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Way back when,

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when young teenagers had
a collection of 45RPM records,

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to me that was kind of exciting.

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That was almost better than having

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a big collection of CDs,

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albums, and everything else.

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But imagine, 45 records, 45RPM records

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a better quality
and less breakable than the 78

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of ten years before,

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but with all the music you ever wanted.

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And you could carry it around
in a little box.

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That's what Tower was about.

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Believe me.

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It was the music that was meaningful

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to young people's lives.

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And we were how they got it.

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The first record I ever bought was

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Bob Wills, New San Antone rose.

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It was like 35 cents.

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The year was 1941,
and my dad had a drug store

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called Tower Drugs.

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It was in the Tower Theatre Building.

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The drugstore was tiny,

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and yet they had everything in there.

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He had toys, he had liquor,
he had magazines,

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cigarettes, perfume, cosmetics, candy,

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heh, you name it.

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So we had a soda fountain
in that store as well,

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and on the soda fountain
we had the jukebox.

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One day, my dad said,
"why don't we sell used records?"

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He asked the jukebox operator to bring in

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his used records, which he brought in

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and sold us the records for three cents

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and we turned around
and sold them for a dime.

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We sold them out right away,
so my dad said,

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"if we can sell used records,

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we ought to be able to sell new records."

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Went in to San Francisco
where you could buy

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all the records wholesale.

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200 records cost about

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less than a couple a hundred bucks.

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So we said, "fine,
we'll spend the 200 dollars,

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give us a franchise,"

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and bang, we're in the record business.

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During that period,
my dad actually broke through

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the wall of the drugstore
into the empty space next door,

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a little empty storefront, and he said,

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"We'll put the record
department back there."

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so we decided to call it Tower Record Mart.

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He couldn't complain too much because
he was getting some free labour,

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but at the same time,
he didn't like the idea

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that I should've been in school.

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And we realized right off the bat
that this was a big deal.

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I went to my dad, I said,
"Well, I want to expand.

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I want to go in to this
rack-jobbing business,

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expand our jukebox, and get this and that."

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All kinds of wonderful things
I wanted to do.

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He says, "No way, absolutely, no way.

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"Don't bother me."

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"You want this thing,

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"you buy the record store from me,

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and then you do what you want,
but I'm not financing it."

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I said, "All right."

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He says: "Fine, it's yours tomorrow."

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"And here's the deal:

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"you have the inventory

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and you have the bills that
the company owes. Goodbye."

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And overnight,
I was the owner of this thing.

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Everything he did influenced me.

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It's, how do you say, that one imparts

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a whole style of life

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just by being close to you

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and you pick it up.

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He was a skinny guy

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who liked to have a lot of fun,

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loved music, loved dancing.

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There was always music on in our house.

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It seems like every evening

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my parents were dancing and partying.

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I'm sure there was some drinking.

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I probably started
when I was five years old.

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I would go in to work with him

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and sort singles.

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It was quite a family affair,
so my mother would be there.

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I think she was doing
the bookkeeping at that time.

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My father had a fantasy and a dream

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and a desire to open up
a supermarket of records.

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He then opened a record store
at Watt and El Camino.

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It was a tiny little store,

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about a thousand square feet, maybe.

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My wonderful friend
who had been doing advertising

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for the drugstore, Mick Mickelson,

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he said, "Well, we're changing your name."

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"Tower Record Mart. That's too..."

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"We're going to call it Tower Records

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and we're going to use
Shell oil company colours."

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"And I'm going to design
a letter that'll stand out,

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that nobody's ever seen before."

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And he literally drew that letter.

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You know, in Sacramento there weren't
very many places for kids to hang out.

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There was, like downtown, there was places,

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so it was, you know,

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Tower Books and Records
we're in like this parking lot

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surrounded by nothing.

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And for kids in high school,
that's what you did.

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You know, you went to Tower Records.

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It was the beginning of the folk era,

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and so we would sit
in the parking lot at Tower

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on our little sports cars and play music.

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So the guitar guys would come,
and the banjo guys would come,

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and we'd play music
in front of the record store

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and then you'd go into the record
store and into the listening booths

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and listen to as much as you could

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because you couldn't afford
to buy any records.

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There were make out sessions
in the listening booths,

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people had sex in listening booths.

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We put really big lights in there

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so they'd be as hot as possible

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so that you couldn't stay
in there too long.

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This store opened in 1961,
I was eleven years old,

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it was the only place I knew.

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You'd walk down the aisle
and you could just see

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from the front of the store
to the back of that aisle,

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just these stacks of LPs.

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You know, somebody came up
with that terminology,

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stack them high and sell them low.

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Yeah, the managers
and the employees were young,

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they loved music,
they were enjoying themselves.

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They were having a lot of fun,
which was a good thing,

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because they weren't
getting paid very much.

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And that was the beginning
of Tower Records.

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I worked for Tower for 37 years.

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I started when I was 19 years old,

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and it started out
at the Watt Avenue store.

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Stan was this kid that was the son

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of one of the pharmacists
that worked for my father.

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He came to work and he said,
"You got to give the kid a job."

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I said, "Okay, put him to work."

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I walked out in to the Watts store,

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and this guy George Horton
came running up to the counter

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and looked at me and goes,
"Who are you?" and I go,

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"Oh, uh, I'm the new guy.
My name's Stan, how are you?"

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And he says, "Oh, great, you're here.

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Charlie and I are going to lunch."

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And I went, "Okay."

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He says, "Good, everything's $3.88

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"except for Frank Sinatra,
Phase four, and Command.

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"That's $4.88, see you later.

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"We'll be back in an hour."

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And there I was, that was my training.

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Tower was like the place to work at

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because it was so open.

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Plus, you could play whatever
you want on the record player,

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so you could be an amateur DJ, too,

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and it was definitely the place to work.

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What happened in the very early '60s,

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'63, '64, was a couple of artists

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happened on the scene that just
changed the world around.

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When the Beach Boys' early album

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"Surfin' Safari" came out,

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all of a sudden,
the business kind of shifted

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from a singles business to a LP business.

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Then, of course, throughout the '60s

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as the baby boomers kind of came of age

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and there started being more and more
potential buyers of these records.

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The great thing for the record industry
was that they cost a lot more.

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So instead of spending 49 cents

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or whatever it was on a single back then,

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people were spending $3.99 or $4.99

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or $5.99 on an album.

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We could literally sell
a thousand copies of a record

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over a weekend, or something like that,

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which was incredible.

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The hits began to sell in quantity,

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the kids came in more and more,

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they grew up with it,

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they widened their taste in music.

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By the late '60s, radio began to explore

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something besides top 40.

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You had these really
free form radio stations.

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They were changing the way
that everybody looked at music,

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and we just rode that wave.

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But as the '60s went on,

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you had one LP after another

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that was a huge artistic statement.

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Sergeant Pepper and Pet Sounds
and on and on and on.

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Then suddenly, you started to have

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more and more cash coming
in to the record industry.

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And that was exactly the time

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that Tower Records really started to peak

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in that first wave
where Russ had opened his store.

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Well, he would talk about it all the time,

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how important it was
to have a big inventory,

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and how he wanted to open up
a very big store.

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The largest store
in the world in a big city.

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She was pretty. I wish
I could remember her name.

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She was a manicurist at a barbershop
that I used to go to,

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and I just accidentally ran into
her in a bar in Sacramento,

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sitting there and saying,
"Why don't we take a trip?

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Why don't we go to San
Francisco?" and she says, "Yes."

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So off to San Francisco we went.

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I mean, this was early,
like five o'clock or so

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in the afternoon.

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An hour and a half later,
we're in San Francisco

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having dinner and drinks,
and dinner and drinks,

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and dinner and drinks, and a little jazz.

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Getting pretty drunk, as a matter of fact.

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Later on ending up at a hotel.

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And the next morning,

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I was hung over, badly,

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and had to do something

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about trying to get well
to drive back to Sacramento.

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So we went down to a drive-in
at Columbus and Bay.

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I could get a nice greasy
breakfast and a lot of coffee,

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so went in there

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and I'm sitting in there
with this awful hangover

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and I looked across the street,

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and there was this empty building.

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And a big sign on it
that said, "For lease."

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The only thing that looked
alive on that property

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was a telephone booth.

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I went over to that telephone booth

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and I called the number on the sign,

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and I said, "You want to rent this place?"

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The guy said, "Love to."

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And I made a deal, just like that.

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It actually was this huge building,

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and the record company people said,

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"Where are you going to put the refrigerators
and the washing machines and stoves?"

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And he said,
"It's all going to be records."

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And they said, "Okay, you know what?
This is such an insane idea,

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that you'll be gone in three months.
We're going to back you."

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So he basically opened
that whole San Francisco store

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on nothing more
than the record company's money.

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Luckily, my cousin Ross

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was a builder, electrical, carpentry,

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and so he volunteered,
"Oh, I'll go down and fix it up.

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Put some lighting in there.

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Put a new floor in, and paint it."

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And that was it.

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He went and did it.

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There was no way we could, you know, heh,

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afford a neon sign or anything like that.

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So we opened a store,

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and it just takes off like, like a rocket.

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I mean, the day the place opened up,

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people are swarming in there, literally.

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There's a picture around
of me standing there

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with these people all over the place.

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It was unbelievable.

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If you go to San Francisco,

252
00:13:14,302 --> 00:13:15,963
be sure to wear flowers in your hair.

253
00:13:16,262 --> 00:13:18,127
I mean, you know you walked through
the streets of San Francisco

254
00:13:18,431 --> 00:13:20,171
and there were people smoking pot

255
00:13:20,474 --> 00:13:22,055
and having little daisies in their hair

256
00:13:22,351 --> 00:13:24,433
and hanging out,
and the fillmore was packed,

257
00:13:24,729 --> 00:13:26,265
and, you know, it was a change.

258
00:13:26,564 --> 00:13:29,601
People were against the war,
and against segregation,

259
00:13:29,900 --> 00:13:32,266
and there was a lot of
political feeling in the world,

260
00:13:32,570 --> 00:13:34,435
and a lot of it was centered in the change

261
00:13:34,739 --> 00:13:36,650
that was happening in San Francisco

262
00:13:36,949 --> 00:13:40,612
and that's the cauldron
in which Tower Records was born.

263
00:13:40,911 --> 00:13:43,698
So consequently, there were
people pouring into San Francisco

264
00:13:43,998 --> 00:13:46,205
from all over Northern California,

265
00:13:46,500 --> 00:13:47,831
and for that matter, all over the world,

266
00:13:48,127 --> 00:13:50,209
to experience what could be called

267
00:13:50,504 --> 00:13:52,210
the hippie kind of movement, if you will,

268
00:13:52,506 --> 00:13:55,043
but mostly the music movement
that was happening down there.

269
00:13:55,343 --> 00:13:56,879
All the San Francisco bands

270
00:13:57,178 --> 00:13:58,884
and the new music,
and so many of the people

271
00:13:59,180 --> 00:14:02,172
who went in to be entertained
by the music in San Francisco,

272
00:14:02,475 --> 00:14:04,136
wanted to know where that music came from.

273
00:14:04,435 --> 00:14:06,642
They want to know the roots of that music.

274
00:14:28,292 --> 00:14:31,079
What was particularly
unique about that store

275
00:14:31,379 --> 00:14:33,085
was how much music it had.

276
00:14:33,381 --> 00:14:34,666
Customers were so excited,

277
00:14:34,965 --> 00:14:36,546
you could almost see their eyes light up.

278
00:14:36,842 --> 00:14:39,128
Well, I think the inventory
made a big difference,

279
00:14:39,428 --> 00:14:42,420
because they wanted
everything to begin with.

280
00:14:51,440 --> 00:14:53,226
The thing that was amazing to me

281
00:14:53,526 --> 00:14:55,357
was just the sheer...

282
00:14:55,653 --> 00:14:59,316
like, almost seemed like
an unlimited types of music.

283
00:14:59,615 --> 00:15:02,732
Things like spoken word
and comedy and sound effects,

284
00:15:03,035 --> 00:15:06,243
and international and jazz,
trend jazz, big band.

285
00:15:06,539 --> 00:15:07,824
I mean, it was unbelievable.

286
00:15:08,124 --> 00:15:09,580
Tower wasn't just a group of departments,

287
00:15:09,875 --> 00:15:12,457
It was a group of little stores
within one roof.

288
00:15:12,753 --> 00:15:15,210
I mean, there was a jazz store,
there was a classical store,

289
00:15:15,506 --> 00:15:17,212
and you got to know those people,

290
00:15:17,508 --> 00:15:19,464
they got to know your tastes,
you got to know theirs.

291
00:15:19,760 --> 00:15:21,375
That's how you learned about music,

292
00:15:21,679 --> 00:15:24,512
and that's also what
brought you back into the store.

293
00:15:24,807 --> 00:15:26,923
All of a sudden,
it would become fashionable

294
00:15:27,226 --> 00:15:29,182
for those young people to find something

295
00:15:29,478 --> 00:15:31,218
that they want to hold in their hand,

296
00:15:31,522 --> 00:15:35,014
that they want to collect,
that it's hip to collect,

297
00:15:35,317 --> 00:15:36,477
that has music on it.

298
00:15:36,777 --> 00:15:39,063
Well, first, there was the thrill

299
00:15:39,363 --> 00:15:42,571
of being surrounded by music.

300
00:15:42,867 --> 00:15:45,700
80 percent of it
is a complete mystery to you.

301
00:15:45,995 --> 00:15:48,532
So when we came west, we were shocked

302
00:15:48,831 --> 00:15:51,948
at the size of Tower Records, and simply,

303
00:15:52,251 --> 00:15:55,835
how many records there were.

304
00:15:56,130 --> 00:15:59,873
Everybody in a record store
is a little bit of your friend

305
00:16:00,176 --> 00:16:03,213
for twenty minutes or so, you know?

306
00:16:03,512 --> 00:16:07,676
So there was that family aspect
of a real record store.

307
00:16:07,975 --> 00:16:09,840
It started out as a small family

308
00:16:10,144 --> 00:16:12,135
here in Sacramento with just a few of us,

309
00:16:12,438 --> 00:16:15,225
and as time went on, the company
got bigger and bigger and bigger,

310
00:16:15,524 --> 00:16:17,515
it just became a bigger and bigger family.

311
00:16:17,818 --> 00:16:19,558
It was my second year in college

312
00:16:19,862 --> 00:16:21,773
and I didn't like college.
I was moving out of the house

313
00:16:22,072 --> 00:16:23,482
and I decided I needed to get a job.

314
00:16:23,783 --> 00:16:25,398
I wanted to go some place
and make some money.

315
00:16:25,701 --> 00:16:27,737
I applied for the record store
on Watt Avenue.

316
00:16:28,037 --> 00:16:29,573
They weren't hiring girls that year.

317
00:16:29,872 --> 00:16:31,737
They'd already had one
and she hadn't worked out.

318
00:16:32,041 --> 00:16:33,952
So these two gentlemen that
were running the bookstore,

319
00:16:34,251 --> 00:16:35,866
and the bookstore opened in '62,

320
00:16:36,170 --> 00:16:38,001
so it had only been open for three years.

321
00:16:38,297 --> 00:16:41,130
They wouldn't let us wear pants,
either. We had to wear skirts.

322
00:16:41,425 --> 00:16:43,040
So they could, of course,
look up our skirts.

323
00:16:43,344 --> 00:16:44,800
Heidi was a girl that worked for me

324
00:16:45,095 --> 00:16:47,131
in the book division, in the bookstore,

325
00:16:47,431 --> 00:16:49,672
the very first bookstore in Sacramento.

326
00:16:49,975 --> 00:16:52,387
He walks into the store and the
first thing he sees in this bookstore

327
00:16:52,686 --> 00:16:54,426
is this woman in leopard skin underwear

328
00:16:54,730 --> 00:16:57,016
and a mini skirt
hanging desiderata posters,

329
00:16:57,316 --> 00:16:58,806
and that was me.

330
00:16:59,109 --> 00:17:02,567
I showed up, and I wasn't
a weenie, and I worked hard,

331
00:17:02,863 --> 00:17:05,195
and I wasn't going to be put down.

332
00:17:05,491 --> 00:17:08,324
And learned how to swear,
and learned how to drink,

333
00:17:08,619 --> 00:17:10,484
I learned how to do drugs.

334
00:17:10,788 --> 00:17:13,154
[Mark Viducich] I think we were with
some friends one afternoon.

335
00:17:13,457 --> 00:17:15,038
It was late evening/

336
00:17:15,334 --> 00:17:17,495
Honest to god, I think we stole
a couple of records from Tower,

337
00:17:17,795 --> 00:17:19,251
and it wasn't the last one I ever took.

338
00:17:19,547 --> 00:17:21,287
After I started working there, of course,

339
00:17:21,590 --> 00:17:22,705
but it was fun.

340
00:17:23,008 --> 00:17:24,589
First day, I think I went to El Chico,

341
00:17:24,885 --> 00:17:26,591
which was the local bar down the street,

342
00:17:26,887 --> 00:17:29,378
probably spent three hours
at lunch having a few cocktails

343
00:17:29,682 --> 00:17:31,047
and came back to work.

344
00:17:31,350 --> 00:17:33,386
That's pretty much how
it went for a long time.

345
00:17:33,686 --> 00:17:37,019
Mark is crazy. He's totally nuts.

346
00:17:37,314 --> 00:17:38,645
But he could do anything.

347
00:17:38,941 --> 00:17:40,477
Viducich, Sid Vicious.
We called him Sid Vicious

348
00:17:40,776 --> 00:17:42,732
because he was the nastiest
mother on the planet.

349
00:17:43,028 --> 00:17:45,735
You know he could ream your ass
like nobody's business.

350
00:17:46,031 --> 00:17:47,521
I'll go drink whenever the hell I want,

351
00:17:47,825 --> 00:17:49,315
and please don't ever
talk to me that way again.

352
00:17:49,618 --> 00:17:51,404
No, there was nothing like that.

353
00:17:51,704 --> 00:17:52,910
Course it helped that your best friend

354
00:17:53,205 --> 00:17:54,490
was the manager of the store, too.

355
00:17:54,790 --> 00:17:57,247
My dad and Russ are first cousins.

356
00:17:57,543 --> 00:18:01,627
My father actually ran the cafe
at the Tower drugstore.

357
00:18:01,922 --> 00:18:04,254
And so that's where the
connection is with Tower Drugs.

358
00:18:04,550 --> 00:18:08,168
So my father actually ended up
working at Tower Records too.

359
00:18:08,470 --> 00:18:11,337
He did store development
for Russ for many years,

360
00:18:11,640 --> 00:18:14,757
so when we built new stores,
my father, Ross,

361
00:18:15,060 --> 00:18:16,596
was the person who built those stores,

362
00:18:16,896 --> 00:18:18,887
so obviously,
it was easy for me to get a job

363
00:18:19,189 --> 00:18:21,350
working at Tower
when I got out of high school.

364
00:18:21,650 --> 00:18:22,639
I went to work for the book division

365
00:18:22,943 --> 00:18:26,026
as a clerk and then advertising.

366
00:18:26,322 --> 00:18:28,438
So I ran the advertising
for the book division.

367
00:18:28,741 --> 00:18:30,277
Then I went into community relations,

368
00:18:30,576 --> 00:18:32,737
and bringing in authors for book signings.

369
00:18:33,037 --> 00:18:36,200
Virtually everyone in the
company started off as a clerk.

370
00:18:36,498 --> 00:18:38,454
They'd become buyers, they'd become

371
00:18:38,751 --> 00:18:41,288
supervisor types in the store.

372
00:18:41,587 --> 00:18:44,294
They'd become assistant managers
and then they'd become managers,

373
00:18:44,590 --> 00:18:46,296
so they learn everything
they need to learn.

374
00:18:46,592 --> 00:18:49,925
And the entire development of Tower Records

375
00:18:50,220 --> 00:18:53,508
through the entire period
of time it existed

376
00:18:53,807 --> 00:18:55,547
was just that kind of a thing.

377
00:18:55,851 --> 00:18:57,466
As a woman, I just said,

378
00:18:57,770 --> 00:18:59,055
"I'm not even going to think
about being a woman."

379
00:18:59,355 --> 00:19:01,095
There're no excuses, no period stuff.

380
00:19:01,398 --> 00:19:03,980
I mean, I went in to labour
twice behind the counter.

381
00:19:04,276 --> 00:19:07,484
Because I was determined
to be treated as an equal,

382
00:19:07,780 --> 00:19:09,520
because I was the first female hired,

383
00:19:09,823 --> 00:19:11,484
I was the first female vice president,

384
00:19:11,784 --> 00:19:12,864
I was the first female general manager,

385
00:19:13,160 --> 00:19:14,366
I was the first manager,

386
00:19:14,662 --> 00:19:17,620
so I unknowingly had this responsibility

387
00:19:17,915 --> 00:19:19,325
to be kind of the mentor

388
00:19:19,625 --> 00:19:21,616
for these women coming up behind me.

