Saturday, October 07, 2006

Icon of my youth going away: Tower Records will be no more

Kind of bummed to read this story from the AP:

Group plans to liquidate Tower Records

According to the story, Great American Group (whatever that is) in an approved sale through bankruptcy court bought and will liquidate the stores, leases and property.

Tower was a serious hang-out when I was younger, and before I could drive, I would beg my mom to take me there on weekends or after school to look around. Of course it thrilled me to no end if my parents were annoyed by whatever loud music was playing.

I bought many a long playing record there (vinyl, that is, for you youngsters) and then switched to CD's as the time came. I bought my first CD there in the very early 80's (a Bowie CD) and over the years bought hundreds more.

Of course, before cd technology was standard in a car, you had to buy6 bricks of blank tapes for your deck. Ah, the days of sharing music before Napster and MP3's.
Growing up in the Bay Area, there was never a shortage of places one could buy music, but it never even occured to me to venture into a brick and mortar store other than Tower.
Even now days, with the ability to easily buy your music from ITunes or via Amazon (or Target for that matter along with your Tide) there always was something nice about browsing through Tower.

So today we say goodbye to an icon, born and bred in the great state of California.
Maybe I should head over to the one closest to me over in Point Loma here in San Diego and have one more look around..

7 comments:

Tom Harper said...

Yeah, that's definitely the end of an icon. I lived in Berkeley for awhile in the '70s. The Tower Records store in Berkeley was right next door to a local record store -- Leopold's. Between the 2 stores, you could just hang out for hours listening to dynamite music and looking through hundreds of albums. I went to the North Beach store a few times too.

The end of an era.

Unknown said...

dude, I was so sad when I read about it. I am a native Californian, specifically San Diego. It is the end of an era.

I have spent many an hour at the Tower in Pt. Loma..across from the Sports Arena right?

Mike V. said...

Yea, over by the Sports Arena.

When I lived in the bay area, I went to the one in Cambell (south san jose/los gatos area) and have been to the one in SFO.
Never got to go to the landmark store on Sunset in LA, though..

LA said...

Add me to the list of bummed out Californian music lovers who can't believe the news.

The thing that differentiated Tower from other music stores was that had TONS of imports. You could always find something there that the other music stores didn't have.

I take it the one on El Cajon Blvd. that I used to go to when I was at SDSU (1981-1985, okay, 20 years ago) is long gone.

Jay said...

I say we all start up a ramones cover band, climb on top of the marquee and hold a benefit concert.

Diane said...

Ditto to la about the imports - I remember driving to the Tower in Anaheim in 1979 to buy the import version of Cheap Trick's Live at Budokan

Anonymous said...

I was shocked to see the going out of business signs at our Tower Record here in Dallas as well :-(

Great blog!

Best wishes,
Captain Cox