenting a forum and homepage for every creator of music, more fascinating internet radio than could be digested in 100 lifetimes - running without the chains of corporate broadcast around their necks, and bittorrent allowing you once again to shell out more for hard drives than you ever could have spent on vinyl. These, plus thousands of smaller players and more every day, have sent the horizons of music discovery and creation scurrying for the hills. mcMC, you're right about the thrill of expeditioning across the musical landscape, and i think to the age of musical discovery, these events are the wheel, the sail, and the rocket engine all rolled into one. To be sure, I still like to talk to someone face to face, and feel the ridiculous packaging real in my hand, and so I hope that stores like Amoeba survive. I feel that they might, and that like Strand for books, they will hold out against their monsterous competition using the strength of their knowledge, passion, and reverence for their art. On the whole, while I do grieve a little that Virgin and Borders persist while the neon Tower goes dark, in the end there is something so good on the other side of the screen that it's as if a little hill I used to play on before I discovered the mountains got bulldozed, I don't really care all that much. Since you do alert to the passing though, I will raise a small glass of Ricard. Cheers.
Thanks I&I, that was very nicely-put - I like your style, man - and I agree with you entirely. The intention of my original post was also mostly just to raise a glass, to reminisce, but your perspective is eye-opening.
Post a Comment
<< Home