389
00:19:21,919 --> 00:19:24,626
It isn't what we as a company
could teach our employees,

390
00:19:24,922 --> 00:19:27,789
but what other employees
could teach each other.

391
00:19:28,092 --> 00:19:31,801
That family kind of thing
is what made the company grow,

392
00:19:32,096 --> 00:19:33,711
and what made the company successful.

393
00:19:34,014 --> 00:19:35,550
I'm convinced of that.

394
00:19:35,849 --> 00:19:37,760
That's my old Tom Sawyer
theory of management.

395
00:19:38,060 --> 00:19:39,641
Let somebody else paint the fence.

396
00:19:39,937 --> 00:19:42,019
But we had the freedom to do
whatever we wanted,

397
00:19:42,314 --> 00:19:45,101
I mean he literally gave us these
stores with all this product in it,

398
00:19:45,401 --> 00:19:49,735
and said, "Okay, show up, do the job right,

399
00:19:50,030 --> 00:19:52,521
don't screw me over."
And then left us alone.

400
00:19:52,825 --> 00:19:55,282
One key to the success of Tower Records,

401
00:19:55,577 --> 00:19:57,192
particularly in that period,

402
00:19:57,496 --> 00:19:58,656
is we had no dress code.

403
00:19:58,956 --> 00:20:00,912
I really believe that a lot of people

404
00:20:01,208 --> 00:20:04,200
wanted to come to work for us,
young people especially,

405
00:20:04,503 --> 00:20:07,165
so they wouldn't have
to be told how to dress.

406
00:20:07,464 --> 00:20:09,295
[Ken Sockolov] The people
who worked at Tower

407
00:20:09,591 --> 00:20:11,297
were musicians in many cases.

408
00:20:11,593 --> 00:20:13,129
[Dave Grohl] I got a job at Tower Records

409
00:20:13,429 --> 00:20:16,136
because that's the only place
I could get a job

410
00:20:16,432 --> 00:20:18,468
with my fucking haircut.

411
00:20:18,767 --> 00:20:20,883
That is the truth.

412
00:20:21,186 --> 00:20:23,393
I love Tower Records, and I love music,

413
00:20:23,689 --> 00:20:26,931
and I only wanted to work at Tower Records

414
00:20:27,234 --> 00:20:30,897
and be surrounded by these cool
people and all this cool music.

415
00:20:31,196 --> 00:20:32,936
I just imagined that everybody that worked

416
00:20:33,240 --> 00:20:34,730
at Tower was like an aficionado.

417
00:20:35,034 --> 00:20:37,241
They didn't necessarily have
any other kind of skills,

418
00:20:37,536 --> 00:20:42,030
sometimes even people skills,
but they had musical knowledge.

419
00:20:42,332 --> 00:20:44,869
Every music store, whether it was
a place to go buy drumsticks,

420
00:20:45,169 --> 00:20:46,579
or a place to go buy records,

421
00:20:46,879 --> 00:20:49,586
were total snobs, total snobs.

422
00:20:49,882 --> 00:20:51,088
The record store especially was,

423
00:20:51,383 --> 00:20:53,544
had a reputation of being incredibly rude.

424
00:20:53,844 --> 00:20:55,380
And fuck you if you can't take a joke.

425
00:20:55,679 --> 00:20:58,921
So, heh, it was more of
a battlefield to get music,

426
00:20:59,224 --> 00:21:01,931
to get records out of the store
in the earlier days.

427
00:21:02,227 --> 00:21:04,013
When we opened up at Sunset,

428
00:21:04,313 --> 00:21:07,350
that, I feel, really put us on the map.

429
00:21:10,235 --> 00:21:13,978
Larry Carp called Russ, "You got to see
this location. the best thing in the world."

430
00:21:14,281 --> 00:21:15,942
And he goes down there,

431
00:21:16,241 --> 00:21:18,232
and it was a mad man Muntz location,

432
00:21:18,535 --> 00:21:21,993
where you could get a four track
player installed in your car

433
00:21:22,289 --> 00:21:24,029
right at the corner of Sunset and Horn.

434
00:21:24,333 --> 00:21:26,540
It was 4,000 bucks
a month for a land lease.

435
00:21:26,835 --> 00:21:28,450
That meant I had to build a building.

436
00:21:28,754 --> 00:21:31,461
So my cousin Ross
comes to the rescue again,

437
00:21:31,757 --> 00:21:34,715
and he says, "All right, we'll just
build a building on there."

438
00:21:35,010 --> 00:21:36,341
I said, "Okay, do it."

439
00:21:36,637 --> 00:21:39,003
It was the first building we built.

440
00:21:39,306 --> 00:21:41,592
It was a pre-fab building
that's still standing

441
00:21:41,892 --> 00:21:43,223
forty years later, fifty years later,

442
00:21:43,519 --> 00:21:44,599
whatever it is.

443
00:21:44,895 --> 00:21:46,476
It was a concrete slab,

444
00:21:46,772 --> 00:21:49,855
and then these metal girders
that went up and over

445
00:21:50,150 --> 00:21:53,358
filled in with concrete block and glass,

446
00:21:53,654 --> 00:21:56,236
and an orange tile floor.

447
00:21:56,532 --> 00:21:58,614
And some counters, that was it.
I laid the floor

448
00:21:58,909 --> 00:22:00,991
at Tower Sunset, with these two hands.

449
00:22:01,286 --> 00:22:05,950
Ross built that building,
the entire project for $75,000.

450
00:22:06,250 --> 00:22:07,740
Nobody else would do that.

451
00:22:08,043 --> 00:22:09,624
You know, they have the whole process

452
00:22:09,920 --> 00:22:11,035
of getting the store ready,

453
00:22:11,338 --> 00:22:12,794
then getting the racks put together,

454
00:22:13,090 --> 00:22:15,672
and getting the merchandise
put in and so on.

455
00:22:15,968 --> 00:22:17,754
Stan was there from the beginning.

456
00:22:18,053 --> 00:22:20,669
I would come home from working all day,

457
00:22:20,973 --> 00:22:22,964
which really was digging ditches

458
00:22:23,267 --> 00:22:25,849
and laying floors, and getting all sweaty,

459
00:22:26,145 --> 00:22:27,806
but the nice thing was,
record companies would come by

460
00:22:28,105 --> 00:22:29,811
and drop off promos every once in a while,

461
00:22:30,107 --> 00:22:32,018
and when I'd get home,
I'd have some new records.

462
00:22:32,317 --> 00:22:35,980
Well, I just saw
this guy schlepping albums up,

463
00:22:36,280 --> 00:22:37,770
a good twelve steps to his level,

464
00:22:38,073 --> 00:22:40,314
and then it was even farther to mine,

465
00:22:40,617 --> 00:22:43,575
but I just saw him,
and I'm a very friendly guy,

466
00:22:43,871 --> 00:22:46,032
and just went down and said,
"Hi, I'm your neighbour."

467
00:22:46,331 --> 00:22:49,949
And Bob would come down from his apartment

468
00:22:50,252 --> 00:22:52,368
to check out, see if I had any new promos.

469
00:22:52,671 --> 00:22:55,037
He was really nice, he was very open to me,

470
00:22:55,340 --> 00:22:59,583
I didn't know him,
but we became very good friends.

471
00:22:59,887 --> 00:23:01,969
I'll never forget, one day I came home

472
00:23:02,264 --> 00:23:04,050
and my front door was open,

473
00:23:04,349 --> 00:23:05,805
and I thought, "Well, that's odd."

474
00:23:06,101 --> 00:23:07,637
I walk in, and I hear splashing.

475
00:23:07,936 --> 00:23:09,801
Well yeah, I mean it got hot in LA.

476
00:23:10,105 --> 00:23:11,720
When Stan went to work,

477
00:23:12,024 --> 00:23:13,639
Bob'd go in to his apartment and smoke dope

478
00:23:13,942 --> 00:23:15,728
and listen to Stan's records.

479
00:23:16,028 --> 00:23:17,768
But yeah, he came home and I was soaking

480
00:23:18,071 --> 00:23:20,653
in his tub, listening to records.

481
00:23:20,949 --> 00:23:23,190
That did it, I was really pissed.

482
00:23:23,493 --> 00:23:27,577
So I said, "Well Bob, no, but
it's time for you to get a job.

483
00:23:27,873 --> 00:23:30,580
"We need a receiving clerk. Why
don't you be a receiving clerk?"

484
00:23:30,876 --> 00:23:32,912
In November, actually,
they opened the store.

485
00:23:33,212 --> 00:23:34,577
So I had hung around for quite a bit,

486
00:23:34,880 --> 00:23:36,290
he said, "Come in the store and apply,"

487
00:23:36,590 --> 00:23:38,922
and I did, and Charlie Shaw,
the manager at the time,

488
00:23:39,218 --> 00:23:41,129
hired me, immediately.

489
00:23:41,428 --> 00:23:42,884
And then once I got in the door,

490
00:23:43,180 --> 00:23:45,136
I just fell in love
with being in the building.

491
00:23:45,432 --> 00:23:47,764
I had no clue about the record industry,

492
00:23:48,060 --> 00:23:50,176
but it was, to me, right up my alley.

493
00:23:50,479 --> 00:23:52,720
This is like being home
with a bunch of friends,

494
00:23:53,023 --> 00:23:55,059
and much more fun than I'd ever had

495
00:23:55,359 --> 00:23:57,065
in any of my previous jobs.

496
00:23:57,361 --> 00:23:58,817
Again, now here,

497
00:23:59,112 --> 00:24:00,522
we hadn't opened a store
since San Francisco,

498
00:24:00,822 --> 00:24:02,938
and the same thing happened in Los Angeles.

499
00:24:03,242 --> 00:24:06,780
We were in the midst
of a marvellous audience.

500
00:24:07,079 --> 00:24:09,035
I mean you had this variety of people

501
00:24:09,331 --> 00:24:12,789
with all kinds of musical tastes and money.

502
00:24:13,085 --> 00:24:15,827
[Bob Delanoy] I mean,
I knew Sunset was like the focus

503
00:24:16,129 --> 00:24:17,835
of the whole record industry, there.

504
00:24:18,131 --> 00:24:19,712
If you didn't get it in that store,

505
00:24:20,008 --> 00:24:21,873
their whole rest of their marketing crew

506
00:24:22,177 --> 00:24:24,133
thought you were doing a shit job.

507
00:24:24,429 --> 00:24:25,794
But imagine where we were.

508
00:24:26,098 --> 00:24:28,134
We were within walking distance, virtually,

509
00:24:28,433 --> 00:24:31,391
of the entire record industry,
in the LA area.

510
00:24:31,687 --> 00:24:33,518
I think that was a good strategy, I mean,

511
00:24:33,814 --> 00:24:36,226
if you're about music, you go
to where the music's being made.

512
00:24:36,525 --> 00:24:38,686
In Los Angeles,
especially in San Francisco,

513
00:24:38,986 --> 00:24:41,944
so many of the artists
lived in our neighbourhood.

514
00:24:42,239 --> 00:24:45,356
I mean, we were the local record
store for them, so it was great.

515
00:24:45,659 --> 00:24:48,366
I remember David Geffen
coming in to the store one Saturday,

516
00:24:48,662 --> 00:24:50,698
and I was chatting with him, and he says,

517
00:24:50,998 --> 00:24:52,829
"Hey, you got to come listen
to this record."

518
00:24:53,125 --> 00:24:55,241
I go, "Okay." So I hop into his car

519
00:24:55,544 --> 00:24:57,455
and we drive up into
the Hollywood Hills somewhere

520
00:24:57,754 --> 00:24:58,834
to where he was living,

521
00:24:59,131 --> 00:25:01,668
and he took out an acetate test pressing,

522
00:25:01,967 --> 00:25:03,457
he put it on, and he played it,

523
00:25:03,760 --> 00:25:05,296
and it was the Eagles' first record.

524
00:25:05,595 --> 00:25:06,926
You had The Troubadour,
and you had The Roxy,

525
00:25:07,222 --> 00:25:08,462
and you had The Whiskey,

526
00:25:08,765 --> 00:25:11,222
and lots of clubs
that they played coming up,

527
00:25:11,518 --> 00:25:13,054
so those artists would look through Tower

528
00:25:13,353 --> 00:25:14,889
wonder when their records
were going to be there,

529
00:25:15,188 --> 00:25:16,928
and would they have piles,
that kind of thing.

530
00:25:17,232 --> 00:25:19,598
If you loved music,
and having a record collection,

531
00:25:19,901 --> 00:25:22,392
which, I did, it was exciting
to walk through the store.

532
00:25:22,696 --> 00:25:25,153
I went there three or four times a week.

533
00:25:25,449 --> 00:25:27,815
We just drove down Sunset Boulevard...

534
00:25:28,118 --> 00:25:31,861
And we were just
eyeballing everything we could see,

535
00:25:32,164 --> 00:25:34,906
and there was a huge record store.

536
00:25:35,208 --> 00:25:38,746
It was that place where your dreams

537
00:25:39,046 --> 00:25:41,037
meet the listener.

538
00:25:41,340 --> 00:25:44,628
That's where the final connection was made.

539
00:25:44,926 --> 00:25:46,382
That audience you dreamt of

540
00:25:46,678 --> 00:25:49,636
is walking through the door right now.

541
00:25:49,931 --> 00:25:52,923
And you can stand there
and watch that happen.

542
00:25:53,226 --> 00:25:54,841
They are your listeners.

543
00:25:55,145 --> 00:25:56,931
And the place also served

544
00:25:57,230 --> 00:25:59,346
as kind of a lost boys club,

545
00:25:59,649 --> 00:26:02,356
so if you were a young musician,

546
00:26:02,652 --> 00:26:05,940
you came into town
and you didn't know what to do,

547
00:26:06,239 --> 00:26:08,901
the first thing you did
is you went to Tower Records.

548
00:26:09,201 --> 00:26:11,317
Artists who were in California
and in Los Angeles

549
00:26:11,620 --> 00:26:14,157
would go into Tower Records to
find out where their records were.

550
00:26:14,456 --> 00:26:15,741
And if there was a pile of Elton John

551
00:26:16,041 --> 00:26:17,872
and there wasn't a pile of The Eagles,

552
00:26:18,168 --> 00:26:19,874
The Eagles weren't happy, or vice versa.

553
00:26:20,170 --> 00:26:22,126
I mean there were
a couple people that came in

554
00:26:22,422 --> 00:26:24,128
to the store that I was so in awe of,

555
00:26:24,424 --> 00:26:27,382
I couldn't even, you know,
I couldn't even approach them.

556
00:26:27,677 --> 00:26:29,508
Eric Clapton, when he came in,

557
00:26:29,805 --> 00:26:33,172
Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend,
it was a constant flow.

558
00:26:33,475 --> 00:26:35,056
And nobody ever bothered them.

559
00:26:35,352 --> 00:26:37,809
I mean, they had a place there
where they could go

560
00:26:38,105 --> 00:26:39,845
and maybe a few people,
"Oh, look over there.

561
00:26:40,148 --> 00:26:41,684
There's Elton John," or whatever,

562
00:26:41,983 --> 00:26:43,189
but they kind of knew,

563
00:26:43,485 --> 00:26:44,975
that was a place where you could hang

564
00:26:45,278 --> 00:26:47,109
and not really worry
about anybody hassling you.

565
00:26:47,406 --> 00:26:49,271
Tuesday mornings
I would be at Tower Records

566
00:26:49,574 --> 00:26:52,316
at 10:00, 9:00 in LA.

567
00:26:52,619 --> 00:26:54,234
The store'd open at nine
and they'd let me in.

568
00:26:54,538 --> 00:26:56,904
And it was a ritual,
and it was a ritual I loved.

569
00:26:57,207 --> 00:26:58,492
It was, you know, my music centre.

570
00:26:58,792 --> 00:27:01,033
Yeah, I knew where everything was.

571
00:27:01,336 --> 00:27:03,167
And if they didn't have
something in one week,

572
00:27:03,463 --> 00:27:04,703
or the next week,

573
00:27:05,006 --> 00:27:07,338
I told them, I said,
"You need to get this in."

574
00:27:07,634 --> 00:27:10,376
Well Elton was one that used to
come even during business hours.

575
00:27:10,679 --> 00:27:12,169
He'd come in with his limo driver.

576
00:27:12,472 --> 00:27:14,008
His limo driver would
just stand there with bags

577
00:27:14,307 --> 00:27:16,343
and he would come through
with a long, long list,

578
00:27:16,643 --> 00:27:18,554
and go through the record bins, picking out

579
00:27:18,854 --> 00:27:20,560
all the new releases that he had seen.

580
00:27:20,856 --> 00:27:22,471
[Elton John] I mean,
Tower just had everything.

581
00:27:22,774 --> 00:27:25,481
Those people knew their stuff.
They were really on the ball.

582
00:27:25,777 --> 00:27:28,268
They weren't just employees that
happened to work in a music store.

583
00:27:28,572 --> 00:27:29,778
They were devotees of music.

584
00:27:30,073 --> 00:27:31,688
That's what I loved about the Tower.

585
00:27:31,992 --> 00:27:33,107
I could talk about music
to them, and they'd say,

586
00:27:33,410 --> 00:27:34,900
"Have you heard this?"

587
00:27:35,203 --> 00:27:37,660
It was just... they were like friends.

588
00:27:37,956 --> 00:27:39,742
I knew the guys in the store pretty well

589
00:27:40,041 --> 00:27:41,656
because I was so, you know, regular.

590
00:27:41,841 --> 00:27:44,056
There was a little guy... Was it Bob?
Is the little guy Bob?

591
00:27:44,463 --> 00:27:46,249
- No, that's Stan.
- That's Stan.

592
00:27:46,548 --> 00:27:49,665
He was my main man. Yeah, he was great.

593
00:27:49,968 --> 00:27:52,880
And he would go through every single aisle,

594
00:27:53,180 --> 00:27:56,764
every single bin,
and he had an incredible memory

595
00:27:57,058 --> 00:27:58,468
from what records he had,

596
00:27:58,768 --> 00:28:00,724
and he'd get like two to three each.

597
00:28:01,021 --> 00:28:02,852
One for each one of his houses.

598
00:28:03,148 --> 00:28:05,309
It was comfortable
and not intimidating at all.

599
00:28:05,609 --> 00:28:09,022
It was inviting. It was like
going to your favourite cafe.

600
00:28:09,321 --> 00:28:11,733
And eventually we said,
"Elton, we'll open early

601
00:28:12,032 --> 00:28:13,363
for you if you want to come in."

602
00:28:13,658 --> 00:28:15,944
So, we started opening like at 8:00AM.

603
00:28:16,244 --> 00:28:18,360
I can honestly say this
without any exaggeration,

604
00:28:18,663 --> 00:28:19,994
I spent more money in Tower Records

605
00:28:20,290 --> 00:28:21,700
than any other human being.

606
00:28:26,338 --> 00:28:27,953
Once the word's out

607
00:28:28,256 --> 00:28:30,497
that's where the stars are,
it really clicked.

608
00:28:30,800 --> 00:28:33,963
And then it became the place to go in LA.

609
00:28:39,017 --> 00:28:40,257
Did you know

610
00:28:40,560 --> 00:28:41,925
the world's largest record store

611
00:28:42,229 --> 00:28:44,311
in the known world,
and universe, et cetera,

612
00:28:44,606 --> 00:28:45,812
is here in Los Angeles?

613
00:28:46,107 --> 00:28:47,938
It is and it's called Tower Records.

614
00:28:48,235 --> 00:28:51,068
And Tower Records is located
in the heart of Sunset Strip.

615
00:28:51,363 --> 00:28:52,728
At Tower you'll find tens of thousands

616
00:28:53,031 --> 00:28:54,771
of your favourite LPs and tapes,

617
00:28:55,075 --> 00:28:56,940
and you'll find that they're
all super discount priced.

618
00:28:57,244 --> 00:28:59,326
Tower'll always save you money
on the LPs and tapes you buy.

619
00:28:59,621 --> 00:29:01,907
You'll find more rock LPs
than you ever thought existed

620
00:29:02,207 --> 00:29:05,040
and that includes more imported
rock LPs if you need that stuff.

621
00:29:05,335 --> 00:29:06,825
You'll find more jazz, more classics,

622
00:29:07,128 --> 00:29:09,039
easy listening, more country,
more international,

623
00:29:09,339 --> 00:29:10,749
more spoken words, and more words.

624
00:29:11,049 --> 00:29:12,164
More of everything than you've ever seen

625
00:29:12,467 --> 00:29:14,003
in your whole life in one store,

626
00:29:14,302 --> 00:29:15,758
at one time.

627
00:29:16,054 --> 00:29:18,010
And you'll find thousands of 45RPM singles.

628
00:29:18,306 --> 00:29:21,469
In short, the largest record store
in the known world, hmm,

629
00:29:21,768 --> 00:29:23,304
lives up to its name.

