ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
These days, pretty much every type of music is at our fingertips. But, kids, there was a time when Grandpa Ari had to actually go to a store to find music and buy it. Back then Tower Records was a mecca. Actor Colin Hanks loved Tower so much, he spent seven years making a documentary about it. NPR's Anastasia Tsioulcas dug through the memory bin with him.
ANASTASIA TSIOULCAS, BYLINE: Colin Hanks created a love letter to Tower Records in his film "All Things Must Pass."
COLIN HANKS: Tower sort of helped pave the way for your identity. For lack of a better phrase, music makes people sometimes, where you sort of latch on to music as a way of identifying yourself or your tribe. I got that at Tower Records.
TSIOULCAS: Tower was a pilgrimage place for music fanatics, even for the world's biggest stars. Elton John talked to Hanks about how he'd go to one of the LA stores every week to buy stacks of new releases.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "ALL THINGS MUST PASS")
JOHN BRENNAN: Tuesday mornings I would be at Tower Records. And it was a ritual, and it was a ritual I loved. I mean, Tower Records had everything. Those people knew their stuff. They were really on their ball. I mean, they just weren't employees and they have to work in a music store, they were devotees of music.
TSIOULCAS: And Tower Records founder Russ Solomon let them decide what each store stocked, says Hanks.
HANKS: New Orleans had a huge heritage music section. Nashville had a gigantic country section. Tower was, in essence, a bunch of mom-and-pop record stores. Each one was run individually by the people in the stores - the clerks, the buyers, the art department from each individual store. Each store represented its city or its neighborhood in the city. They all had their own style.
TSIOULCAS: Tower started out as an offshoot of Russ Solomon's father's drug store in Sacramento, Calif. He tells Hanks how he got his friends and relatives to help him get off the ground.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "ALL THINGS MUST PASS")
RUSS SOLOMON: Luckily, my cousin Ross was a builder - electrical, carpentry - and so he - well, I'll go down and fix it up.
TSIOULCAS: Solomon's California inner circle eventually became some of Tower's top brass, and that family atmosphere spread as the company expanded. Jason Sumney started out as a clerk at Tower's store at 4th and Broadway in New York before moving into its regional operations.
JASON SUMNEY: Never in my life before and probably never again will I experience anything like that. Everybody got along and it was just such an amazing vibe. Every day was fun, you know? Even the downs were fun.
TSIOULCAS: Over the years, Tower grew, and grew and grew. It became a multinational empire, with stores and licenses everywhere from London, to Buenos Aires to Tokyo. But in 2006, Tower declared bankruptcy.
ED CHRISTMAN: It took eight or nine years to unfold, but the things that proved to be a mistake, in hindsight, occurred in 1998.
TSIOULCAS: Ed Christman has been reporting on music retail for Billboard Magazine for 26 years. Christman says that Tower wasn't alone in the hunger to expand that eventually proved to be its undoing.
CHRISTMAN: There was at least 10 or 15 large chains that were racing to be the dominant force in music, and Tower decided to take on a $110 million in debt. So they did a bond offering, and they were going to use that debt to drive global expansion. It was just the mood of the day - it was grow and go.
TSIOULCAS: Tower's competitors weren't just other record stores. Big-box outlets like Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy wanted music fans' dollars too. But they discounted CD prices drastically to get customers through their doors in hopes that they'd also pile things like clothes, pet food, batteries and TVs in their shopping baskets.
CHRISTMAN: What they did was, they looked at the basket - was the basket profitable? So if there was a lot of other items in there, they didn't care if it was music or not, whereas at Tower Records, they needed everything in their basket to be profitable.
TSIOULCAS: Tower couldn't convince consumers to spend somewhere between $12 and $19 for an album, and Solomon couldn't convince the labels to lower their prices or start selling CD singles. But by then music fans had already start turning to other options, from file-sharing sites like Napster, to download stores like iTunes.
Filmmaker Colin Hanks contends that Tower started acting as if it was just too big to fail.
HANKS: Tower, in almost 40 years, had always grown. It had always made money, it never lost money. So I think there was a lot of stuff that Tower did not see coming.
TSIOULCAS: You can hear that in a 1994 promotional video from Tower's founder, Russ Solomon.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SOLOMON: As for the whole concept of beaming something into one's home, that may come along someday. That's for sure. But it will come along over a long period of time, and we'll be able to deal with it and change our focus and change the way we do business. As far as your CD collection - and our CD inventory, for that matter - it's going to be around for a long, long time, believe me.
TSIOULCAS: Solomon and Tower certainly had their critics, none of whom are in Colin Hanks's documentary. For him, making this film was a chance to revisit a time and experience than molded him.
HANKS: You forged a connection with it whether you knew it or not. I didn't know it when I was a kid, and it wasn't until I started making this project that I realized just how informative it was for me when I was growing up. And it's like that for a lot of people.
TSIOULCAS: And even though it's been nearly a decade since Russ Solomon's Tower closed its doors, its memory still burns bright for fans whose musical tastes were shaped below those yellow and red signs. Anastasia Tsioulcas, NPR News, New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GOODBYE YELLOW BRICK ROAD")
JOHN: (Singing) So goodbye, yellow brick road, where the dogs of society howl. You can't plant me in your penthouse. I'm going back to my plough. Back to the howling old owl in the woods, hunting the horny back toad...
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