The Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard: Where Muhammad Ali, B.B. King and Michael Jackson shopped for music.
Our friend and fellow music lover Mike Webber sent along this account of what the closing of Tower Records in Hollywood meant to a long-time friend (and his KU roommate), a guy named Al. Read it and sigh.
Sadly, today at 12:30pm Tower Records on Sunset Blvd. closed and locked its front doors forever. The liquidation of their inventory began two months ago
when they went into receivership.
.
The store manager and several of the minimum wage clerks stayed on to help facilitate the reps from the liquidation company by collapsing the bin and endcap space down to where shoppers had less geography to browse through. Since they were not receiving any new releases from the labels, you can imagine how grim the pickings were the last few weeks. There was a guy who came in that had made arrangements to purchase every piece of product left over at a guaranteed discount of around 95%. Granted most of it was the dregs but for several hundred dollars he will have some
things to sort through and get rid of next year.
I arrived this morning around 11:30 to say my private goodbyes to a place that changed the course and direction of my life. Yes it's now just a brick and mortar shell in an empty parking lot on some of the most expensive commercial real estate on the west coast, but the place was filled with ghosts.Todd Meehan, one of the people who worked there for 20-plus years, came in to be the honorary last customer and to buy something on his last day in LA. It was a fitting finale to and old ship destined for the wrecking ball. He was to the point of tears as was Sharon the manager.
The Universal rep came in and bought pizzas for the staff so we all stayed for one last back room party as the equipment began to roll out the back doors on dollies.
Seventeen years ago, I walked in that store just to kill an hour while waiting for a friend to get free. I was out in LA looking for work and a reason to move there. As I left, I noticed a 'help wanted' sign on the front door and I thought, "What the hell?" I filled out the application and finagled an interview for the next day. The manager said he would hold a job for me and to call him when I was leaving Kansas City. I told him I would be back in 30 days. All on a lark I suppose.
That store and that account were so much a part of the fabric of my life from then to this year. As a result of working there, I got to work at Capitol Records, EMD Distribution back when it was called CEMA, Triloka Records, and finally Sony Music. I had nearly all of the So Cal Tower stores as accounts when I was a field rep and I dealt with them on a regional basis as a marketing manager the last 5 years working at Sony. The time I spent at Sunset back in the day was like boot camp for the music industry.
Today as I was standing in a empty store looking at empty bins and bare walls, a
flood of 10,000 memories came to mind. Recollections of a time when I was young and hungry and new to a very strange and exciting and foreign environment. One which if Mike or Corky or Stretch had told me back in the early 80's I would experience, I would have fainted from elation and disbelief. How could I know I would get to spend 5 hours helping BB King find music he was looking for? How could I know that I would get to spend 45 minutes privately with Muhammad Ali and his wife doing the same thing while a buzzing crowd was gathering outside for autographs when the news spread throughout the store and the local neighborhood that The Champ was in the house?Yes these were but two of millions of stories that made for such a colorful existence back then when I made so little money that I survived on hot dogs and ice cream from the gas station up the block for lunch. Ringing up Jeff Beck or Slash at the front cash register, getting Ella Fitzgerald's autograph, getting my picture taken with Gumby,
freeing Springsteen from a doofus fan that had glommed onto him, watching Jacko running up and down the aisles in a disguise as he tried to to escape an entire busload of Japanese school girl tourists who made him, these are memories and stories that no one can rob me of....not a bankruptcy judge, not a mismanaged account, not a
calloused industry and not even fate.
Seeing the last bit of product being loaded onto the carts to take to the back room for that guy who bought them out made the finality of it sink in. It's over. Mine is but a small tale in the great novel that was Tower Sunset. There are thousands more. I don't think a team of writers could do justice to what happened at that location
for 36 years. All the in-stores, the celebrities, the drama, the scene......it would fill a library. The whole thing today was like watching a funeral in slow motion, much the way the last episode of Cheers was, only this time it was real.
Goodbye old friend, it was a good ride
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