630
00:29:23,603 --> 00:29:25,093
Shop Tower Records in the heart
of Sunset Strip tonight,

631
00:29:25,397 --> 00:29:27,137
and every night of the year,
until midnight.

632
00:29:27,440 --> 00:29:28,930
And Tower will have my latest album

633
00:29:29,234 --> 00:29:31,816
"Walls and Bridges",
this afternoon, so go get it!

634
00:29:47,085 --> 00:29:48,495
[Steve Nikkel]
Part of the concept with Tower

635
00:29:48,795 --> 00:29:51,036
was as much social as it was retail,

636
00:29:51,339 --> 00:29:53,170
you know, before social networking

637
00:29:53,466 --> 00:29:56,708
and social media, people went outside.

638
00:29:57,012 --> 00:30:00,220
People would spend hours together
just digging through the bins.

639
00:30:00,515 --> 00:30:02,426
You know, and people would meet
at Tower Records.

640
00:30:02,726 --> 00:30:06,059
I mean, we were a destination.
people would hook up at Tower.

641
00:30:06,354 --> 00:30:08,390
And that kind of captured my...

642
00:30:08,690 --> 00:30:10,806
Wow, this is a really cool place to work.

643
00:30:11,109 --> 00:30:12,770
And then of course,
once I got in the back room,

644
00:30:13,069 --> 00:30:15,651
I really started to see
what went on in that store.

645
00:30:21,119 --> 00:30:22,450
There was drinking going on.

646
00:30:22,746 --> 00:30:25,738
Abso-fucking-lutely, just hammered.

647
00:30:26,041 --> 00:30:28,908
There was a culture that you
could drink as much as you want,

648
00:30:29,210 --> 00:30:32,452
you can do whatever the hell you wanted,
but you know, you had to come to work.

649
00:30:32,756 --> 00:30:34,292
There was a guy who slept in the office

650
00:30:34,591 --> 00:30:37,333
and washed his pits with Comet cleanser.

651
00:30:37,636 --> 00:30:39,092
He'd slept in the office all night,

652
00:30:39,387 --> 00:30:41,093
and had to get up for work
the next day to open up.

653
00:30:41,389 --> 00:30:42,754
Sometimes you could even come to work

654
00:30:43,058 --> 00:30:46,095
say for an hour
and go home with cocktail flu.

655
00:30:46,394 --> 00:30:48,180
But there was a thing about showing up,

656
00:30:48,480 --> 00:30:49,845
manning up, coming to work,

657
00:30:50,148 --> 00:30:52,434
and even if you threw up,
you had to show up.

658
00:30:52,734 --> 00:30:55,976
The rules were don't smoke dope
on the premises.

659
00:30:56,279 --> 00:30:58,190
And certainly don't drink on the premises.

660
00:30:58,490 --> 00:31:00,776
That didn't mean that once in a while
there wasn't a party back there,

661
00:31:01,076 --> 00:31:04,193
but you know,
you do your job during the day,

662
00:31:04,496 --> 00:31:06,111
had a good time doing it,

663
00:31:06,414 --> 00:31:09,577
and you'd go out and play
the way you wanted to at night.

664
00:31:09,876 --> 00:31:11,491
Hell, there were many nights
we just came to work

665
00:31:11,795 --> 00:31:14,502
and never went to bed, for Christ's sakes.

666
00:31:14,798 --> 00:31:17,631
That's not cocktail flu,
that's a lifestyle.

667
00:31:17,926 --> 00:31:19,917
When you hit the late '60s, early '70s,

668
00:31:20,220 --> 00:31:22,802
you start to get to kind of
the hookers and blow era

669
00:31:23,098 --> 00:31:24,963
of the record industry, and this continued

670
00:31:25,266 --> 00:31:27,302
all the way through
the end of the disco era.

671
00:31:27,602 --> 00:31:30,059
Yeah, '70s is when we started doing...

672
00:31:30,355 --> 00:31:32,437
hand truck fuel, yes.

673
00:31:32,732 --> 00:31:34,723
Hand truck fuel is a controlled substance

674
00:31:35,026 --> 00:31:37,108
that you ingest through a small straw

675
00:31:37,404 --> 00:31:40,066
in your nose.

676
00:31:40,365 --> 00:31:43,152
Seems like Tower Records people
always ended up in a bathroom.

677
00:31:43,451 --> 00:31:46,864
Either in a hot tub,
you know, probably drinking,

678
00:31:47,163 --> 00:31:49,119
maybe smoking a little pot or whatever.

679
00:31:49,416 --> 00:31:53,159
We used to do inventories
overnight or we would work late,

680
00:31:53,461 --> 00:31:56,248
doing whatever project we were doing,
and we needed hand truck fuel,

681
00:31:56,548 --> 00:31:58,038
which, by the way, we took paid-outs for.

682
00:31:58,341 --> 00:31:59,547
No one even caught it.

683
00:31:59,843 --> 00:32:01,458
There was hand truck fuel, yeah.

684
00:32:01,761 --> 00:32:03,752
You understood you had a lot of latitude

685
00:32:04,055 --> 00:32:06,296
to do what you wanted,
to manage the way you wanted,

686
00:32:06,599 --> 00:32:08,339
and there wasn't going
to be any real repercussions

687
00:32:08,643 --> 00:32:10,258
if things went terribly wrong,

688
00:32:10,562 --> 00:32:12,223
because the whole thing was an experiment

689
00:32:12,522 --> 00:32:13,602
from day one until the end.

690
00:32:13,898 --> 00:32:16,230
But... the store always got opened.

691
00:32:16,526 --> 00:32:19,233
We always covered the shifts.
No matter what.

692
00:32:19,529 --> 00:32:21,986
It was always a party
atmosphere; it was never work.

693
00:32:25,702 --> 00:32:30,241
[Rudy Danzinger] Russ was the free-
swinging guy, man. He enjoyed life.

694
00:32:30,540 --> 00:32:34,158
He liked to buy drinks for people
after work, especially the girls.

695
00:32:34,461 --> 00:32:38,249
There was nothing more common than
Russ rounding up all the babes

696
00:32:38,548 --> 00:32:40,755
and taking them to the bar, and
you're stuck behind the counter,

697
00:32:41,050 --> 00:32:42,756
the only guy in the store, you know.

698
00:32:43,052 --> 00:32:45,543
My father was always a ladies' man.

699
00:32:45,847 --> 00:32:49,339
He was attracted to many a beautiful woman,

700
00:32:49,642 --> 00:32:51,257
and they were to him.

701
00:32:51,561 --> 00:32:52,892
But he always respected the women,

702
00:32:53,188 --> 00:32:55,349
I mean, when they were working,
it was one thing.

703
00:32:55,648 --> 00:32:58,060
When it was partying,
it was altogether different.

704
00:32:58,359 --> 00:32:59,769
I can remember one night,

705
00:33:00,069 --> 00:33:02,185
it was about five in the morning
and we had been partying,

706
00:33:02,489 --> 00:33:05,856
and for some reason, the alarm
went off at Tower Broadway,

707
00:33:06,159 --> 00:33:09,492
and Bud Martin at the time, he was
the vice president of the company.

708
00:33:09,788 --> 00:33:11,244
He shows up, and we were actually

709
00:33:11,539 --> 00:33:13,029
in the back room still drinking.

710
00:33:13,333 --> 00:33:15,039
Well, he got a little
pissed off that night.

711
00:33:15,335 --> 00:33:18,202
Bud Martin didn't have the same loose feel

712
00:33:18,505 --> 00:33:19,836
for management that Russ did.

713
00:33:20,131 --> 00:33:22,247
Bud was the one that was
that glue, so to speak,

714
00:33:22,550 --> 00:33:25,542
that was able to hold
this thing called Tower,

715
00:33:25,845 --> 00:33:27,551
and this culture that started rolling,

716
00:33:27,847 --> 00:33:29,963
and Russ would have never ever been able

717
00:33:30,266 --> 00:33:33,429
to keep it together
without Bud, no question.

718
00:33:33,728 --> 00:33:36,185
Bud Martin, he was my dad's accountant,

719
00:33:36,481 --> 00:33:40,065
and when Tower opened,
he had a little private office,

720
00:33:40,360 --> 00:33:41,691
so that became our office.

721
00:33:41,986 --> 00:33:44,227
Bud controlled most of all the divisions--

722
00:33:44,531 --> 00:33:46,237
the accounts payable, sales audit,

723
00:33:46,533 --> 00:33:48,319
all those areas. I mean, he was--

724
00:33:48,618 --> 00:33:50,028
when they had a problem, they'd go to Bud.

725
00:33:50,328 --> 00:33:51,613
I was not a financial manager.

726
00:33:51,913 --> 00:33:53,653
I certainly wasn't a CPA.

727
00:33:53,957 --> 00:33:56,323
I had no business school training,

728
00:33:56,626 --> 00:33:58,491
so I had to trust him, and I did.

729
00:33:58,795 --> 00:34:00,410
Bud was at one end of the hall, Mr. No,

730
00:34:00,713 --> 00:34:02,704
and Russ was at the other end
of the hall, Mr. Yes,

731
00:34:03,007 --> 00:34:04,292
and so you could go to Russ and get a yes,

732
00:34:04,592 --> 00:34:06,878
then you had to go down the hall to Mr. No,

733
00:34:07,178 --> 00:34:08,418
and tell him, Mr. Yes had said yes,

734
00:34:08,721 --> 00:34:10,211
and then you had to justify to Bud

735
00:34:10,515 --> 00:34:12,631
why Russ had said yes.

736
00:34:12,934 --> 00:34:14,299
Yeah, it was a constant battle.

737
00:34:14,602 --> 00:34:17,264
Bud became almost like a partner with Russ.

738
00:34:17,564 --> 00:34:18,644
They were yin and yang.

739
00:34:18,940 --> 00:34:20,601
He was the antithesis of Russ Solomon.

740
00:34:20,900 --> 00:34:23,733
Russ was like a very carefree, if you will,

741
00:34:24,028 --> 00:34:26,360
entrepreneur who loved music

742
00:34:26,656 --> 00:34:28,521
and Bud was actually a businessman.

743
00:34:28,825 --> 00:34:30,406
I would make it work

744
00:34:30,702 --> 00:34:32,363
by hiring my people to go out and do it.

745
00:34:32,662 --> 00:34:34,823
He would make it work
because he had to pay for it.

746
00:34:35,123 --> 00:34:37,660
I suppose there was a rather serious

747
00:34:37,959 --> 00:34:41,201
love-hate relationship
going on between Russ and Bud,

748
00:34:41,504 --> 00:34:44,211
because again, Russ would say,
"Spend the money, get it done,"

749
00:34:44,507 --> 00:34:46,372
and then Bud would say,
"No, you can't spend the money."

750
00:34:46,676 --> 00:34:49,338
We would go to lunch every day

751
00:34:49,637 --> 00:34:52,424
and I would get...
at lunch, we would argue.

752
00:34:52,724 --> 00:34:53,554
He was the keeper of the money,

753
00:34:53,850 --> 00:34:55,090
and he didn't let anything go.

754
00:34:55,393 --> 00:34:56,428
And he and Russ would have battles

755
00:34:56,728 --> 00:34:58,309
about Russ wanting to open up a store

756
00:34:58,605 --> 00:34:59,845
and Bud said, "I don't have any money,

757
00:35:00,148 --> 00:35:01,684
and we're going to go to the poor house."

758
00:35:01,983 --> 00:35:03,268
Russ'd say, "Bud, I'm doing it.

759
00:35:03,568 --> 00:35:04,603
Figure out how to get it done."

760
00:35:04,903 --> 00:35:06,359
But if you get two drinks in him,

761
00:35:06,654 --> 00:35:08,895
he would be literally hanging
from the lampshades.

762
00:35:09,198 --> 00:35:11,780
You know what I mean?
Or swinging on the chandelier.

763
00:35:12,076 --> 00:35:16,365
He had a conservative monetary policy

764
00:35:16,664 --> 00:35:18,950
but a liberal social policy.

765
00:35:24,505 --> 00:35:27,463
It was dangerous to go out
with him and get him drunk.

766
00:35:27,759 --> 00:35:30,421
We've been thrown out
of a few restaurants, you know.

767
00:35:30,720 --> 00:35:33,757
It was just that
he was living another life,

768
00:35:34,057 --> 00:35:36,514
dating and things like that,
buying splurges.

769
00:35:36,809 --> 00:35:39,972
Just do, probably just do
normal things you do with money.

770
00:35:40,271 --> 00:35:41,386
You spend it.

771
00:35:41,689 --> 00:35:44,021
Bud loved cars.

772
00:35:44,317 --> 00:35:47,309
He would buy at least
one new car every year.

773
00:35:47,612 --> 00:35:49,318
Sometimes more than one car,

774
00:35:49,614 --> 00:35:51,070
continuously trading them in.

775
00:35:51,366 --> 00:35:54,199
He was also the most random
woman chaser on the planet.

776
00:35:54,494 --> 00:35:56,359
He literally had an extra office
out of his office

777
00:35:56,663 --> 00:35:58,528
where he took women to wink them.

778
00:35:58,831 --> 00:36:00,446
He'd hire them as secretaries.

779
00:36:00,750 --> 00:36:03,492
And I mean, it was so flamboyantly bad

780
00:36:03,795 --> 00:36:05,331
that it had to be a joke.

781
00:36:11,386 --> 00:36:15,220
He was straight laced with a secret life.

782
00:36:15,515 --> 00:36:16,595
I think he was intrigued by the idea

783
00:36:16,891 --> 00:36:18,176
that we could race along too,

784
00:36:18,476 --> 00:36:20,592
because he'd never have done it himself.

785
00:36:20,895 --> 00:36:22,601
So I had to kind of lead the charge.

786
00:36:22,897 --> 00:36:24,307
We use to call it the Russ Bus, yeah.

787
00:36:24,607 --> 00:36:25,517
You know he was so fearless

788
00:36:25,817 --> 00:36:27,557
and he was so enthusiastic

789
00:36:27,860 --> 00:36:29,316
about what he-- I don't think he had a clue

790
00:36:29,612 --> 00:36:31,193
what he was doing, seriously.

791
00:36:31,489 --> 00:36:33,320
Russ just had a special way of living.

792
00:36:33,616 --> 00:36:35,777
He didn't play golf, he didn't go hunting,

793
00:36:36,077 --> 00:36:38,284
Tower Records was what he did.
That's what he...

794
00:36:38,579 --> 00:36:39,739
he breathed that.

795
00:36:40,039 --> 00:36:41,700
You were part of his family.
You were part of

796
00:36:42,000 --> 00:36:44,491
the Tower experience, as it were.

797
00:36:46,129 --> 00:36:47,710
The record companies and NARM

798
00:36:48,006 --> 00:36:50,622
would have conventions
in Los Angeles, mainly.

799
00:36:50,925 --> 00:36:54,008
So, for fun, I would start stealing ties.

800
00:36:54,303 --> 00:36:56,589
I said you're going to feel
much better without this.

801
00:36:56,889 --> 00:36:59,130
You'll be much more comfortable.
What are you doing?

802
00:36:59,434 --> 00:37:02,016
Coming to California,
big shots from New York,

803
00:37:02,311 --> 00:37:03,426
for crying out loud.

804
00:37:03,730 --> 00:37:05,186
You come out here, you put on your suit,

805
00:37:05,481 --> 00:37:06,561
you put on your tie,

806
00:37:06,858 --> 00:37:08,064
you know, and you act like big shots.

807
00:37:08,359 --> 00:37:09,599
I said, "We're here in California.

808
00:37:09,902 --> 00:37:11,108
"We have a lot-- everything's loose.

809
00:37:11,404 --> 00:37:13,144
Take your tie off."

810
00:37:13,448 --> 00:37:15,313
So they walk in and Frannie,
who was his secretary,

811
00:37:15,616 --> 00:37:17,948
would grab the scissors and chop a tie.

812
00:37:18,244 --> 00:37:20,530
And after a while,
it became the stuff of legends.

813
00:37:20,830 --> 00:37:22,195
So it was like, people would walk in

814
00:37:22,498 --> 00:37:23,954
and just give him the tie.

815
00:37:24,250 --> 00:37:28,038
The tie thing just got part
of his reputation, you know.

816
00:37:28,337 --> 00:37:32,046
Don't wear a good tie in there,
or leave it in the car.

817
00:37:32,341 --> 00:37:33,706
[Jim Urie] He never collected
any of my ties,

818
00:37:34,010 --> 00:37:35,716
because I had heard those stories

819
00:37:36,012 --> 00:37:37,548
and of course,
when I became a national guy,

820
00:37:37,847 --> 00:37:39,462
I was going out there.

821
00:37:39,766 --> 00:37:40,676
They had a big plaque on the wall,

822
00:37:40,975 --> 00:37:42,465
must have been this big,

823
00:37:42,769 --> 00:37:45,226
and it was an array of neckties

824
00:37:45,521 --> 00:37:47,557
that had been cut off, right about here.

825
00:37:47,857 --> 00:37:50,599
I would steal the whole tie.
I got a bad rap, you know,

826
00:37:50,902 --> 00:37:52,893
for cutting the ties off. Never cut a tie.

827
00:37:53,196 --> 00:37:55,278
Always stole the whole tie.

828
00:37:55,573 --> 00:37:57,529
Made the guy give me a card, usually,

829
00:37:57,825 --> 00:37:59,031
if they were friendly.

830
00:37:59,327 --> 00:38:00,442
Sometimes they weren't very friendly

831
00:38:00,745 --> 00:38:01,905
when you steal their tie, really.

832
00:38:02,205 --> 00:38:03,615
But they all felt

833
00:38:03,915 --> 00:38:05,655
a lot more comfortable not wearing them.

834
00:38:07,502 --> 00:38:09,709
I think his leadership and his vision

835
00:38:10,004 --> 00:38:11,414
and the way he dealt with his people

836
00:38:11,714 --> 00:38:13,250
really was significant.

837
00:38:13,549 --> 00:38:14,789
If it hadn't been for these people

838
00:38:15,093 --> 00:38:16,253
being able to do these things for me,

839
00:38:16,552 --> 00:38:18,133
we could never have done anything.

840
00:38:18,429 --> 00:38:20,511
We didn't do anything in a formal way.

841
00:38:20,807 --> 00:38:22,468
We did it on the fly.

842
00:38:22,767 --> 00:38:23,677
It was the Russ Bus.

843
00:38:23,976 --> 00:38:24,840
With Tower Records,

844
00:38:25,144 --> 00:38:26,680
you had an idea, a thought,

845
00:38:26,979 --> 00:38:28,560
you either went to Russ or Bud with it,

846
00:38:28,856 --> 00:38:30,471
and flew with it, it was that simple.

847
00:38:30,775 --> 00:38:32,015
That was the fun part.

848
00:38:32,318 --> 00:38:33,478
You never fucking knew

849
00:38:33,778 --> 00:38:35,018
where it was going to take you.

850
00:38:36,823 --> 00:38:39,565
Russ Solomon, because he was Tower Records,

851
00:38:39,867 --> 00:38:42,324
there wasn't all these layers
of management.

852
00:38:42,620 --> 00:38:45,612
You sat down with Russ
and that's how the company ran.

853
00:38:45,915 --> 00:38:47,246
It ran that way for a long time.

854
00:38:47,542 --> 00:38:49,908
You'd grow your people out of the stores,

855
00:38:50,211 --> 00:38:51,667
send them to a new store,

856
00:38:51,963 --> 00:38:54,045
they'd grow a whole crop of new people

857
00:38:54,340 --> 00:38:57,673
that would go to the next store, and so on.

858
00:38:57,969 --> 00:38:59,630
Back then there were few enough people

859
00:38:59,929 --> 00:39:02,386
that we all even went
to all the store openings.

860
00:39:02,682 --> 00:39:05,139
So we'd go to a town for two or three weeks

861
00:39:05,434 --> 00:39:08,346
and literally a team of us
put the stores together.

862
00:39:08,646 --> 00:39:10,728
Obviously, as Tower got
very big, we had a team

863
00:39:11,023 --> 00:39:13,514
whose job that was to do it
separate from the retail,

864
00:39:13,818 --> 00:39:15,479
but this was the retail team, you know,

865
00:39:15,778 --> 00:39:18,144
we'd take our classical buyer,
and our assistant manager,

866
00:39:18,447 --> 00:39:21,063
and our favourite rock buyer,
and a couple managers,

867
00:39:21,367 --> 00:39:24,109
and go camp out for
a couple of weeks in a store.

868
00:39:24,412 --> 00:39:25,948
Bringing the racks in, marking the records,

869
00:39:26,247 --> 00:39:27,578
putting the records in the shelves,

870
00:39:27,874 --> 00:39:29,535
setting everything up so it really helped

871
00:39:29,834 --> 00:39:31,540
make you feel like you were part of a team,

872
00:39:31,836 --> 00:39:34,327
but it also made you feel like
you were personally successful

873
00:39:34,630 --> 00:39:37,292
because you were able to be part of this.

