A farewell for Tower
December 7th, 2006, 2:24 pm · 4 Comments · posted by Brian
It’s a shame that it takes a bad event for everyone to come together.
Tower Records is in its final weeks of existence (there’s still no official last day yet) and the company’s Southern California employees were all invited to Slidebar Café in Fullerton to reminisce and meet up with old friends.
Why Slidebar? Tower Anaheim hosted Lit’s CD release party in 1999. To return the favor, the Lit folks invited employees from the Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego county stores for free food and booze all night.
The restaurant was filled with a couple hundred Tower “lifers,” temps and alum. There was definitely a high school reunion vibe with everyone talking about the good ole days of Tower. Chasing shoplifters through the parking lot and ringing up porn customers topped our list of best memories.
Those porn shoppers were so creative with ways to cover their “Barely Legal” porn. Sometimes they would roll up the magazine. The most popular technique was covering the porn with a random gun magazine (gun mags were right next to porn mags at the Anaheim store).
I don’t know what’s worse. Buying a porn magazine by itself or buying a porn and gun magazine at the same time?
Here are a few of the folks I ran into last night.
From left to right: John Gump, Neil Raboy, JR Ross and Jamie Pendergrast
Jr again and Troy Clem. That’s the guy that hired me!
And you can’t forget the Tower love (even if it’s not that attractive).
So what’s the liquidation discount down to now?
How long did you work at Tower, Brian?
There was a time, in the mid-’80s, that Tower Records was the bomb. It was like Google. No…really.
The staff there was always so knowledgeable…like the librarian-types in a mom and pop bookstore. I’ll never forget asking a purple-haired female in the store at Broadway and E. 4th Street in the Village for an artist and song title, and after just a few hums and lyrics, she effortlessly blurted out, “LL Cool Jay.” Ah, but now we have…er, Google…to source song titles by lyrics.
Tower once (still?) published a monthly rag called “Pulse” that was a must-scoop on your way out the door. There was a feature called “Desert Island Discs” in the “Letters” section, where contributors would list the 10 albums they must have if stranded somewhere. Ah, but now we have the Internet, where we can compose and publish self-defining lists until the cows come home.
This is really the end of an era…very sad……..
When I was a teenager, all we had in town was the Wherehouse, where everything was overpriced and nonstocked. Once every couple months, I’d make it up to Tower 40 minutes away… I could hardly stand it, all the compilations, all the bands on those compilations, all of it rung up by clerks who made me feel like a dork for having just heard of the bands on the compilations. It has been totally unnecessary for at least seven years (Amazon) or longer (Amoeba), but yeah. It was a pretty big part of learning to be a music fan.