An Era -- And How It Ended
I saw this new documentary because I always had a thing for Tower Records. And Tower Books. And (came the 80's and VHS) Tower Video.
This worldwide chain began in the smallish California city of Sacramento, California -- its the capitol of California, but is (or was) a far less sophisticated California city than SF, LA, or even San Diego. Sacramento is inland and high north in that bleak "Central Valley" of California. When Hitchcock first told the New York Times in 1959 of the setting of Psycho, he said "Its about a motel near Sacramento, California." Which was about 200 miles off (the story is set higher north, in Shasta County near Redding),but still "of that rural type."
A young man went to college at Sacramento State named...Tom Hanks. He eventually married and had a son named...Colin Hanks. As dad headed on to Hollywood, became a star, divorced and married his second wife(Rita Wilson), Colin Hanks was raised by his mother in Sacramento. And there, Colin Hanks became enwrapped in the Tower Records story.
It took Colin Hanks(now an actor himself; see Mad Men and Fargo the TV show) seven years of raising money off and on(I guess Papa Tom wasn't going to bankroll it) and shooting off and on, to complete this movie. I found it a very nostalgic and touching film.
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"All Things Must Pass" is the title of George Harrison's first(?) solo album and a song that I find very, very touching, if a little overdone in the horns. Its point is about life itself: all things must pass. Sunrise doesn't last all morning, a cloudburst doesn't last all day. Eras end. People die...and so do businesses. But its a natural thing.
When Tower Records closed most of its stores in 2006, the Sacramento store put that message on the marquee: All Things Must Pass.
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"All Things Must Pass" is a talking heads movie, with the main interviewee being Russ Solomon, who founded Tower Records in 1961 with one downtown store, expanded to the suburbs, and then slowly marched on through the "album boom" of the sixties(The Beatles, The Beach Boys), when he opened a store in San Francisco(just 150 miles or less West of Sacramento), and then into the "music explosion" of the seventies...during which Solomon opened an LA store on the Sunset Strip and suddenly had musical superstars dropping by to shop.
The other talking heads are mainly Tower management employees who rose from being record clerks to actually heading up entire divisions of a chain that dominated California, spread to Japan, put up specialty stores in NYC and London and went worldwide.
And then crashed, just like that. From a billion dollars to bankruptcy to over.
The story ends up being a simple one of the Capitalism of Change. Once Napster and other downloadable means of getting music came into play...the concept of a "record store"(or a "CD store") became obsolete. Soloman and his staff talk of trying to save Tower when all that changed...but how could they? They'd made their billions on records and CDS. Only by "buying into Napster" could they continue. All Things Must Pass.
I must admit an oldster's confusion about exactly what TYPE of music brought Tower down : "free"(i.e. "stolen" or pirated) or "paid"? I dunno myself. How can modern bands make money if they give their product away?
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Though most of the talking heads are a charming band of "hippies grown old"(I love them talking of how Tower put "Hand Truck Fuel" on their books -- it was cocaine.) But Hanks manages to get four famous folks to talk, too:
Bruce Springsteen(looking great)
Elton John(shown now and wonderfully "then" in the 70's shopping at Tower on the Sunset Strip)
Dave Grohl(who once worked as a Tower clerk, "because I could wear my hair like I wanted")
David Geffen(a billionaire music mogul who knows exactly why Tower grew and why it crashed.)
The point of many of these musical big shots is that at Tower --ESPECIALLY the Tower on Sunset Strip -- they could actually watch customers buying THEIR music, and see their work being "digested." Not to mention: they liked to shop there themselves. Elton John says: "I spent the most money that anyone ever spent at Tower Records."
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The movie goes "foggy" on the other elements of Tower: did someone else own Tower Books and Tower Video? Tower BOOKS was well killed off by Amazon, I suppose.
For my part, Tower was a HUGE part of my life in the seventies and eighties. From one store to the next, I practically lived in Tower Records and Tower Books at least a couple of hours a week. I bought a book at Tower Books called "Interviews with Great Directors" and, as a young Hitchcock fan, went straight to the Hitch interview, but then "forced myself" to read every other interview in the book -- John Ford, John Huston, Otto Preminger, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa...didn't see all THEIR movies, but read about them. From Tower Books.
Tower Records? How cool was it when a big new album was released -- like "Hotel California" -- and you could grab your fresh, cellophane enwrapped copy from a big old stack of scores of them?
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I noted in a thread on "Bridge of Spies" that "Tom Hanks makes you cry." Well, son Colin has learned at daddy's knee. A number of the interviewees in "All Things Must Pass" cry as they start to recount how their fun and wonderful days at Tower came to a screeching, layoff-heavy halt. And we as an audience fight the tears of the "loss of an era" -- vinyl, record stores, a shared sense of music. I hear "vinyl's coming back," but really only as a used record format -- or maybe a re-making of old albums?
No matter. I enjoyed All Things Must Pass. That George Harrison song eventually turns up and its 1971 all over again...but the movie is bigger than that.
Recommended.