874
00:39:37,592 --> 00:39:38,672
So by 1979,

875
00:39:38,968 --> 00:39:41,459
we were really a West Coast operation.

876
00:39:41,762 --> 00:39:43,673
We'd opened stores all the way from Seattle

877
00:39:43,973 --> 00:39:45,338
to San Diego,

878
00:39:45,641 --> 00:39:47,757
and then we went over to Phoenix and Tempe.

879
00:39:48,060 --> 00:39:50,642
So a couple of guys came over
and visited me,

880
00:39:50,938 --> 00:39:53,270
Hugh Sazaki and Akehana Zowa.

881
00:39:53,566 --> 00:39:57,058
They said they wanted to start
up Tower Records in Japan.

882
00:39:57,361 --> 00:39:59,147
These two gentlemen, Aki and Hugh,

883
00:39:59,447 --> 00:40:01,062
had come to Sacramento, met with Russ,

884
00:40:01,365 --> 00:40:03,071
and Russ would fall for any idea,

885
00:40:03,367 --> 00:40:04,948
and then they went back to Japan,

886
00:40:05,244 --> 00:40:07,951
and then a few weeks later
called up and said,

887
00:40:08,247 --> 00:40:09,783
"Come on over. We want to show you around."

888
00:40:10,082 --> 00:40:11,572
So they sent us a couple of tickets.

889
00:40:11,876 --> 00:40:14,709
We travelled all over Japan,
saw the sights,

890
00:40:15,004 --> 00:40:17,461
saw the existing
record retailers over there.

891
00:40:17,757 --> 00:40:19,418
But one guy up in Sapporo,

892
00:40:19,717 --> 00:40:22,174
which was a little island on
the northern border of Japan,

893
00:40:22,470 --> 00:40:24,335
I think had stolen the name Tower Records,

894
00:40:24,639 --> 00:40:26,630
and literally had a Tower Record store.

895
00:40:26,933 --> 00:40:28,423
We said, "Oh, no."

896
00:40:28,726 --> 00:40:30,717
So we went up and we saw this, and said,

897
00:40:31,020 --> 00:40:32,385
"That's not very nice,
you've stolen our name.

898
00:40:32,688 --> 00:40:34,269
You shouldn't have done that."

899
00:40:34,565 --> 00:40:36,897
But at least, if we open
our wholesale operation here,

900
00:40:37,193 --> 00:40:39,980
will you let us sell you
the imported records,

901
00:40:40,279 --> 00:40:41,735
and you guys run it?

902
00:40:42,031 --> 00:40:43,316
So that's how it started.

903
00:40:45,618 --> 00:40:48,701
Russ was always enthusiastic
about something new.

904
00:40:48,996 --> 00:40:51,032
Everybody else on the record side hated it.

905
00:40:51,332 --> 00:40:52,913
They said, "We're an American
record company,

906
00:40:53,209 --> 00:40:54,699
we sell retail in America."

907
00:40:55,002 --> 00:40:56,492
They didn't know anything about Japan.

908
00:40:56,796 --> 00:40:58,878
Russ didn't have any kind
of attitude like that.

909
00:40:59,173 --> 00:41:01,289
And they had no desire to do it.

910
00:41:01,592 --> 00:41:03,674
They didn't care, it was just
one of Russ' little projects.

911
00:41:03,970 --> 00:41:05,710
I was just a nobody
receiving clerk, and I said,

912
00:41:06,013 --> 00:41:07,844
"Hell, I'll help you out.
Whatever you want to do."

913
00:41:08,140 --> 00:41:09,880
Our job at Tower Broadway was

914
00:41:10,184 --> 00:41:12,470
we would pull the records
out of stock from Broadway,

915
00:41:12,770 --> 00:41:14,510
and ship them to Japan,

916
00:41:14,814 --> 00:41:16,224
and that's when
I first got involved with Russ,

917
00:41:16,524 --> 00:41:17,809
as I was the shipping and receiving clerk

918
00:41:18,109 --> 00:41:20,225
making probably five bucks an hour.

919
00:41:20,528 --> 00:41:22,143
That's how Russ and I became friends.

920
00:41:22,446 --> 00:41:24,903
Nobody else would help him.

921
00:41:25,199 --> 00:41:26,780
This goes on for a few months,

922
00:41:27,076 --> 00:41:29,658
and things are not really
looking all that good.

923
00:41:29,954 --> 00:41:31,569
We don't know what is going wrong,

924
00:41:31,872 --> 00:41:34,579
but sad but true, they didn't
know what they were doing,

925
00:41:34,875 --> 00:41:36,160
and they weren't very good at it.

926
00:41:36,460 --> 00:41:38,121
I think it was a Friday evening,

927
00:41:38,421 --> 00:41:40,036
and probably Russ and I,
I know I was in Russ' office,

928
00:41:40,339 --> 00:41:41,624
and we had been drinking,

929
00:41:41,924 --> 00:41:43,130
had a few cocktails, you know, as you would

930
00:41:43,426 --> 00:41:44,882
wind down after a tough day.

931
00:41:45,177 --> 00:41:46,667
Somehow the subject came up,

932
00:41:46,971 --> 00:41:48,836
"Who am I going to send to Japan?"

933
00:41:49,140 --> 00:41:51,347
and he asked me that question,
"Who am I going to send to Japan?"

934
00:41:51,642 --> 00:41:53,428
And I said, "The only guy to send is me."

935
00:41:53,728 --> 00:41:55,969
And he goes, "What do you mean,
you? You're not a store manager.

936
00:41:56,272 --> 00:41:57,603
You don't know anything about it."

937
00:41:57,898 --> 00:41:59,308
And I said, "Well, I'm the one

938
00:41:59,608 --> 00:42:00,768
who's been doing all this work for Japan."

939
00:42:01,068 --> 00:42:02,399
He goes, "Do you think you can do it?"

940
00:42:02,695 --> 00:42:04,811
I said, "Sure." He goes, "Then go."

941
00:42:05,114 --> 00:42:06,229
You didn't have to go through
a bunch of people

942
00:42:06,532 --> 00:42:07,817
to make a decision at Tower Records.

943
00:42:08,117 --> 00:42:09,072
He was the worst person to send,

944
00:42:09,368 --> 00:42:10,528
I would ever think in my life.

945
00:42:10,828 --> 00:42:11,908
I mean he had the social skills

946
00:42:12,204 --> 00:42:13,239
of a warthog in heat. You kidding me?

947
00:42:13,539 --> 00:42:15,154
But I think the reason that they did,

948
00:42:15,458 --> 00:42:17,244
is he knew a lot
about shipping and receiving.

949
00:42:17,543 --> 00:42:19,829
He'd learned about international shipping.

950
00:42:20,129 --> 00:42:22,040
They needed somebody to know about how
to get the product in and out of there.

951
00:42:22,340 --> 00:42:24,080
I'd only been there two and a half years.

952
00:42:24,383 --> 00:42:26,749
I saw it as an opportunity to do something.

953
00:42:28,596 --> 00:42:30,382
We had no idea what we're doing.

954
00:42:30,681 --> 00:42:33,673
I'll be honest with you, we had not a clue.

955
00:42:33,976 --> 00:42:35,182
But we did it anyhow.

956
00:42:35,478 --> 00:42:36,968
I had literally no idea what to expect.

957
00:42:37,271 --> 00:42:39,262
I'd never been to Japan.
I had to go get a passport.

958
00:42:39,565 --> 00:42:41,772
We had a warehouse in Akasaka,

959
00:42:42,068 --> 00:42:44,650
which is like the Beverly Hills
of Tokyo, for god's sakes.

960
00:42:44,945 --> 00:42:46,276
We had this little warehouse,

961
00:42:46,572 --> 00:42:47,857
and I was supposed
to be there for six months.

962
00:42:48,157 --> 00:42:49,272
That was my deal, you got six months

963
00:42:49,575 --> 00:42:51,782
to go either fix it or close it.

964
00:42:54,038 --> 00:42:55,778
Shibuya was a little like Times Square,

965
00:42:56,082 --> 00:42:57,822
Laginsu was a little like Times Square.

966
00:42:58,125 --> 00:42:59,865
Tokyo was like Times Square.

967
00:43:00,169 --> 00:43:01,284
I mean the place was always lit up

968
00:43:01,587 --> 00:43:03,919
at night time, Tokyo came alive.

969
00:43:06,008 --> 00:43:09,216
Shibuya was a very hip,
more of a younger area

970
00:43:09,512 --> 00:43:11,594
for stores and kids and people to hang out.

971
00:43:11,889 --> 00:43:13,971
The Japanese at that time were very much

972
00:43:14,266 --> 00:43:16,052
into the culture of American music.

973
00:43:16,352 --> 00:43:18,138
So I called Russ, and said,
"Russ, we're not closing

974
00:43:18,437 --> 00:43:19,973
the wholesale operation.

975
00:43:20,272 --> 00:43:21,387
We're going to open up a retail store."

976
00:43:21,690 --> 00:43:23,681
And that set off quite a firestorm

977
00:43:23,984 --> 00:43:26,441
of controversy to say the least.

978
00:43:26,737 --> 00:43:29,194
The push back from stateside was,

979
00:43:29,490 --> 00:43:30,946
"You guys are crazy.
You're not going to do it."

980
00:43:31,242 --> 00:43:33,107
That was probably Bud's first impression.

981
00:43:33,411 --> 00:43:34,776
Bud wanted to be profitable.

982
00:43:35,079 --> 00:43:37,661
He didn't care so much about being big.

983
00:43:37,957 --> 00:43:42,166
If you don't take advantage of a new idea,

984
00:43:42,461 --> 00:43:45,294
if it makes any sense at all,

985
00:43:45,589 --> 00:43:46,999
then you've lost something.

986
00:43:48,926 --> 00:43:50,712
Russ wasn't omnipotent

987
00:43:51,011 --> 00:43:52,876
and he couldn't tell you,
"Here, you go play with this,

988
00:43:53,180 --> 00:43:55,592
it's going to work,
go play with this, it isn't."

989
00:43:55,891 --> 00:43:57,222
This was Russ' company.

990
00:43:57,518 --> 00:43:59,133
Russ loved Japan, he loved the culture.

991
00:43:59,437 --> 00:44:01,519
And he said, "You know, Mark,
I think that's a great idea."

992
00:44:01,814 --> 00:44:05,022
Because he was so cutting edge.
You know, he was so hip.

993
00:44:05,317 --> 00:44:06,807
He was always taking that next step forward

994
00:44:07,111 --> 00:44:08,396
before the forward was there.

995
00:44:08,696 --> 00:44:10,527
I saw this location and loved it.

996
00:44:10,823 --> 00:44:12,905
Called Russ, and I think he was in Japan

997
00:44:13,200 --> 00:44:14,656
within two weeks to look at the location.

998
00:44:17,371 --> 00:44:20,408
It took six to eight months
of legal wrangling to do this,

999
00:44:20,708 --> 00:44:22,744
because it hadn't been done before.

1000
00:44:23,043 --> 00:44:26,160
In Japan, in order to open up a
business you had to have a partner.

1001
00:44:26,464 --> 00:44:29,581
There was restaurants,
Shakey's Pizza Parlors

1002
00:44:29,884 --> 00:44:32,842
and Mcdonald's,
but those were all franchises.

1003
00:44:33,137 --> 00:44:35,924
There was no retail establishment in Japan

1004
00:44:36,223 --> 00:44:37,963
wholly owned by an American company.

1005
00:44:38,267 --> 00:44:40,508
It was something nobody else
had ever done, for Christ sake.

1006
00:44:40,811 --> 00:44:44,474
This was a 3,000 year old country
and nobody could ever think

1007
00:44:44,773 --> 00:44:46,104
of another American company

1008
00:44:46,400 --> 00:44:49,062
opening a retail store
without a Japanese partner.

1009
00:44:59,872 --> 00:45:02,079
Getting all of the racking, the records,

1010
00:45:02,374 --> 00:45:04,080
the employees, everything in place,

1011
00:45:04,376 --> 00:45:06,867
that went without a hitch.
That was no problem.

1012
00:45:07,171 --> 00:45:08,331
The hardest part, once again,

1013
00:45:08,631 --> 00:45:10,667
was all of the legal manoeuvring

1014
00:45:10,966 --> 00:45:13,002
that had to go on just to open the store.

1015
00:45:13,302 --> 00:45:16,635
But he did open up the Shibuya store.

1016
00:45:16,931 --> 00:45:18,671
Literally, the morning we opened,

1017
00:45:18,974 --> 00:45:20,555
we had over 300 or 400 people

1018
00:45:20,851 --> 00:45:22,182
standing in line to get in to the store.

1019
00:45:24,230 --> 00:45:27,188
People were literally
squashed against the door,

1020
00:45:27,483 --> 00:45:29,940
waiting to get in, and they poured in.

1021
00:45:30,236 --> 00:45:31,066
You never saw anything like it.

1022
00:45:31,362 --> 00:45:33,569
I mean, it was amazing.

1023
00:45:33,864 --> 00:45:35,274
I remember, the store was packed

1024
00:45:35,574 --> 00:45:37,110
from the moment we opened till we closed.

1025
00:45:37,409 --> 00:45:40,276
We did like 65, 70 grand that day.

1026
00:45:40,579 --> 00:45:42,535
It was like that for the first month

1027
00:45:42,831 --> 00:45:44,947
the store was open. That store was just

1028
00:45:45,251 --> 00:45:47,412
a huge success from day one.

1029
00:45:47,711 --> 00:45:51,454
The Japanese culture was
really into American music,

1030
00:45:51,757 --> 00:45:54,043
and the fact that it was an American import

1031
00:45:54,343 --> 00:45:56,629
and not a Japanese pressed...

1032
00:45:56,929 --> 00:45:58,294
It wasn't the Eagles pressed in Japan,

1033
00:45:58,597 --> 00:46:00,133
it was the Eagles made in the United States

1034
00:46:00,432 --> 00:46:01,672
brought to Japan and sold,

1035
00:46:01,976 --> 00:46:06,140
and that whole vibe really sold well.

1036
00:46:06,438 --> 00:46:07,678
We just happened to literally be

1037
00:46:07,982 --> 00:46:09,222
at the right place, at the right time.

1038
00:46:09,525 --> 00:46:11,937
You want to call that luck?
Then call it luck.

1039
00:46:12,236 --> 00:46:13,521
What would you call it?

1040
00:46:13,821 --> 00:46:14,901
Luck. Ha!

1041
00:46:19,493 --> 00:46:23,202
We weren't shoving Americana down
Japanese throats, for god's sakes.

1042
00:46:23,497 --> 00:46:25,954
It was a culture. It was a music culture.

1043
00:46:26,250 --> 00:46:29,993
So he went and found
a second location in Yokohama.

1044
00:46:30,296 --> 00:46:32,082
He got it, we put it together,

1045
00:46:32,381 --> 00:46:35,043
opened that damn thing,
and it was a success, heh.

1046
00:46:35,342 --> 00:46:37,048
All we had to do was open the doors.

1047
00:46:37,344 --> 00:46:39,630
People flocked in the joint.

1048
00:46:39,930 --> 00:46:42,216
Expansion was obviously, once you do it,

1049
00:46:42,516 --> 00:46:45,053
Russ can't wait to do it again.

1050
00:46:45,352 --> 00:46:46,888
So then we started finding

1051
00:46:47,187 --> 00:46:49,018
these kind of stores all over the country,

1052
00:46:49,315 --> 00:46:51,772
one right after another.

1053
00:46:52,067 --> 00:46:54,228
And I think Russ, seeing the success it was

1054
00:46:54,528 --> 00:46:56,814
globally, or nationally,
or internationally,

1055
00:46:57,114 --> 00:46:59,196
I actually think that gave him the impetus

1056
00:46:59,491 --> 00:47:01,152
to move to New York.

1057
00:47:01,452 --> 00:47:03,818
First met Russ Solomon in the early '80s.

1058
00:47:04,121 --> 00:47:06,282
At that point, I was
the New York branch manager

1059
00:47:06,582 --> 00:47:08,368
for what is now Sony Music.

1060
00:47:08,667 --> 00:47:10,703
It was called CBS Records
at the time, and of course,

1061
00:47:11,003 --> 00:47:13,244
everyone knew about Tower Records,

1062
00:47:13,547 --> 00:47:17,506
but it was not an East Coast
phenomenon, at that point.

1063
00:47:17,801 --> 00:47:20,258
We started with a conversation I was having

1064
00:47:20,554 --> 00:47:22,761
at the NARM convention in Florida.

1065
00:47:23,057 --> 00:47:25,218
We were talking about, "Gosh, you know,

1066
00:47:25,517 --> 00:47:27,473
"I'd love to open
a classical store in New York

1067
00:47:27,770 --> 00:47:31,103
because that's the place where
people like classical music."

1068
00:47:31,398 --> 00:47:33,013
Russ called up and said,

1069
00:47:33,317 --> 00:47:35,228
"Hey guys, I want you
to come to my office."

1070
00:47:35,527 --> 00:47:37,233
We go in there, and Russ says,

1071
00:47:37,529 --> 00:47:39,394
"How would you like to open the store

1072
00:47:39,698 --> 00:47:43,486
"in the middle of the hippest
city in the United States

1073
00:47:43,786 --> 00:47:45,117
by a college?"

1074
00:47:45,412 --> 00:47:46,993
We had no idea what he was talking about.

1075
00:47:47,289 --> 00:47:50,577
And we go down into the bowels
of lower Manhattan

1076
00:47:50,876 --> 00:47:52,537
to The Village, 4th and Broadway.

1077
00:47:52,836 --> 00:47:54,952
There wasn't even
a particular neighbourhood.

1078
00:47:55,255 --> 00:47:57,496
We started calling it The Village,
and it became part of The Village.

1079
00:47:57,800 --> 00:48:00,166
But it really wasn't part of The Village.

1080
00:48:00,469 --> 00:48:03,506
But you spend enough money
in marketing and things happen.

1081
00:48:03,806 --> 00:48:05,262
It was terrible,
it was like I kind of thought,

1082
00:48:05,557 --> 00:48:08,094
"What the fuck is he thinking?"

1083
00:48:08,394 --> 00:48:10,259
There was a dead dog in the gutter.

1084
00:48:10,562 --> 00:48:14,146
I'm in shock. I thought we were...

1085
00:48:14,441 --> 00:48:15,647
in the bowels of hell.

1086
00:48:15,943 --> 00:48:17,604
And it was really cheap rent.

1087
00:48:17,903 --> 00:48:19,814
I mean the whole deal
was like 10 bucks a foot.

1088
00:48:20,114 --> 00:48:21,570
Literally, there was nothing else there.

1089
00:48:21,865 --> 00:48:24,402
Empty office buildings, empty storefronts.

1090
00:48:24,702 --> 00:48:27,444
There was nothing around it.
I can't emphasize that enough.

1091
00:48:27,746 --> 00:48:29,782
There was nothing around it at all.

1092
00:48:30,082 --> 00:48:33,074
You know, it was like
a massive four storeys,

1093
00:48:33,377 --> 00:48:34,662
mezzanines, escalators, you know,

1094
00:48:34,962 --> 00:48:38,250
very, very expensive
store to build. Very risky.

1095
00:48:38,549 --> 00:48:40,460
We took it, and then we fixed it up.

1096
00:48:40,759 --> 00:48:42,545
Everybody thought we were totally crazy.

1097
00:48:42,845 --> 00:48:46,053
That nobody would ever go
to Broadway and buy records,

1098
00:48:46,348 --> 00:48:49,556
and we open up, and the people
are lined up to get in.

1099
00:48:49,852 --> 00:48:52,093
And here is this cavernous store,

1100
00:48:52,396 --> 00:48:55,058
half a block footprint, four storeys,

1101
00:48:55,357 --> 00:48:56,972
had an elevator, it was so tall.

1102
00:48:57,276 --> 00:48:59,517
God knows how much inventory was in there.

1103
00:48:59,820 --> 00:49:01,310
It looked fantastic, of course,

1104
00:49:01,613 --> 00:49:03,069
the vinyl with the 12-inch artwork.

1105
00:49:03,365 --> 00:49:05,105
I mean, it looked great,
and it was everywhere.

1106
00:49:05,409 --> 00:49:07,274
Their singles department alone

1107
00:49:07,578 --> 00:49:09,569
was probably bigger than any other store

1108
00:49:09,872 --> 00:49:12,113
in my whole New York tri-state area.

1109
00:49:12,416 --> 00:49:14,498
And it wasn't three years later

1110
00:49:14,793 --> 00:49:18,661
when that whole part of town
became vibrant again.

1111
00:49:18,964 --> 00:49:22,172
Tower Records opening there
literally revived

1112
00:49:22,468 --> 00:49:27,508
those eight or ten
square blocks of Manhattan.

1113
00:49:27,806 --> 00:49:30,047
Everybody that worked there
was a character,

1114
00:49:30,350 --> 00:49:31,180
but Russ was the face

1115
00:49:31,477 --> 00:49:33,513
of the company in every way.

1116
00:49:33,812 --> 00:49:35,803
I worked at PolyGram Records in New York.

1117
00:49:36,106 --> 00:49:38,313
As happens in any entertainment company

1118
00:49:38,609 --> 00:49:41,225
there was a change at the top and so a whole
bunch of us got blown out as a result.

1119
00:49:41,528 --> 00:49:44,440
New management coming in. I was
senior vice president of marketing.

1120
00:49:44,740 --> 00:49:47,607
And it feels pretty bad to get fired.

1121
00:49:47,910 --> 00:49:49,400
And you're on the outside of this business

1122
00:49:49,703 --> 00:49:51,284
you've been in your whole life,

1123
00:49:51,580 --> 00:49:53,912
and your phone's not ringing.

1124
00:49:54,208 --> 00:49:56,494
You worry about your family,
and all these things.

1125
00:49:56,794 --> 00:49:58,659
Russ used to have this big Christmas party

1126
00:49:58,962 --> 00:50:00,327
in his major markets,

1127
00:50:00,631 --> 00:50:02,371
and the one in New York was really big.

1128
00:50:02,674 --> 00:50:04,039
Probably 500 people.

1129
00:50:04,343 --> 00:50:05,833
And out of the blue I get an invitation

1130
00:50:06,136 --> 00:50:07,717
to go to the Christmas party at my home,

1131
00:50:08,013 --> 00:50:09,503
and I was, of course happy about that.

1132
00:50:09,807 --> 00:50:11,092
I thought, "Do I really want to go

1133
00:50:11,391 --> 00:50:12,301
have people looking at me, feeling sorry?"

1134
00:50:12,601 --> 00:50:13,340
But I finally decided to go.

1135
00:50:13,644 --> 00:50:15,305
And I go in that night,

1136
00:50:15,604 --> 00:50:18,516
and you sort of walked in
and walked down some stairs.

1137
00:50:18,816 --> 00:50:20,306
When you first walk in
you could see the whole place,

1138
00:50:20,609 --> 00:50:22,895
and it was huge, and shoulder to shoulder.

1139
00:50:23,195 --> 00:50:25,481
And Russ was like
the Pied Piper in the middle.

1140
00:50:25,781 --> 00:50:28,363
Where Russ went,
there were throngs of people.

1141
00:50:28,659 --> 00:50:30,115
As Russ made his way around the room,

1142
00:50:30,410 --> 00:50:31,650
there was always a throng of people.

1143
00:50:31,954 --> 00:50:34,036
Everybody wanted to shake
his hand, touch him.

1144
00:50:34,331 --> 00:50:35,286
So, umm...

1145
00:50:38,293 --> 00:50:39,123
I, uh...

1146
00:50:40,504 --> 00:50:41,960
I finally shook his hand,

1147
00:50:42,256 --> 00:50:44,542
said, "Hi, thanks for
inviting me," whatever.

1148
00:50:44,842 --> 00:50:47,458
He leaned over to me and he said,

1149
00:50:47,761 --> 00:50:51,049
"A couple of us are going out for
dinner afterward. Do you want to go?"

1150
00:50:52,474 --> 00:50:54,180
And, uh...

1151
00:50:54,476 --> 00:50:56,137
Let me start that again.

1152
00:50:58,355 --> 00:51:00,346
"A couple of us are going out
to dinner. Do you want to go?"

1153
00:51:00,649 --> 00:51:03,766
And I said, "Well, golly yeah, Russ,
if you really want to have me."

1154
00:51:04,069 --> 00:51:05,900
So he told me where and I went.

1155
00:51:06,196 --> 00:51:08,187
And it was Russ,
and four other people, and me.

1156
00:51:13,453 --> 00:51:14,533
And, uh...

1157
00:51:16,331 --> 00:51:17,411
And at that moment in my life,

1158
00:51:17,708 --> 00:51:20,745
that meant... a lot.

1159
00:51:22,546 --> 00:51:24,377
Because I was down.

1160
00:51:24,673 --> 00:51:26,755
And that Russ Solomon would care enough,

1161
00:51:27,050 --> 00:51:29,132
and do that personal little touch...

1162
00:51:32,055 --> 00:51:34,296
means something to me now,
20 some years later.

1163
00:51:38,353 --> 00:51:41,060
He could have used it, I mean,
most guys would have used it

1164
00:51:41,356 --> 00:51:42,937
as a business opportunity and grabbed

1165
00:51:43,233 --> 00:51:45,019
a couple record company
presidents and whatever,

1166
00:51:45,319 --> 00:51:47,480
instead of some out of work guy.

1167
00:51:47,779 --> 00:51:50,316
But that's not the way Russ sees life.

1168
00:51:58,332 --> 00:52:00,493
The whole magic of Tower as a chain

1169
00:52:00,792 --> 00:52:02,453
was that it was a chain
of independent stores.

1170
00:52:02,753 --> 00:52:04,368
Book stores as well as the record stores.

1171
00:52:04,671 --> 00:52:06,411
So when you walked
into a Tower Record store,

1172
00:52:06,715 --> 00:52:08,626
you thought it was
the only one on the planet.

1173
00:52:08,926 --> 00:52:11,542
The LA people always thought
the LA store was the first store.

1174
00:52:11,845 --> 00:52:14,086
The New Yorkers always thought
the New York store was.

1175
00:52:14,389 --> 00:52:16,926
The San Francisco people thought
that their store was.

1176
00:52:17,225 --> 00:52:18,840
Because they all had the individual flavour

1177
00:52:19,144 --> 00:52:21,305
of the people who ran it
and who worked there,

1178
00:52:21,605 --> 00:52:22,890
which made them very unique.

1179
00:52:23,190 --> 00:52:26,307
There was no cookie cutter going on at all.

1180
00:52:26,610 --> 00:52:28,601
Until we got
into some of the larger markets

1181
00:52:28,904 --> 00:52:30,565
on the East Coast, then we started buying

1182
00:52:30,864 --> 00:52:33,901
national TV for ads,
so we became a national brand.

1183
00:52:34,201 --> 00:52:35,190
But you had to have

1184
00:52:35,494 --> 00:52:36,984
the credibility in the larger markets

1185
00:52:37,287 --> 00:52:39,403
before you could go into the suburbs.

1186
00:52:39,706 --> 00:52:41,822
Probably in about late '70s,

1187
00:52:42,125 --> 00:52:44,912
we established our own
advertising department.

1188
00:52:45,212 --> 00:52:47,453
That was Chris Hopson who ran it.

1189
00:52:47,756 --> 00:52:49,542
Farrace was just working in there

1190
00:52:49,841 --> 00:52:51,923
as one of the advertising
people, the assistants.

1191
00:52:52,219 --> 00:52:54,585
Farrace also was one of these thinkers.

1192
00:52:54,888 --> 00:52:56,378
And he came to me one day and says,

1193
00:52:56,682 --> 00:52:58,172
"We ought to have a magazine for Tower.

1194
00:52:58,475 --> 00:53:00,386
I've got an idea what to call it: Pulse."

1195
00:53:00,686 --> 00:53:02,017
I said, "Great, let's do it."

1196
00:53:03,563 --> 00:53:05,224
[Mike Farrace] Working with Chris,

1197
00:53:05,524 --> 00:53:07,856
we hammered out this way
that the magazine would exist

1198
00:53:08,151 --> 00:53:09,687
and when people advertised in it,

1199
00:53:09,987 --> 00:53:11,477
they would get a sale price in the store,

1200
00:53:11,780 --> 00:53:13,020
positioning in a rack,

1201
00:53:13,323 --> 00:53:15,484
just the things
that really gave it the teeth.

1202
00:53:15,784 --> 00:53:17,820
Pulse was another credibility thing for us.

1203
00:53:18,120 --> 00:53:19,826
We could not only sell music,

1204
00:53:20,122 --> 00:53:22,113
but we could write about it.
We could communicate about it.

1205
00:53:22,416 --> 00:53:24,953
I mean, there was nothing and no one,

1206
00:53:25,252 --> 00:53:28,210
with the exception of your rock fanzines

1207
00:53:28,505 --> 00:53:32,418
and small columns in maybe
a few of the major newspapers,

1208
00:53:32,718 --> 00:53:35,004
that were interested
in what you were doing.

1209
00:53:35,303 --> 00:53:36,839
There weren't that many people interested

1210
00:53:37,139 --> 00:53:39,130
in what 25-year-old kids
were doing with music.

1211
00:53:39,433 --> 00:53:42,721
So you made your record,
you gave a few interviews

1212
00:53:43,020 --> 00:53:46,308
to music publications,
and some daily newspapers.

1213
00:53:46,606 --> 00:53:48,267
That was all there was to do.

1214
00:53:48,567 --> 00:53:50,728
It was a very credible music magazine,

1215
00:53:51,028 --> 00:53:52,814
and it was a national music magazine

1216
00:53:53,113 --> 00:53:54,853
because of all the markets we were in.

1217
00:53:55,157 --> 00:53:58,445
And the magazine grew
and it was a really good magazine.

1218
00:53:58,744 --> 00:54:00,029
But it was a great idea.

1219
00:54:00,328 --> 00:54:01,943
I remember him saying more than once,

1220
00:54:02,247 --> 00:54:03,987
"Just don't lose too much money on it."

1221
00:54:04,291 --> 00:54:05,872
And try to make something.

1222
00:54:06,168 --> 00:54:09,331
It was the first time he really
focused on an idea I had.

1223
00:54:09,629 --> 00:54:12,371
You'd listen to the people who had ideas.

1224
00:54:12,674 --> 00:54:13,914
The kids in the store,

1225
00:54:14,217 --> 00:54:16,674
who I say invented all kinds of ideas.

1226
00:54:16,970 --> 00:54:18,506
Everything we ever did was invented

1227
00:54:18,805 --> 00:54:20,386
by the kids in the store.

1228
00:54:20,682 --> 00:54:23,765
The art on the walls,
the way they displayed things.

1229
00:54:24,061 --> 00:54:27,224
Their attitude about what to buy
and what not to buy,

1230
00:54:27,522 --> 00:54:30,184
was all things happening
at the store level.

1231
00:54:30,484 --> 00:54:32,816
The whole "No music, no life",
came out of Japan.

1232
00:54:33,111 --> 00:54:35,022
We adopted it, brought it in, and used it.

1233
00:54:35,322 --> 00:54:36,937
So we're using their creativity.

1234
00:54:37,240 --> 00:54:38,400
Going, "Wow, this is interesting,"

1235
00:54:38,700 --> 00:54:40,156
or "Ah, that's too dark."

1236
00:54:40,452 --> 00:54:41,817
And I'm going, "No it's not, it's fun."

1237
00:54:42,120 --> 00:54:43,530
No music, no life, in this sort of

1238
00:54:43,830 --> 00:54:45,536
Snoopy, Peanuts kind of script.

1239
00:54:45,832 --> 00:54:47,242
I'm going, "This is very cool."

1240
00:54:47,542 --> 00:54:50,955
It was famous for
the record cover paintings

1241
00:54:51,254 --> 00:54:53,996
that was jammed on its walls outside.

1242
00:54:54,299 --> 00:54:56,039
But that became prominent.

1243
00:54:56,343 --> 00:54:57,708
All of a sudden, that became the norm

1244
00:54:58,011 --> 00:54:59,547
for anywhere we had windows.

1245
00:54:59,846 --> 00:55:02,087
They'd expect us to put some displays.

1246
00:55:02,390 --> 00:55:05,803
You aspired to have your album

1247
00:55:06,103 --> 00:55:08,310
part of that big mural out there, you know.

1248
00:55:08,605 --> 00:55:10,596
I mean, the board thing was really cool,

1249
00:55:10,899 --> 00:55:12,981
and then we took it inside
where we had an art dept.

1250
00:55:13,276 --> 00:55:15,733
That was all foam core, it wasn't
just people stapling albums up.

1251
00:55:16,029 --> 00:55:17,485
People went to great lengths,

1252
00:55:17,781 --> 00:55:20,614
like they'd get that
weird foam cardboard stuff

1253
00:55:20,909 --> 00:55:22,865
and make a baby, and then there's

1254
00:55:23,161 --> 00:55:24,867
an actual dollar bill
dangling in front of it,

1255
00:55:25,163 --> 00:55:27,028
and it looks like water
behind it, you know,

1256
00:55:27,332 --> 00:55:29,869
and when you'd see people go
to that much trouble for you,

1257
00:55:30,168 --> 00:55:31,157
for your band,

1258
00:55:31,461 --> 00:55:34,248
we were just... We were just shocked.

1259
00:55:34,548 --> 00:55:37,005
I think that really influenced and enhanced

1260
00:55:37,300 --> 00:55:39,507
the experience people had
when they came in the store.

1261
00:55:39,803 --> 00:55:41,839
The presentation of music...

1262
00:55:43,890 --> 00:55:46,597
was physically exciting.

1263
00:55:46,893 --> 00:55:48,224
[Steve Knopper] They branded it, they made

1264
00:55:48,520 --> 00:55:50,431
those red and yellow logos and signs.

1265
00:55:50,730 --> 00:55:53,096
And turned the idea that this
was your local record store

1266
00:55:53,400 --> 00:55:55,265
into a national thing.

1267
00:55:55,569 --> 00:55:57,935
[Mike Solomon] Tower was growing
at a faster and faster rate,

1268
00:55:58,238 --> 00:55:59,728
was becoming more successful,

1269
00:56:00,031 --> 00:56:03,194
and was becoming more known or renowned.

1270
00:56:03,493 --> 00:56:06,576
The employees at Tower
felt proud about that.

1271
00:56:06,872 --> 00:56:08,362
We helped each other make it work.

1272
00:56:08,665 --> 00:56:11,623
We tried to get
the person below us promoted

1273
00:56:11,918 --> 00:56:12,873
so that they could move on.

1274
00:56:13,170 --> 00:56:14,580
I became a store manager.

1275
00:56:14,880 --> 00:56:16,620
I became the regional director,

1276
00:56:16,923 --> 00:56:18,959
I became vice president
of operations for the USA,

1277
00:56:19,259 --> 00:56:20,624
I became vice president and director

1278
00:56:20,927 --> 00:56:22,508
of in-store design and development.

1279
00:56:22,804 --> 00:56:25,045
We were really getting
into an expansion mode.

1280
00:56:25,348 --> 00:56:28,681
It was quite a transition
from being store-centric

1281
00:56:28,977 --> 00:56:31,559
to having to look at the whole picture.

1282
00:56:31,855 --> 00:56:34,847
But all those years
weren't wonderful years.

1283
00:56:35,150 --> 00:56:36,765
I only remember this
because I was a young guy,

1284
00:56:37,068 --> 00:56:38,649
and had to lay some people off
for the first time.

1285
00:56:38,945 --> 00:56:41,357
'79, '81, and like '83 were years

1286
00:56:41,656 --> 00:56:43,817
where the record companies
were actually laying people off.

1287
00:56:44,117 --> 00:56:45,823
Rock and roll, which had been so exciting

1288
00:56:46,119 --> 00:56:48,485
just 10 or 15 or 20 years earlier,

1289
00:56:48,788 --> 00:56:51,621
kind of got to the point where
it was a little bit stagnant.

1290
00:56:51,917 --> 00:56:53,373
The record labels, many of them,

1291
00:56:53,668 --> 00:56:56,125
had put all their eggs
into the disco basket.

1292
00:56:56,421 --> 00:56:58,707
A lot of radio stations
immediately changed formats

1293
00:56:59,007 --> 00:57:01,168
in every big city there were
two or three disco stations

1294
00:57:01,468 --> 00:57:03,208
that replaced other formats of radio,

1295
00:57:03,511 --> 00:57:05,593
and I think hurt,
as disco didn't sell that well.

1296
00:57:05,889 --> 00:57:08,175
There were a lot of layoffs,
record sales went way, way down,

1297
00:57:08,475 --> 00:57:10,431
and some in the industry
that were really worried.

1298
00:57:10,727 --> 00:57:14,561
It was all disco, and then
disco just one day crashed.

1299
00:57:14,856 --> 00:57:17,393
You wound up having these
DJs, to get attention,

1300
00:57:17,692 --> 00:57:18,477
take advantage of it.

1301
00:57:18,777 --> 00:57:19,812
"Disco sucks, man."

1302
00:57:20,111 --> 00:57:21,976
And so there was a recession.

1303
00:57:22,280 --> 00:57:25,488
Three things happened
that pulled the music industry

1304
00:57:25,784 --> 00:57:27,820
out of its recession, out of its doldrums.

1305
00:57:33,917 --> 00:57:35,202
One thing was MTV.

1306
00:57:35,502 --> 00:57:37,117
Turn it on, leave it on.

1307
00:57:37,420 --> 00:57:40,253
America, see the music you want to see.

1308
00:57:40,548 --> 00:57:42,084
I want my MTV.

1309
00:57:42,384 --> 00:57:43,965
Artists who'd been somewhat successful

1310
00:57:44,261 --> 00:57:46,843
could add a whole new visual
part of their careers.

1311
00:57:47,138 --> 00:57:48,628
If you got your video on MTV,

1312
00:57:48,932 --> 00:57:51,799
that directly had a huge impact on sales.

1313
00:57:52,102 --> 00:57:53,387
Hi, MTV.

1314
00:57:53,687 --> 00:57:55,097
I can remember clearly signing off on

1315
00:57:55,397 --> 00:57:58,685
video budgets that were $700, $800,000.

1316
00:57:58,984 --> 00:58:01,396
It was all important
that we get that thing on MTV

1317
00:58:01,695 --> 00:58:03,105
and if we did,
boy we were off to the races.

1318
00:58:03,405 --> 00:58:06,238
Call your cable company and say,

1319
00:58:06,533 --> 00:58:08,023
"I want my MTV!"

1320
00:58:08,326 --> 00:58:11,193
The second thing was Michael
Jackson's Thriller album.

1321
00:58:11,496 --> 00:58:13,828
In the record industry, there's
a saying, "Hits save everything."

1322
00:58:14,124 --> 00:58:16,365
And so Thriller was
the proverbial rising tide

1323
00:58:16,668 --> 00:58:17,953
that lifted all the boats.

1324
00:58:18,253 --> 00:58:20,289
So many people went into record stores,

1325
00:58:20,588 --> 00:58:23,045
including Tower, tens of
millions of them at a time.

1326
00:58:23,341 --> 00:58:24,956
And when they were in there, they'd say,

1327
00:58:25,260 --> 00:58:26,796
"Oh, how about also
this Lionel Richie album,

1328
00:58:27,095 --> 00:58:28,505
"and how about this Madonna album,

1329
00:58:28,805 --> 00:58:30,841
and how about this Springsteen,
and Prince album?"

1330
00:58:31,141 --> 00:58:32,426
Then the whole thing started to lift.

1331
00:58:32,726 --> 00:58:34,011
And then the third and final thing,

1332
00:58:34,311 --> 00:58:35,892
which was much more of a prolonged thing,

1333
00:58:36,187 --> 00:58:38,143
was the adoption of the CD.

1334
00:58:40,859 --> 00:58:43,145
It's hard to remember now,
because they seem so antiquated,

1335
00:58:43,445 --> 00:58:45,310
but CDs for a while were cool.

1336
00:58:45,613 --> 00:58:47,774
They were shiny and silver,
and state of the art,

1337
00:58:48,074 --> 00:58:49,314
and they sounded perfect.

1338
00:58:49,617 --> 00:58:51,073
They sounded pristine,
and that was something

1339
00:58:51,369 --> 00:58:53,451
that we couldn't get
from our big, cumbersome LPs.

1340
00:58:53,747 --> 00:58:55,703
That was exciting because it was digital,

1341
00:58:55,999 --> 00:58:58,741
and as much as I like the sound of LPs,

1342
00:58:59,044 --> 00:59:01,080
the ticks and pops when
you were listening to classical

1343
00:59:01,379 --> 00:59:03,210
used to just drive me up the wall.

1344
00:59:03,506 --> 00:59:05,497
So this thing was coming out, and you'd go,

1345
00:59:05,800 --> 00:59:08,587
"Okay, well how do
we explain this to people?"

1346
00:59:08,887 --> 00:59:10,423
How do we tell them there's a whole,

1347
00:59:10,722 --> 00:59:12,337
not only that there's a whole
new technology out there,

1348
00:59:12,640 --> 00:59:14,471
but there's also a reason to buy it,

1349
00:59:14,768 --> 00:59:18,807
Because there are enough CDs
out there for you to buy.

1350
00:59:19,105 --> 00:59:20,140
But you didn't know

1351
00:59:20,440 --> 00:59:21,850
if the people would adopt it or not.

1352
00:59:22,150 --> 00:59:24,607
The executives at labels resisted the CD.

1353
00:59:24,903 --> 00:59:26,109
They wanted no part of it at all.

1354
00:59:26,404 --> 00:59:29,191
They were worried that it'd create piracy.

1355
00:59:29,491 --> 00:59:31,072
But Russ persevered through that,

1356
00:59:31,368 --> 00:59:35,953
and he was the first, biggest,
best champion of the CD.

1357
00:59:36,247 --> 00:59:37,737
It is so clean.

1358
00:59:38,041 --> 00:59:40,532
I'm very conscious of high quality sound.

1359
00:59:40,835 --> 00:59:42,700
He always said that that was going to be

1360
00:59:43,004 --> 00:59:44,369
the saviour of the retail store.

1361
00:59:44,672 --> 00:59:46,754
These new, innovative, high end,

1362
00:59:47,050 --> 00:59:48,836
super great sounding discs.

1363
00:59:49,135 --> 00:59:50,215
Everybody, it turns out,

1364
00:59:50,512 --> 00:59:52,002
was getting tired of the LP,

1365
00:59:52,305 --> 00:59:54,296
and they were ready to replace
their record collections

1366
00:59:54,599 --> 00:59:56,715
on this more expensive product
called the CD.

1367
00:59:57,018 --> 00:59:58,679
I mean that was a huge piece
of the record business

1368
00:59:58,978 --> 01:00:01,469
was people replacing
their catalogues with CDs.

1369
01:00:01,773 --> 01:00:03,809
Look at this cool new thing.

1370
01:00:04,109 --> 01:00:05,645
Where can I buy it? Tower Records.

1371
01:00:08,905 --> 01:00:10,065
As an experiment, the Tower store

1372
01:00:10,365 --> 01:00:11,650
on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles

1373
01:00:11,950 --> 01:00:13,611
has installed a bin full of CDs.

1374
01:00:13,910 --> 01:00:15,446
They realized
the CD was much more expensive.

1375
01:00:15,745 --> 01:00:17,656
And it would push up that price point

1376
01:00:17,956 --> 01:00:19,947
up to maybe $15.99 or $16.99,

1377
01:00:20,250 --> 01:00:22,161
which was a godsend for the record industry

1378
01:00:22,460 --> 01:00:24,826
at that time,
and Tower took advantage of it.

1379
01:00:34,264 --> 01:00:36,971
By 1988 though,
cassette sales nearly doubled,

1380
01:00:37,267 --> 01:00:39,804
CDs had exploded,
and the market for vinyl LPs

1381
01:00:40,103 --> 01:00:42,594
had shrunk by nearly two thirds.

1382
01:00:42,897 --> 01:00:44,808
So it was exciting for the record company,

1383
01:00:45,108 --> 01:00:45,972
it was exciting for the consumer,

1384
01:00:46,276 --> 01:00:48,312
and for the artist.

1385
01:00:48,611 --> 01:00:51,318
All of a sudden, you sold you were rich.

1386
01:00:51,614 --> 01:00:53,821
All of this flowed from the fact that

1387
01:00:54,117 --> 01:00:56,859
the CD was selling so well.

1388
01:00:57,162 --> 01:00:58,868
And Tower, of course benefited from that.

1389
01:00:59,164 --> 01:01:00,779
They were part of that culture too.

1390
01:01:01,082 --> 01:01:02,788
In response to this consumer defection,

1391
01:01:03,084 --> 01:01:05,120
a number of major record stores
have removed vinyl albums

1392
01:01:05,420 --> 01:01:07,126
from their shelves altogether.

1393
01:01:07,422 --> 01:01:09,538
So, is vinyl dead?

1394
01:01:09,841 --> 01:01:11,206
Today's popular music

1395
01:01:11,509 --> 01:01:12,965
is more diverse than ever before,

1396
01:01:13,261 --> 01:01:15,593
and selection is at an all-time high.

1397
01:01:15,889 --> 01:01:17,174
But the cost of pre-recorded music

1398
01:01:17,474 --> 01:01:18,759
has also reached new levels,

1399
01:01:19,058 --> 01:01:20,548
causing customers to be wary

1400
01:01:20,852 --> 01:01:23,093
of purchasing unknown artists
and musical styles.

1401
01:01:23,396 --> 01:01:26,308
Tower and the record labels
were doing this dance on price

1402
01:01:26,608 --> 01:01:29,850
that suppliers and wholesalers often do,

1403
01:01:30,153 --> 01:01:33,111
which is sort of:
"Where will the consumer break?"

1404
01:01:33,406 --> 01:01:34,862
To combat this problem,

1405
01:01:35,158 --> 01:01:37,365
Tower has introduced
their new CD listening stations

1406
01:01:37,660 --> 01:01:39,571
in its retail locations worldwide,

1407
01:01:39,871 --> 01:01:42,658
and the public's reaction
has been tremendous.

1408
01:01:42,957 --> 01:01:45,699
But I think where Russ said and where
Tower Records said, they were just like,

1409
01:01:46,002 --> 01:01:48,789
"Every Christmas the records cost
more, and they're selling more."

1410
01:01:49,088 --> 01:01:50,828
What's not to like?

1411
01:01:51,132 --> 01:01:53,088
Our stores are bigger,
they're better stocked,

1412
01:01:53,384 --> 01:01:54,590
they have more knowledgeable people.

1413
01:01:54,886 --> 01:01:56,547
Competition will take care of itself.

1414
01:01:56,846 --> 01:01:59,212
That's it, Russ,
you can open more stores now.

1415
01:02:05,188 --> 01:02:07,600
Russ had a serious amount
of power, for a long time.

1416
01:02:07,899 --> 01:02:09,480
There were always a lot of record chains,

1417
01:02:09,776 --> 01:02:11,141
but Tower was, I think,
the most powerful one

1418
01:02:11,444 --> 01:02:13,150
for a long period of time.

1419
01:02:13,446 --> 01:02:15,061
Recently,
Tower Records was again recognized

1420
01:02:15,365 --> 01:02:17,697
as US music retailer of the year by NARM,

1421
01:02:17,992 --> 01:02:20,324
the National Association
of Recording Merchandisers.

1422
01:02:20,620 --> 01:02:22,156
This makes the fourth
time that Tower's received

1423
01:02:22,455 --> 01:02:23,945
this prestigious award.

1424
01:02:24,249 --> 01:02:25,955
The honour was bestowed
in recognition of Tower's

1425
01:02:26,251 --> 01:02:28,913
high profile image, marketing
and merchandising strength,

1426
01:02:29,212 --> 01:02:31,123
and fiscal responsibility.

1427
01:02:33,341 --> 01:02:35,423
So starting in 1984,
you had Michael Jackson,

1428
01:02:35,718 --> 01:02:37,379
and Madonna, and Bruce
Springsteen, and Prince,

1429
01:02:37,679 --> 01:02:39,135
and then you had the hair metal bands

1430
01:02:39,430 --> 01:02:41,091
and then you had the grunge era,

1431
01:02:41,391 --> 01:02:43,097
and then you had Hootie and the Blowfish,

1432
01:02:43,393 --> 01:02:45,008
and then you had this entire period

1433
01:02:45,311 --> 01:02:47,176
'84 to 2000. It's no coincidence

1434
01:02:47,480 --> 01:02:49,391
that hip hop had its booming growth

1435
01:02:49,691 --> 01:02:50,931
during this period.

1436
01:02:51,234 --> 01:02:52,940
Then you had boy bands and Britney Spears

1437
01:02:53,236 --> 01:02:55,443
and Christina Aguilera, and all these acts

1438
01:02:55,738 --> 01:02:58,104
that took advantage of teen
pop stuff that was big.

1439
01:02:58,408 --> 01:03:00,148
So it was just one bomb exploding

1440
01:03:00,451 --> 01:03:02,407
after another in music.

1441
01:03:02,704 --> 01:03:03,864
Tower was the centre of it all.

1442
01:03:04,163 --> 01:03:05,619
If they're paying by credit card,

1443
01:03:05,915 --> 01:03:09,874
the register sets the charge
in a matter of seconds.

1444
01:03:10,169 --> 01:03:11,033
You make that kind of money,

1445
01:03:11,337 --> 01:03:12,417
you want to hang on to it.

1446
01:03:12,714 --> 01:03:16,957
Tower, Tower again, and again.

1447
01:03:17,260 --> 01:03:18,545
All the music is stuck

1448
01:03:18,845 --> 01:03:20,585
in this completely warped galaxy,

1449
01:03:20,888 --> 01:03:22,469
but then Tower goes and gets it back,

1450
01:03:22,765 --> 01:03:25,051
and opens stores all over your planet.

1451
01:03:25,351 --> 01:03:28,809
Tower Records, more music for less money.

1452
01:03:29,105 --> 01:03:31,187
And it was just overwhelmingly big.
Everybody knew the logo.

1453
01:03:31,482 --> 01:03:32,892
Everybody knew the red and yellow bag.

1454
01:03:33,192 --> 01:03:34,523
When the digital revolution came,

1455
01:03:34,819 --> 01:03:36,150
you know the record business jumped on it

1456
01:03:36,446 --> 01:03:40,485
with the CD, not realizing that they were

1457
01:03:40,783 --> 01:03:42,398
really causing their own demise.

1458
01:03:42,702 --> 01:03:44,909
But I definitely think
that Tower was optimistic,

1459
01:03:45,204 --> 01:03:46,159
and they felt like
the good times would last

1460
01:03:46,456 --> 01:03:47,571
for a good long time.

1461
01:03:47,874 --> 01:03:49,364
I mean they expanded during this period.

1462
01:03:49,667 --> 01:03:51,623
Well, by the early '90s, we were having

1463
01:03:51,919 --> 01:03:53,910
pretty good success
in our foreign operations.

1464
01:03:54,213 --> 01:03:55,544
Again, it was driven by Japan,

1465
01:03:55,840 --> 01:03:58,001
which was extremely profitable,

1466
01:03:58,301 --> 01:04:01,919
maybe more so than the
domestic company in America.

1467
01:04:02,221 --> 01:04:03,836
We moved the old Shibuya store

1468
01:04:04,140 --> 01:04:06,176
to this new Shibuya store.
It was an eight storey building.

1469
01:04:06,476 --> 01:04:08,182
84,000 feet.

1470
01:04:08,478 --> 01:04:10,560
Each floor was a segmented store.

1471
01:04:10,855 --> 01:04:13,562
And the place was doing
hundreds of hundreds

1472
01:04:13,858 --> 01:04:15,189
of thousands of dollars a month.

1473
01:04:15,485 --> 01:04:18,397
I mean, it was a huge success.

1474
01:04:18,696 --> 01:04:19,776
You couldn't stop them.

1475
01:04:20,073 --> 01:04:22,940
It gave us a lot of confidence.

1476
01:04:23,242 --> 01:04:24,527
Somebody came from England and said,

1477
01:04:24,827 --> 01:04:26,112
"Why don't you have a store in England?"

1478
01:04:26,412 --> 01:04:27,902
Howdy, I'm Russ Solomon.

1479
01:04:28,206 --> 01:04:30,322
I want to take this opportunity
to welcome all of you

1480
01:04:30,625 --> 01:04:32,161
to our little spot in central London,

1481
01:04:32,460 --> 01:04:34,200
and I hope you're going
to have a great time tonight

1482
01:04:34,504 --> 01:04:38,122
seeing what is tonight,
the marriage of Wembley and Tower.

1483
01:04:38,424 --> 01:04:39,709
Two great names in entertainment.

1484
01:04:40,009 --> 01:04:41,499
So drink up and have a great time.

1485
01:04:41,803 --> 01:04:43,418
I'm doing it.

1486
01:04:43,721 --> 01:04:45,803
And then in Japan,
the guy that we sent to Japan

1487
01:04:46,099 --> 01:04:49,387
a few years later, makes
a contact with somebody in Taiwan

1488
01:04:49,686 --> 01:04:50,892
to make a partnership

1489
01:04:51,187 --> 01:04:53,303
for Hong Kong and Taiwan and Singapore.

1490
01:04:53,606 --> 01:04:55,972
The company was really getting big.

1491
01:04:58,820 --> 01:05:01,277
We were doing
business on a very high level.

1492
01:05:01,572 --> 01:05:03,108
But you never escaped this thing that,

1493
01:05:03,408 --> 01:05:05,239
wow, it's like,
I'm sitting in an ex-pat bar

1494
01:05:05,535 --> 01:05:07,366
at 2:00 in the morning in Taipei,

1495
01:05:07,662 --> 01:05:10,074
you know, and I'm from Sacramento.

1496
01:05:10,373 --> 01:05:11,408
How cool is this?

1497
01:05:11,708 --> 01:05:14,996
Moving to countries outside of Japan

1498
01:05:15,294 --> 01:05:16,283
was a risk.

1499
01:05:16,587 --> 01:05:17,417
They expanded in Latin America,

1500
01:05:17,714 --> 01:05:20,046
in Asia, and all over the place.

1501
01:05:20,341 --> 01:05:22,548
Can you give the fans a message tonight?

1502
01:05:22,844 --> 01:05:24,675
No music, no life.

1503
01:05:24,971 --> 01:05:27,257
We were becoming famous worldwide,

1504
01:05:27,557 --> 01:05:29,047
and we enjoyed that.

1505
01:05:29,350 --> 01:05:30,339
Why, I suppose it stroked our egos

1506
01:05:30,643 --> 01:05:31,428
to a certain point.

1507
01:05:31,728 --> 01:05:32,934
It was fucking awesome.

1508
01:05:33,229 --> 01:05:35,561
I mean, come on.

1509
01:05:35,857 --> 01:05:39,315
I mean, my gosh, it was a mind blower.

1510
01:05:39,610 --> 01:05:40,565
It was really fun.

1511
01:05:40,862 --> 01:05:42,773
We got to know more about music

1512
01:05:43,072 --> 01:05:45,154
going in to Mexico City,
going in to Colombia,

1513
01:05:45,450 --> 01:05:47,486
and Buenos Aires, it allowed us to know

1514
01:05:47,785 --> 01:05:49,491
a lot more about Latin music.

1515
01:05:49,787 --> 01:05:51,948
But we weren't really successful

1516
01:05:52,248 --> 01:05:54,739
in any of the other countries we went into.

1517
01:05:55,042 --> 01:05:56,202
Therein lies the tale.

1518
01:05:56,502 --> 01:05:58,288
You know, sometimes, I guess, one can get

1519
01:05:58,588 --> 01:06:00,249
a little too big for their britches.

1520
01:06:00,548 --> 01:06:02,379
Like I said, there was this culture

1521
01:06:02,675 --> 01:06:04,711
that was growing that wherever we wanted

1522
01:06:05,011 --> 01:06:06,922
to put a store,
build it and they will come,

1523
01:06:07,221 --> 01:06:08,586
field of dreams bullshit.

1524
01:06:08,890 --> 01:06:10,881
There was no due diligence,
for Christ sakes,

1525
01:06:11,184 --> 01:06:14,176
done on Buenos Aires or Mexico City.

1526
01:06:14,479 --> 01:06:17,141
I said borrow all that damn money.

1527
01:06:17,440 --> 01:06:20,227
I'm as guilty about that as anybody else.

1528
01:06:20,526 --> 01:06:23,017
I'm stupid for saying yes

1529
01:06:23,321 --> 01:06:25,061
to partnerships in Argentina,

1530
01:06:25,364 --> 01:06:27,320
even though I didn't
totally believe in them.

1531
01:06:27,617 --> 01:06:30,700
Bud did not want
the company to go in to so much debt.

1532
01:06:30,995 --> 01:06:32,781
He would succumb to the pressure that Russ

1533
01:06:33,080 --> 01:06:36,038
put on him, although he was happy enough,

1534
01:06:36,334 --> 01:06:37,449
especially because he was making

1535
01:06:37,752 --> 01:06:38,832
a lot of money, personally.

1536
01:06:39,128 --> 01:06:40,334
If you look at the music industry

1537
01:06:40,630 --> 01:06:42,791
at any given point during that period

1538
01:06:43,090 --> 01:06:45,957
from '84 to 2000, you wouldn't really go,

1539
01:06:46,260 --> 01:06:48,672
"Oh no, there's choppy
waters on the horizon."

1540
01:06:48,971 --> 01:06:50,256
Russ, what about these new technologies

1541
01:06:50,556 --> 01:06:53,889
like the mini disc, DCC,
or beaming music and video

1542
01:06:54,185 --> 01:06:55,345
right in to my house?

1543
01:06:55,645 --> 01:06:57,260
Are my CDs history, and will your inventory

1544
01:06:57,563 --> 01:06:59,019
at Tower become obsolete?

1545
01:06:59,315 --> 01:07:00,521
There's so many new technologies,

1546
01:07:00,817 --> 01:07:02,307
we simply get involved with them.

1547
01:07:02,610 --> 01:07:03,690
We get involved with them

1548
01:07:03,986 --> 01:07:05,522
at the early part of their development

1549
01:07:05,822 --> 01:07:08,154
and we grow with them, or when they die,

1550
01:07:08,449 --> 01:07:10,781
we throw them out like DAT.

1551
01:07:11,077 --> 01:07:12,658
As for the whole concept
of beaming something

1552
01:07:12,954 --> 01:07:16,412
into one's home,
that may come along someday,

1553
01:07:16,707 --> 01:07:18,538
that's for sure, but it will come along

1554
01:07:18,835 --> 01:07:20,575
over a long period of time,
and we'll be able

1555
01:07:20,878 --> 01:07:22,493
to deal with it and change our focus

1556
01:07:22,797 --> 01:07:24,412
and change the way we do business

1557
01:07:24,715 --> 01:07:27,127
to deal with the situation as it really is.

1558
01:07:27,426 --> 01:07:28,632
As far as your CD collection,

1559
01:07:28,928 --> 01:07:31,214
and our CD inventory for that matter,

1560
01:07:31,514 --> 01:07:34,176
it's going to be around
for a long, long time, believe me.

1561
01:07:34,475 --> 01:07:35,965
When you look back on all your mistakes,

1562
01:07:36,269 --> 01:07:37,725
and you make them, that's for sure,

1563
01:07:38,020 --> 01:07:40,261
it just, it catches up with you,

1564
01:07:40,565 --> 01:07:42,101
is what the truth of it is.

1565
01:07:42,400 --> 01:07:45,267
You think you're going to be all right,

1566
01:07:45,570 --> 01:07:46,730
and when it catches up with you,

1567
01:07:47,029 --> 01:07:49,395
then it's too late to do anything about it.

1568
01:07:49,699 --> 01:07:51,405
The business had grown significantly.

1569
01:07:51,701 --> 01:07:53,362
It was an international business.

1570
01:07:53,661 --> 01:07:56,778
Sales were running close to
a billion dollars by that time,

1571
01:07:57,081 --> 01:07:59,743
and Bud the accountant was possibly

1572
01:08:00,042 --> 01:08:01,248
a little bit over his head.

1573
01:08:01,544 --> 01:08:03,910
We had to hire a guy from the outside.

1574
01:08:04,213 --> 01:08:05,453
Fellow by the name of Dee Searson.

1575
01:08:05,756 --> 01:08:08,418
Because I had complete trust in Bud,

1576
01:08:08,718 --> 01:08:10,583
I had also complete trust with Dee.

1577
01:08:10,887 --> 01:08:13,253
By the early 1990s, the relationship

1578
01:08:13,556 --> 01:08:16,593
between Bud and Russ had
become a little bit strained.

1579
01:08:16,893 --> 01:08:19,930
Bud stopped going to the daily lunches.

1580
01:08:20,229 --> 01:08:21,514
They were giving him ulcers.

1581
01:08:21,814 --> 01:08:26,148
Bud's job became less and less important.

1582
01:08:26,444 --> 01:08:27,775
He finally had to leave.

1583
01:08:28,070 --> 01:08:32,404
So it was around 1995
that Bud decided to retire.

1584
01:08:32,700 --> 01:08:35,533
Russ will, even to this day, will say

1585
01:08:35,828 --> 01:08:37,614
that that's one of the things
that went wrong

1586
01:08:37,914 --> 01:08:41,532
when Bud was kind of eased out.

1587
01:08:41,834 --> 01:08:43,790
I think Bud was that kind of person

1588
01:08:44,086 --> 01:08:45,622
they felt as though
something's going to happen.

1589
01:08:45,922 --> 01:08:47,662
The company won't, will not be the same.

1590
01:08:47,965 --> 01:08:51,082
When Bud left, Dee took over as the CFO.

1591
01:08:51,385 --> 01:08:53,671
I'm developing a company
and expanding a company.

1592
01:08:53,971 --> 01:08:57,259
He's managing the money,
and it was a surprise to me

1593
01:08:57,558 --> 01:08:59,048
that I couldn't use all that money

1594
01:08:59,352 --> 01:09:00,717
to open new stores.

1595
01:09:01,020 --> 01:09:02,885
Dee was put on a mission to go out

1596
01:09:03,189 --> 01:09:06,898
and get money by Tower selling bonds.

1597
01:09:07,193 --> 01:09:10,401
Well, it made it easier for Tower

1598
01:09:10,696 --> 01:09:12,778
to borrow more money.

1599
01:09:13,074 --> 01:09:14,689
Things became much more tense.

1600
01:09:14,992 --> 01:09:16,528
We had pressure from creditors,

1601
01:09:16,827 --> 01:09:19,034
from bond holders, from banks,

1602
01:09:19,330 --> 01:09:21,867
and there was pressure
in the business in general.

1603
01:09:22,166 --> 01:09:24,498
A perfect storm of events was developing

1604
01:09:24,794 --> 01:09:27,376
in the music industry as a whole.

1605
01:09:27,672 --> 01:09:30,334
We'd gone from vinyl
singles, to cassette singles,

1606
01:09:30,633 --> 01:09:33,045
to CD singles, but we cut that out

1607
01:09:33,344 --> 01:09:35,426
because we felt like, rightfully so,

1608
01:09:35,721 --> 01:09:36,756
why were we letting people buy

1609
01:09:37,056 --> 01:09:38,341
the best song off an album.

1610
01:09:38,641 --> 01:09:40,882
Let's just not make that available,

1611
01:09:41,185 --> 01:09:42,391
and they'll have to buy the album.

1612
01:09:42,687 --> 01:09:44,052
And at that day and time, it was true.

1613
01:09:44,355 --> 01:09:46,346
And eventually, I think people were kind of

1614
01:09:46,649 --> 01:09:47,889
crying foul about that.

1615
01:09:48,192 --> 01:09:50,808
Like okay, I like a couple
of Britney Spears songs,

1616
01:09:51,112 --> 01:09:53,694
but do I really want to buy
her whole record for $18?

1617
01:09:53,990 --> 01:09:55,355
You know, it was the peak of that.

1618
01:09:55,658 --> 01:09:57,569
There was no need for a whole generation

1619
01:09:57,868 --> 01:09:59,108
of kids to even go in a record store

1620
01:09:59,412 --> 01:10:00,902
to get their music.

1621
01:10:01,205 --> 01:10:02,786
If you haven't got kids
coming into record stores

1622
01:10:03,082 --> 01:10:05,448
to buy records, heh, you've lost a lot.

1623
01:10:05,751 --> 01:10:08,458
But then a whole bunch
of other things started to happen.

1624
01:10:08,754 --> 01:10:11,040
You had all these mass merchants

1625
01:10:11,340 --> 01:10:12,625
getting into the music business.

1626
01:10:12,925 --> 01:10:15,507
And there were horrible,
horrible price wars.

1627
01:10:15,803 --> 01:10:18,135
Everybody and their brother
started selling CDs.

1628
01:10:18,431 --> 01:10:20,763
You know Target, Wal-Mart,
all these companies.

1629
01:10:21,058 --> 01:10:22,639
And they would sell them at cost.

1630
01:10:22,935 --> 01:10:26,519
What that took away from us was
the traffic created by the hits.

1631
01:10:26,814 --> 01:10:28,770
If you had a Tower Records in some market,

1632
01:10:29,066 --> 01:10:30,806
and a Best Buy moved across the street,

1633
01:10:31,110 --> 01:10:32,771
the music consumer would go,
"Hey, here's the Tower

1634
01:10:33,070 --> 01:10:34,856
on my right, where I can
buy the CD for 20 bucks,

1635
01:10:35,156 --> 01:10:36,612
and here's the Best Buy on the left,

1636
01:10:36,907 --> 01:10:38,192
where I could buy the CD for 10 bucks."

1637
01:10:38,492 --> 01:10:40,653
Even before Napster,
that was a big problem.

1638
01:10:40,953 --> 01:10:45,117
The industry as a whole
didn't respond appropriately

1639
01:10:45,416 --> 01:10:46,872
to what was happening.

1640
01:10:47,168 --> 01:10:49,625
What they should have done
was make the records cheaper.

1641
01:10:49,920 --> 01:10:52,002
They could have, but they didn't.

1642
01:10:52,298 --> 01:10:54,584
And I remember vividly
the very first story on,

1643
01:10:54,884 --> 01:10:57,375
"What is an mp3?",
you know, that we ever did.

1644
01:10:57,678 --> 01:10:59,259
I wasn't depressed
the first time I saw Napster.

1645
01:10:59,555 --> 01:11:01,216
Actually, I remember it very clearly,

1646
01:11:01,515 --> 01:11:04,723
and I went on and there were
800,000 people on it.

1647
01:11:05,019 --> 01:11:06,259
And I thought, "Wow,

1648
01:11:06,562 --> 01:11:08,302
this is unbelievable. This is fantastic."

1649
01:11:08,606 --> 01:11:11,473
I wasn't thinking that those 800,000 people

1650
01:11:11,776 --> 01:11:12,640
were stealing from me, heh.

1651
01:11:12,943 --> 01:11:14,524
It was the most amazing

1652
01:11:14,820 --> 01:11:16,776
piece of software in history.

1653
01:11:17,073 --> 01:11:18,734
There was community in it.

1654
01:11:19,033 --> 01:11:21,365
You could look at each
others lists, playlists.

1655
01:11:21,660 --> 01:11:22,900
It was just a natural.

1656
01:11:23,204 --> 01:11:25,286
Mike Farrace literally had

1657
01:11:25,581 --> 01:11:27,867
the first record store online.

1658
01:11:28,167 --> 01:11:29,953
But we didn't know what to do with it.

1659
01:11:30,252 --> 01:11:32,413
In fact, our store was on AOL.

1660
01:11:33,881 --> 01:11:35,246
Talk about lame.

1661
01:11:35,549 --> 01:11:37,210
Developing that into retail

1662
01:11:37,510 --> 01:11:40,126
wasn't really something
that was on my radar.

1663
01:11:40,429 --> 01:11:42,215
But when you realized how easy it was

1664
01:11:42,515 --> 01:11:45,473
for people to share files
and just literally

1665
01:11:45,768 --> 01:11:48,510
take music for free, that's a problem.

1666
01:11:48,813 --> 01:11:50,394
How do you compete with that?

1667
01:11:50,689 --> 01:11:54,147
If you could get Coca-Cola
for free from your faucet,

1668
01:11:54,443 --> 01:11:55,979
you wouldn't buy a bottle of Coca-Cola.

1669
01:11:56,278 --> 01:11:58,269
On one hand, you go, okay,
well what's the big deal?

1670
01:11:58,572 --> 01:11:59,857
Singles are cheap,

1671
01:12:00,157 --> 01:12:01,317
We don't really need that
much money anyway.

1672
01:12:01,617 --> 01:12:03,357
On the other hand, when Napster came out,

1673
01:12:03,661 --> 01:12:06,824
the big issue was,
"How do you compete with free?"

1674
01:12:07,123 --> 01:12:08,488
On one hand, you have all these people

1675
01:12:08,791 --> 01:12:09,871
who are stealing music for free.

1676
01:12:10,167 --> 01:12:13,250
On the other hand, we have this $18 CD,

1677
01:12:13,546 --> 01:12:17,038
which is our main product.
Not really a balance.

1678
01:12:17,341 --> 01:12:20,048
But if you have a single,
if you have a 99-cent single,

1679
01:12:20,344 --> 01:12:21,584
or a cheap way of, an alternative way

1680
01:12:21,887 --> 01:12:23,718
of selling music, that's a little easier

1681
01:12:24,014 --> 01:12:25,470
to compete with free.

1682
01:12:25,766 --> 01:12:27,802
And we, of course, saw that later
because iTunes kicked in,

1683
01:12:28,102 --> 01:12:29,888
and songs cost 99 cents
and it did very well.

1684
01:12:30,187 --> 01:12:32,644
They think music is available
on the computer,

1685
01:12:32,940 --> 01:12:34,146
go Google it,

1686
01:12:34,441 --> 01:12:35,977
and they think they can
just get it for free.

1687
01:12:36,277 --> 01:12:38,359
And that was something that was discussed

1688
01:12:38,654 --> 01:12:40,440
at nauseam with Russ and Tower.

1689
01:12:40,739 --> 01:12:42,525
He believed that there would
always be people

1690
01:12:42,825 --> 01:12:44,861
wanting to buy records
to have a collection,

1691
01:12:45,161 --> 01:12:47,197
a library, if you will, of product.

1692
01:12:47,496 --> 01:12:49,612
Those people died off and went away,

1693
01:12:49,915 --> 01:12:51,576
and the generation that followed

1694
01:12:51,876 --> 01:12:56,210
believes that having an iPad,
that's your music collection.

1695
01:12:56,505 --> 01:12:58,666
That's what it is today,
and that's the truth.

1696
01:12:58,966 --> 01:13:01,878
There's no records.
Go buy a record, are you nuts?

1697
01:13:02,178 --> 01:13:04,590
And so that kind of started leaving

1698
01:13:04,889 --> 01:13:06,550
the terrestrial retailers behind

1699
01:13:06,849 --> 01:13:07,884
because that kind of stuff,

1700
01:13:08,184 --> 01:13:10,300
it's just too easy, too convenient.

1701
01:13:10,603 --> 01:13:12,309
I mean I still enjoy
going in to a record store,

1702
01:13:12,605 --> 01:13:14,220
but I can't tell you the last time I did.

1703
01:13:14,523 --> 01:13:17,606
Did the industry push people a little bit

1704
01:13:17,902 --> 01:13:21,440
to piracy by forcing them to buy albums

1705
01:13:21,739 --> 01:13:23,024
when they only wanted a song?

1706
01:13:23,324 --> 01:13:24,939
I can't say that that is true or not true,

1707
01:13:25,242 --> 01:13:27,278
but you could certainly make that argument.

1708
01:13:27,578 --> 01:13:30,411
And so what became apparent was
the music industry is changing

1709
01:13:30,706 --> 01:13:33,698
and we are not able
to adjust to that change.

1710
01:13:34,001 --> 01:13:36,868
You could couch that as we're
not adjusting to that change,

1711
01:13:37,171 --> 01:13:39,662
or we don't know
how to adjust to that change,

1712
01:13:39,965 --> 01:13:42,456
but I think you're doing
all of those things at once.

1713
01:13:42,760 --> 01:13:45,126
Right when...

1714
01:13:45,429 --> 01:13:46,669
we probably could have changed,

1715
01:13:46,972 --> 01:13:49,008
in my mind, it was out of my control.

1716
01:13:50,726 --> 01:13:53,809
But my getting sick
didn't help matters any.

1717
01:13:54,104 --> 01:13:55,765
In 1998, a couple of things happened.

1718
01:13:56,065 --> 01:13:59,182
One, my father had

1719
01:13:59,485 --> 01:14:02,522
an eight-way bypass heart operation,

1720
01:14:02,821 --> 01:14:05,984
and he was out of the picture
most of that year.

1721
01:14:06,283 --> 01:14:08,490
I was appointed CEO.

1722
01:14:08,786 --> 01:14:10,242
Russ was kicked up to chairman.

1723
01:14:10,537 --> 01:14:13,119
Stanley, Chris Hopson, Dee Searson and I

1724
01:14:13,415 --> 01:14:14,996
were equals, then all of a sudden,

1725
01:14:15,292 --> 01:14:16,623
I'm kicked up to CEO.

1726
01:14:16,919 --> 01:14:20,002
That created some strain and difficulty.

1727
01:14:20,297 --> 01:14:23,130
I knew Michael somewhat. I didn't like it.

1728
01:14:23,425 --> 01:14:25,757
He didn't come up from--
You know, the one thing

1729
01:14:26,053 --> 01:14:27,884
that historically that was
about Tower Records,

1730
01:14:28,180 --> 01:14:31,547
is we all started
and came up, and learned it

1731
01:14:31,850 --> 01:14:33,090
by living it, and doing it.

1732
01:14:33,394 --> 01:14:34,759
And that was pretty much the case

1733
01:14:35,062 --> 01:14:38,896
working for Tower before
I went to law school.

1734
01:14:39,191 --> 01:14:41,773
When I came back to Tower in 1988,

1735
01:14:42,069 --> 01:14:46,529
I came in as a senior vice
president and legal counsel,

1736
01:14:46,824 --> 01:14:49,236
and I was immediately tagged

1737
01:14:49,535 --> 01:14:51,366
as the boss' son.

1738
01:14:51,662 --> 01:14:54,699
There were people
who wanted to sabotage me.

1739
01:14:54,999 --> 01:14:57,741
And Mike was good, but the truth of it is,

1740
01:14:58,043 --> 01:14:59,954
he wasn't me, in the same sense of

1741
01:15:00,254 --> 01:15:03,587
being able to run what we wanted to run.

1742
01:15:03,882 --> 01:15:05,418
Russell had a persona about him

1743
01:15:05,718 --> 01:15:08,505
that people embrace, Michael didn't.

1744
01:15:08,804 --> 01:15:10,510
It was a challenge to...

1745
01:15:12,057 --> 01:15:14,799
...get the trust and cooperation

1746
01:15:15,102 --> 01:15:17,388
of my executive colleagues.

1747
01:15:17,688 --> 01:15:20,680
Another thing started
happening around 2000.

1748
01:15:20,983 --> 01:15:22,894
Sales were flattening.

1749
01:15:23,193 --> 01:15:26,526
We had had growth from 1960 to 2000.

1750
01:15:26,822 --> 01:15:28,904
There was never a year that there was

1751
01:15:29,199 --> 01:15:30,780
no steady growth in sales.

1752
01:15:31,076 --> 01:15:32,782
This became problematic,

1753
01:15:33,078 --> 01:15:36,866
having a large debt
and a large interest payment,

1754
01:15:37,166 --> 01:15:40,784
and that's sort of where
Tower started going down.

1755
01:15:41,086 --> 01:15:43,919
Everything you've touched worked,

1756
01:15:44,214 --> 01:15:45,875
and then it stops.

1757
01:15:46,175 --> 01:15:47,756
It was just dumb.

1758
01:15:48,052 --> 01:15:49,838
The business plan didn't work.

1759
01:15:50,137 --> 01:15:51,718
There was no population to support it.

1760
01:15:52,014 --> 01:15:53,174
It's that simple.

1761
01:15:53,474 --> 01:15:55,430
You've borrowed all this damn money,

1762
01:15:55,726 --> 01:15:57,637
and all of a sudden, you become aware

1763
01:15:57,936 --> 01:15:59,176
that you've gone too far.

1764
01:15:59,480 --> 01:16:01,186
Everything's working well in Japan,

1765
01:16:01,482 --> 01:16:02,722
but because you've lost money

1766
01:16:03,025 --> 01:16:04,435
in all these other places,

1767
01:16:04,735 --> 01:16:06,817
and the bank is forcing you
to do something,

1768
01:16:07,112 --> 01:16:08,898
the bank is forcing you to sell Japan.

1769
01:16:09,198 --> 01:16:11,405
Japan was making all kinds of money.

1770
01:16:11,700 --> 01:16:13,736
I mean, selling Japan was a terrible loss.

1771
01:16:18,874 --> 01:16:20,364
They expanded too much.

1772
01:16:20,667 --> 01:16:23,830
That hurt them whether there
had been a Napster or not.

1773
01:16:24,129 --> 01:16:25,619
The fact that there was a Napster later

1774
01:16:25,923 --> 01:16:26,878
sort of was the death blow.

1775
01:16:29,176 --> 01:16:30,962
Well, here's Russ now.

1776
01:16:31,261 --> 01:16:32,171
I'm being interviewed.

1777
01:16:34,014 --> 01:16:35,424
Bud Martin.

1778
01:16:35,724 --> 01:16:38,340
If Bud had not gotten sick and died on me,

1779
01:16:38,644 --> 01:16:40,760
for crying out loud,
and I'd have listened to him,

1780
01:16:41,063 --> 01:16:42,303
I wouldn't have been in the problems

1781
01:16:42,606 --> 01:16:44,471
that I had later on, I'll tell you.

1782
01:16:46,527 --> 01:16:49,234
People appreciated what Bud did eventually.

1783
01:16:49,530 --> 01:16:52,317
Bud was a cool guy,
and I know when a few drinks,

1784
01:16:52,616 --> 01:16:55,232
the old story about him
swinging on chandeliers

1785
01:16:55,536 --> 01:16:58,494
at the Red Lion, putting
lampshades on his head

1786
01:16:58,789 --> 01:17:01,576
running around, but they felt
like he was the rock

1787
01:17:01,875 --> 01:17:03,160
of the company also.

1788
01:17:03,460 --> 01:17:05,826
He was the guy that took care of business.

1789
01:17:06,130 --> 01:17:07,711
He got older and sicker is all.

1790
01:17:08,006 --> 01:17:10,839
He had an illness,
which he had for a long time.

1791
01:17:14,805 --> 01:17:18,263
He had not really told
anybody by the early '90s,

1792
01:17:18,559 --> 01:17:22,302
but he was suffering from
a debilitating illness,

1793
01:17:22,604 --> 01:17:25,971
leukemia, which, unbeknownst to most of us,

1794
01:17:26,275 --> 01:17:29,767
he had had for... maybe 15 years.

1795
01:17:30,070 --> 01:17:31,276
He had a good life.

1796
01:17:31,572 --> 01:17:33,608
It was sad at the end when it ended.

1797
01:17:33,907 --> 01:17:36,148
He didn't have much at all to speak of.

1798
01:17:38,579 --> 01:17:40,865
It was only a couple of years later

1799
01:17:41,165 --> 01:17:42,780
that he passed away.

1800
01:17:47,796 --> 01:17:49,832
Anyway, I have a couple
things I want to say about Bud.

1801
01:17:50,132 --> 01:17:52,498
I may not get this out right, excuse me.

1802
01:17:55,262 --> 01:17:57,127
I wasn't going to do this.

1803
01:17:57,431 --> 01:18:00,047
He really taught all of us, us young kids

1804
01:18:00,350 --> 01:18:01,556
who are now vice presidents,

1805
01:18:01,852 --> 01:18:03,262
to take a look at

1806
01:18:03,562 --> 01:18:05,974
what we were doing with our lives

1807
01:18:06,273 --> 01:18:09,015
as far as our morality was concerned.

1808
01:18:09,318 --> 01:18:11,684
He was a wonderful teacher to us.

1809
01:18:11,987 --> 01:18:13,318
He was an incredible sexist pig,

1810
01:18:13,614 --> 01:18:15,696
but at the same time he was entirely fair.

1811
01:18:15,991 --> 01:18:18,198
So after that, I only have
one thing more to say,

1812
01:18:18,494 --> 01:18:20,030
if I can get this out.

1813
01:18:20,329 --> 01:18:21,990
Sorry.

1814
01:18:22,289 --> 01:18:24,871
Okay. Bud, baby,

1815
01:18:25,167 --> 01:18:26,998
this one's for you.

1816
01:18:27,294 --> 01:18:28,659
Bud Martin.

1817
01:18:28,962 --> 01:18:32,170
Bud, of all people, was making
things possible to do.

1818
01:18:34,051 --> 01:18:36,417
You know, after all of those 26 years,

1819
01:18:36,720 --> 01:18:39,382
probably the last three years were spent

1820
01:18:39,681 --> 01:18:42,798
feeling that the whole idea
of Tower Records

1821
01:18:43,101 --> 01:18:44,966
was not going to be around much longer.

1822
01:18:45,270 --> 01:18:48,228
At the end, for me,
it was just a matter of when.

1823
01:18:48,524 --> 01:18:49,730
When the banks came in,

1824
01:18:50,025 --> 01:18:51,014
we knew that things were going to change.

1825
01:18:51,318 --> 01:18:53,354
It was, it was...

1826
01:18:55,322 --> 01:18:56,607
my father...

1827
01:18:59,409 --> 01:19:01,570
when the banks started putting pressure

1828
01:19:01,870 --> 01:19:04,486
on the company and insisting that we hire

1829
01:19:04,790 --> 01:19:07,953
a restructuring officer to run the company,

1830
01:19:08,252 --> 01:19:09,583
my father

1831
01:19:09,878 --> 01:19:11,368
became very upset.

1832
01:19:13,131 --> 01:19:15,838
The bank broke me that news.

1833
01:19:16,134 --> 01:19:18,125
And I said, "I don't think
it's a good idea."

1834
01:19:18,428 --> 01:19:20,089
They said, "Well this is your choice,

1835
01:19:20,389 --> 01:19:21,424
"you either bring in new management

1836
01:19:21,723 --> 01:19:23,554
or we don't loan you the money."

1837
01:19:23,850 --> 01:19:25,511
So I say, "Okay, we need the money.

1838
01:19:25,811 --> 01:19:28,473
We have to have the money,
or we can't operate at all,

1839
01:19:28,772 --> 01:19:32,356
so okay, we'll try to bring
in new management."

1840
01:19:32,651 --> 01:19:35,108
Mike goes down to hire this woman,

1841
01:19:35,404 --> 01:19:37,395
Betsy Burton. He wants to hire her.

1842
01:19:37,698 --> 01:19:40,064
These new bodies
were in. I think it was Betsy.

1843
01:19:40,367 --> 01:19:41,607
I didn't even know

1844
01:19:41,910 --> 01:19:43,116
what was going on
in the company at the time.

1845
01:19:43,412 --> 01:19:45,403
Her idea was to spend all this

1846
01:19:45,706 --> 01:19:49,164
marketing money on branding,
and you're just going,

1847
01:19:49,459 --> 01:19:51,415
"Why are you going to spend
this money on branding?

1848
01:19:51,712 --> 01:19:53,077
We're already established as a brand.

1849
01:19:53,380 --> 01:19:55,336
What you need is retail ads.

1850
01:19:55,632 --> 01:19:57,964
You need ads
that are going to move product.

1851
01:19:58,260 --> 01:20:00,216
You need to move product.
That's the bottom line."

1852
01:20:00,512 --> 01:20:03,424
And then she closed down Pulse magazine.

1853
01:20:03,724 --> 01:20:07,512
Losing Pulse, firing 30 or 40 employees,

1854
01:20:07,811 --> 01:20:09,176
was heartbreaking.

1855
01:20:09,479 --> 01:20:13,188
If I ever came close
to wanting to kill somebody,

1856
01:20:13,483 --> 01:20:15,895
with my hands, it was her.

1857
01:20:16,194 --> 01:20:18,230
We closed our print shop, I believe,

1858
01:20:18,530 --> 01:20:21,192
and to lose 30 employees.

1859
01:20:21,491 --> 01:20:24,528
We closed our sign shop
and lost 30 employees.

1860
01:20:24,828 --> 01:20:27,615
We had to make cuts every place.
We had to fire people.

1861
01:20:27,914 --> 01:20:30,621
And that is where you just
had the two feelings of,

1862
01:20:30,917 --> 01:20:33,283
"I'm so good, I'm not going
to be gone, I hope."

1863
01:20:33,587 --> 01:20:35,623
The restructuring officers
were coming in and saying,

1864
01:20:35,922 --> 01:20:37,207
"Look, you got to cut your expenses

1865
01:20:37,507 --> 01:20:38,872
because you don't have any money."

1866
01:20:39,176 --> 01:20:40,586
In a way, they were saying the same thing

1867
01:20:40,886 --> 01:20:43,628
that Bud was saying
for the last four decades.

1868
01:20:43,930 --> 01:20:46,717
You know, I had the one side of my mouth

1869
01:20:47,017 --> 01:20:49,053
sit with him and try to figure out

1870
01:20:49,353 --> 01:20:51,309
growing the company and how
to get out of this mess,

1871
01:20:51,605 --> 01:20:53,345
and the other side of my mouth,

1872
01:20:53,649 --> 01:20:57,233
deal with these guys that want
to just tear everything down.

1873
01:20:57,527 --> 01:20:59,142
For me, I was conflicted.

1874
01:20:59,446 --> 01:21:01,812
They don't understand the product,

1875
01:21:02,115 --> 01:21:05,198
they don't understand the people
that worked for the company,

1876
01:21:05,494 --> 01:21:06,984
they don't understand the systems,

1877
01:21:07,287 --> 01:21:08,402
they don't understand anything.

1878
01:21:08,705 --> 01:21:11,822
The seeds of failure are built in to it.

1879
01:21:12,125 --> 01:21:13,410
And it can't last.

1880
01:21:13,710 --> 01:21:17,202
He basically fought
the restructuring officers--

1881
01:21:17,506 --> 01:21:18,996
there were numerous of them that came in.

1882
01:21:19,299 --> 01:21:23,087
And I remember so vividly
going to the first meeting.

1883
01:21:23,387 --> 01:21:26,254
I talked to them, and I say,
"Well now, I'm on the board,

1884
01:21:26,556 --> 01:21:28,387
and I've still got the officially

1885
01:21:28,684 --> 01:21:30,265
the chairman of the company."

1886
01:21:30,560 --> 01:21:33,302
I mean, that's a chairman
without portfolio.

1887
01:21:33,605 --> 01:21:35,095
I said, "What do you want me to do?

1888
01:21:35,399 --> 01:21:36,855
"Who's going to be the visionary?

1889
01:21:37,150 --> 01:21:39,391
"Who's going to think about
what we should be doing

1890
01:21:39,695 --> 01:21:41,105
in this industry in the future?"

1891
01:21:41,405 --> 01:21:44,147
And this idiot woman says to me,

1892
01:21:44,449 --> 01:21:45,689
"We don't need a visionary."

1893
01:21:47,285 --> 01:21:49,276
I can't control anything anymore.

1894
01:21:49,579 --> 01:21:51,991
So what was I to do?
Just shake my head and walk off.

1895
01:21:52,290 --> 01:21:53,450
Betsy had interviewed the group,

1896
01:21:53,750 --> 01:21:57,038
and if I remember, most of us individually

1897
01:21:57,337 --> 01:22:00,420
who were in senior management,
so we knew what was going on.

1898
01:22:00,716 --> 01:22:05,881
And Mike Solomon was promoted to president,

1899
01:22:06,179 --> 01:22:10,297
and he had to do what
these bank guys wanted to do,

1900
01:22:10,600 --> 01:22:12,431
and so everything just kind of had stopped.

1901
01:22:12,728 --> 01:22:14,264
Somebody who was an outsider

1902
01:22:14,563 --> 01:22:16,645
was taking it away from us.

1903
01:22:16,940 --> 01:22:19,397
I was caught in the middle, really.

1904
01:22:19,693 --> 01:22:21,183
We needed to be profitable, basically,

1905
01:22:21,486 --> 01:22:24,353
and we needed to pay our debt.
But to do that,

1906
01:22:24,656 --> 01:22:27,819
we basically had to cut
the heart out of the company.

1907
01:22:28,118 --> 01:22:32,737
In 2004, they got rid of me and Dee

1908
01:22:33,039 --> 01:22:34,279
and Mark Viducich.

1909
01:22:34,583 --> 01:22:36,323
I guess they decided, I think then,

1910
01:22:36,626 --> 01:22:37,365
to liquidate the company.

1911
01:22:37,669 --> 01:22:38,784
They didn't say it,

1912
01:22:39,087 --> 01:22:41,954
and it took them a few years to do it,

1913
01:22:42,257 --> 01:22:43,713
but they were no longer

1914
01:22:44,009 --> 01:22:45,624
interested in trying
to either grow the company

1915
01:22:45,927 --> 01:22:48,134
or save the company, in my opinion.

1916
01:22:48,430 --> 01:22:51,513
They told us and instructed us

1917
01:22:51,808 --> 01:22:55,596
what we had to do to cut costs, save money,

1918
01:22:55,896 --> 01:22:59,354
increase profits if we could,
or at least decrease losses,

1919
01:22:59,649 --> 01:23:00,980
so if we can fire someone making

1920
01:23:01,276 --> 01:23:04,234
200,000, we can hire
someone making 100,000.

1921
01:23:04,529 --> 01:23:05,644
I was in Mike Solomon's office

1922
01:23:05,947 --> 01:23:10,190
with he and a lady we call Betty Boop,

1923
01:23:10,494 --> 01:23:11,825
and you know why you're there.

1924
01:23:12,120 --> 01:23:13,951
It's not a secret, I told him and Betty,

1925
01:23:14,247 --> 01:23:16,329
"You guys are the ones
that shouldn't be here.

1926
01:23:16,625 --> 01:23:18,707
"You guys are the people
that should be fired, not me."

1927
01:23:19,002 --> 01:23:21,618
Firing people that you
had hired 30 years ago.

1928
01:23:21,922 --> 01:23:25,039
People that you know,
were started as clerks

1929
01:23:25,342 --> 01:23:29,130
that were now regional managers
or VPs or whatever.

1930
01:23:29,429 --> 01:23:32,216
It's just, you know, awful.

1931
01:23:32,516 --> 01:23:34,256
Stanley and I were up at Lake Tahoe.

1932
01:23:34,559 --> 01:23:38,393
We're having a drink after
doing some gambling at the bar,

1933
01:23:38,688 --> 01:23:42,806
and out of the blue,
he says, "Oh Bob, by the way,

1934
01:23:43,109 --> 01:23:44,519
we're restructuring the company."

1935
01:23:44,820 --> 01:23:46,151
"We need to structure the company

1936
01:23:46,446 --> 01:23:48,357
because of growth or whatever,"

1937
01:23:48,657 --> 01:23:51,239
and I was just like, stunned.

1938
01:23:51,535 --> 01:23:54,993
Because, I mean,
this little private setting.

1939
01:23:55,288 --> 01:23:58,405
So, I mean, I was hammering down
some scotches at that point.

1940
01:23:58,708 --> 01:24:00,323
The day Heidi fired me, you know,

1941
01:24:00,627 --> 01:24:02,333
she called me in one day and she says,

1942
01:24:02,629 --> 01:24:04,244
"Rudy, this is hard for me to say,

1943
01:24:04,548 --> 01:24:07,836
but I want a divorce."

1944
01:24:08,134 --> 01:24:10,750
It was really hard,
and I knew it was hard for her

1945
01:24:11,054 --> 01:24:14,262
as it was for me, you know, and so,

1946
01:24:14,558 --> 01:24:16,389
I went to Russ, he said, "Now what the fuck

1947
01:24:16,685 --> 01:24:18,346
are we going to do with you?" like that.

1948
01:24:18,645 --> 01:24:20,727
He never fired anybody in his life,

1949
01:24:21,022 --> 01:24:23,354
let alone his whole executive
committee, for Christ sakes.

1950
01:24:23,650 --> 01:24:26,266
- It's not who he was.
- He took me out for lunch.

1951
01:24:26,570 --> 01:24:27,810
Actually called me and he said,
"Want to go to lunch?"

1952
01:24:28,113 --> 01:24:30,946
And I thought, "This is not boding well.

1953
01:24:31,241 --> 01:24:32,651
"Russ doesn't call you
and ask you to lunch.

1954
01:24:32,951 --> 01:24:34,737
This is not..." You know.
And he was in tears.

1955
01:24:35,036 --> 01:24:37,948
I mean, it was as hard for him
as it was for me.

1956
01:24:38,248 --> 01:24:39,863
It was probably harder.
I felt worse for him.

1957
01:24:40,166 --> 01:24:43,283
Russ and I are cousins, and Mike Solomon,

1958
01:24:43,587 --> 01:24:47,500
who was also the CEO at one time,
and I are cousins,

1959
01:24:47,799 --> 01:24:51,132
and to see family members
just thrown aside too

1960
01:24:51,428 --> 01:24:56,092
was harder than just
losing a 30-year career.

1961
01:24:56,391 --> 01:24:59,804
And at the end of 30 years, I got a watch.

1962
01:25:00,103 --> 01:25:03,015
Just shortly after I left the company.

1963
01:25:03,315 --> 01:25:05,306
In fact, I'm wearing it right now, today.

1964
01:25:07,235 --> 01:25:08,520
And it says,

1965
01:25:08,820 --> 01:25:11,653
"Bob, thank you, we love
you, Tower Records."

1966
01:25:16,745 --> 01:25:18,576
And uh, it was mutual.

1967
01:25:24,669 --> 01:25:27,285
I wish probably
that I could say there was more

1968
01:25:27,589 --> 01:25:30,126
survivor's guilt, but, um,

1969
01:25:31,635 --> 01:25:34,251
there was a lot of relief too.

1970
01:25:34,554 --> 01:25:38,263
And then as more layoffs happened...?

1971
01:25:39,476 --> 01:25:40,807
No?

1972
01:25:48,485 --> 01:25:51,101
Cutting the essential parts of Tower

1973
01:25:51,404 --> 01:25:54,567
that made it so successful
was heart wrenching.

1974
01:25:54,866 --> 01:25:56,072
That was the heart of the company.

1975
01:25:56,368 --> 01:25:57,904
I mean, the company wasn't going to run

1976
01:25:58,203 --> 01:26:00,694
without this team.

1977
01:26:00,997 --> 01:26:02,988
And sure enough it didn't.

1978
01:26:03,291 --> 01:26:05,373
Tonight, the founder of Tower Records

1979
01:26:05,669 --> 01:26:07,830
is closing his last retail record store.

1980
01:26:08,129 --> 01:26:10,040
It's the end of the line for an icon

1981
01:26:10,340 --> 01:26:11,546
that put Sacramento on the map.

1982
01:26:11,841 --> 01:26:13,206
One of several chains

1983
01:26:13,510 --> 01:26:15,296
closing its doors nationwide.

1984
01:26:22,602 --> 01:26:24,888
I was in New York at Fourth and Broadway,

1985
01:26:25,188 --> 01:26:27,474
and we had an apartment
in the same building

1986
01:26:27,774 --> 01:26:31,312
and I was staying there,
looking at the store

1987
01:26:31,611 --> 01:26:33,147
when it closed that night.

1988
01:26:33,446 --> 01:26:35,562
Stood across the street and watched, yeah.

1989
01:26:37,325 --> 01:26:39,782
What are you going to do? It's over.

1990
01:26:40,078 --> 01:26:41,614
They all shut down at once,
and a bunch of people

1991
01:26:41,913 --> 01:26:44,325
lost their job at the end.

1992
01:26:44,624 --> 01:26:46,785
It was one of the greatest
tragedies of my life,

1993
01:26:47,085 --> 01:26:48,450
to be honest with you, when it closed down.

1994
01:26:48,753 --> 01:26:50,960
It really, really upset me.

1995
01:26:51,256 --> 01:26:53,747
And I missed it.
I missed that routine of going

1996
01:26:54,050 --> 01:26:56,962
to buy my records or my CDs or whatever.

1997
01:26:57,262 --> 01:26:59,423
It really was this organization,

1998
01:26:59,723 --> 01:27:03,557
this camaraderie, this group
that coalesced around Russ

1999
01:27:03,852 --> 01:27:05,808
and was able to feed off

2000
01:27:06,104 --> 01:27:08,811
and build on Russ' vision.

2001
01:27:14,029 --> 01:27:17,692
In the early 70s,
I took a job at Tower Broadway

2002
01:27:17,991 --> 01:27:19,902
here in Sacramento, at 16th and Broadway,

2003
01:27:20,201 --> 01:27:21,691
and in 1992,

2004
01:27:21,995 --> 01:27:25,783
I actually ended up here
at Watt Avenue as the manager.

2005
01:27:26,082 --> 01:27:27,572
We have a marquee out
on the front of our store

2006
01:27:27,876 --> 01:27:30,037
that we just advertise what's going on

2007
01:27:30,336 --> 01:27:31,872
in the store and what's happening.

2008
01:27:32,172 --> 01:27:33,582
When we got the word

2009
01:27:33,882 --> 01:27:35,964
that the liquidators had won the auction

2010
01:27:36,259 --> 01:27:38,545
and it was imminent that
it was going to be the end,

2011
01:27:38,845 --> 01:27:40,801
we wanted to put something
up on the marquee.

2012
01:27:41,097 --> 01:27:43,679
One of my employees, Dale, came up with:

2013
01:27:43,975 --> 01:27:47,763
All things must pass. Thanks, Sacramento.

2014
01:27:48,063 --> 01:27:51,271
I went home, and the next day
I came in to work,

2015
01:27:51,566 --> 01:27:52,851
they had taken a huge banner

2016
01:27:53,151 --> 01:27:55,267
that was like 100-feet long it seemed like,

2017
01:27:55,570 --> 01:27:57,185
that said basically going out of business.

2018
01:27:57,489 --> 01:27:59,195
And they put that banner up across

2019
01:27:59,491 --> 01:28:01,402
the whole top of the exterior
of the building,

2020
01:28:01,701 --> 01:28:04,033
covered up our sign that said
"All things must pass",

2021
01:28:04,329 --> 01:28:05,865
and you know, it was pretty deflating.

2022
01:28:06,164 --> 01:28:08,496
It was like, you know reality
slaps you right in the face.

2023
01:28:08,792 --> 01:28:10,453
When they were finally gone,
they took down the sign,

2024
01:28:10,752 --> 01:28:13,334
and exposed our message one more time.

2025
01:28:18,968 --> 01:28:20,174
It's really sad.

2026
01:28:21,721 --> 01:28:23,677
The skeleton is still here.

2027
01:28:23,973 --> 01:28:28,182
Ad the parts are still here,
even though they're not working.

2028
01:28:32,357 --> 01:28:34,689
And it was filled with records.

2029
01:28:34,984 --> 01:28:36,474
And the music was playing.

2030
01:28:36,778 --> 01:28:39,690
And the people were
running around and shopping.

2031
01:28:39,989 --> 01:28:42,822
But then again, that's the past.

2032
01:28:44,786 --> 01:28:47,323
There's no way you can change that.

2033
01:28:47,622 --> 01:28:49,738
Let's think about what to do in the future.

2034
01:29:12,730 --> 01:29:16,393
Driving though
Shibuya or Shinjuku or Herajuku

2035
01:29:16,693 --> 01:29:19,730
or wherever it was,
and I see the Tower Records

2036
01:29:20,029 --> 01:29:22,315
fucking logo on a building.

2037
01:29:22,615 --> 01:29:23,855
I was like...

2038
01:29:24,159 --> 01:29:26,901
You guys have Tower Records? Hell, yeah.

2039
01:29:36,045 --> 01:29:38,001
So we went in.

2040
01:29:38,298 --> 01:29:40,129
It was fucking Tower Records, man.

2041
01:29:40,425 --> 01:29:43,542
Every floor I went to,
there was another different CD,

2042
01:29:43,845 --> 01:29:45,460
and there's displays everywhere,

2043
01:29:45,763 --> 01:29:46,923
and there's people
shopping and buying music,

2044
01:29:47,223 --> 01:29:48,463
listening on listening stations,

2045
01:29:48,766 --> 01:29:50,882
and you know, it was amazing.

2046
01:29:58,484 --> 01:30:00,349
To see Japan flourish like it does,

2047
01:30:00,653 --> 01:30:03,315
I'm really proud of them. I really am.

2048
01:30:03,615 --> 01:30:05,230
I'm as happy as can be,

2049
01:30:05,533 --> 01:30:07,524
because it just proves that it can be done.

2050
01:30:07,827 --> 01:30:11,160
Because they're doing
the same thing we did all along.

2051
01:30:17,837 --> 01:30:19,828
Tower was Russ' baby.

2052
01:30:20,131 --> 01:30:24,750
He built it, he nurtured it,
he expanded it.

2053
01:30:25,053 --> 01:30:26,839
It's very special, it's very unique.

2054
01:30:28,723 --> 01:30:31,510
The feeling that they all have for Russ,

2055
01:30:31,809 --> 01:30:33,470
for Tower, for each other.

2056
01:30:33,770 --> 01:30:34,885
People went to music stores,

2057
01:30:35,188 --> 01:30:37,099
they listened to music,
it was an experience

2058
01:30:37,398 --> 01:30:38,979
going into a store and browsing

2059
01:30:39,275 --> 01:30:41,607
through tens of thousands of records.

2060
01:30:41,903 --> 01:30:44,189
It was here, we were part of it,

2061
01:30:44,489 --> 01:30:46,821
we all fell in love, and then it went away.

2062
01:30:47,116 --> 01:30:49,107
Having a job doesn't have to be tedious,

2063
01:30:49,410 --> 01:30:51,571
it doesn't have to be boring,
it doesn't have to be a place

2064
01:30:51,871 --> 01:30:54,032
that you hate to go every day.

2065
01:30:54,332 --> 01:30:58,041
It certainly wasn't for me, and
probably everybody who worked at Tower.

2066
01:30:58,336 --> 01:30:59,667
It was a family,

2067
01:30:59,963 --> 01:31:02,750
and that family ideal stuck with everybody

2068
01:31:03,049 --> 01:31:04,255
up till the end.

2069
01:31:04,550 --> 01:31:07,667
Wasn't a job, it was just a way of life.

2070
01:31:16,604 --> 01:31:19,767
I think Tower to me was

2071
01:31:20,066 --> 01:31:22,398
a vision of one person

2072
01:31:22,694 --> 01:31:25,106
who knew what they wanted
to give to the world,

2073
01:31:25,405 --> 01:31:28,192
or offer to the world, and us spending

2074
01:31:28,491 --> 01:31:29,856
30 years both following

2075
01:31:30,159 --> 01:31:32,320
and trying to refine that vision.

2076
01:31:34,122 --> 01:31:36,659
We were part of people's lives

2077
01:31:36,958 --> 01:31:39,665
because music was part of people's lives.

2078
01:32:05,611 --> 01:32:07,818
It was the music that was meaningful

2079
01:32:13,911 --> 01:32:15,117
and we were how they got it.

2080
01:32:19,459 --> 01:32:21,040
What's the matter?
Did you run out of questions?

2081
01:32:21,336 --> 01:32:23,042
No.