All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records

All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records

I can recall my first record. I think it was around 1975 and I had just come out of “Cooley High” at the Pix Theater in Jersey City’s McGinley Square. In love with the Motown score to Michael Schultz’s film, I convinced my aunt to buy me a copy of The Four Tops’ “Reach Out (I’ll Be There)” at some nearby record store. We went inside, and as she thumbed through the soul singles rack, I changed my mind because of what was playing on the store turntable.

Had to have that song too, but it was supposed to be one 45, not two. I can still see the guy taking the record off the record player and slipping it into a static-filled paper sleeve before selling it to me. And I can still see my aunt’s facepalm when she realized what happened: My Ding-a-Ling.

Everybody who has ever spent time in a record store has memories like this. If you close your eyes hard enough, you can walk through that place as if you were there yesterday; when you’re done with that one you go strolling through the layout of Tower Records on West 4th Street in New York City in your mind (and then after that one closes, you move on to Second Coming up on Broadway).

It is where we’d put far too much money and time, neither of which we regretted doing so with. It was heaven filled with vinyl records and easily popped cassette tapes and eventually CD’s that no one wanted, since they randomly skipped every five seconds.

The rise and fall of Tower Records is chronicled in Colin Hanks’ “All Things Must Pass,” a documentary that inspires long, gauzy gazes back toward carefree youth for viewers of a certain age. The story of Tower has an arc not unlike human life itself started small in 1960 in Sacramento by Russ Solomon, enjoyed a period of success buffered by unimaginable decadence and an adolescent brand of fearlessness and perceived invincibility, until the piper of harsh adulthood came to collect on the tune that was never supposed to stop playing.

An onscreen title at the top of “All Things Must Pass” lets us know that in 1999 Tower Records was a billion-dollar company. “Five years later,” the next title tells us, “it was bankrupt,” preparing us for the bitter end of the party to which Hanks invites us. We meet Solomon, whose dad owned Tower Drugs inside Sacramento’s Tower theater.

To make money, Solomon would sell used records from the jukebox; when that worked too well, he started selling new records. His dad didn’t want anything to do with this nonsense so he sold his son the business and some extra space. There was nothing else to do in Sacramento so teenagers flocked there in droves.

Solomon thought of his Tower Records employees as family, and this sentiment is reflected in the multitude of talking heads that populate “All Things Must Pass.” People like Steve Gorman, Mark Viducich and the delightfully salty Heidi Cotler talk about their years working at the store, from starting as clerks to ending up in upper management. Every bigwig started out on the sales floor, an approach Solomon calls “the Tom Sawyer method of management.”

“I always got someone else to paint the fence,” he says. “Everything we ever did was based on ideas from people in the stores.” Almost every decision has a seat-of-one’s-pants feeling, fueled by a massive amount of good luck.

The movie gives off an impression that working at Tower was a non-stop party “so long as you did the work.” There wasn’t a dress code; former employee/current superstar Dave Grohl mentions how he loved being able to keep his hair long. This sort of freedom breeds ideas and rapid growth, and by 1968, Tower Records was ready to take over San Francisco.

Once they were installed there and in Los Angeles, celebrities began coming out to visit the store looking for other artists’ records while gauging how their own stuff was doing. Elton John shows up to talk about his weekly ritual of pawing through albums at the Los Angeles Tower; “I spent more money in Tower Records than any human being,” he says. Later, he expresses genuine heartbreak over the store’s demise.

Tower expands into Japan and later into the world-famous NYC Village location; I give a little cheer whenever old New York (my New York) gets name-checked on screen and this happens here when we see just how decrepit West 4th and Broadway were when Solomon bought property there for what would become one of Tower’s most successful locations: The store revitalized a pretty well-known part of town and brought with it a whole lot of local celebrities, college students and music fans into its multi-storied interior.

While “All Things Must Pass” unflinchingly details the company’s downfall (due in part to record company greed, bad financial decisions and the rise of Napster), there’s a world-weary lessons-learned stoicism that feels so intimately personal that it makes the happiest scenes in the stores stick with us most memorably.

“Everybody in a record store is your friend for 20 minutes,” says Bruce Springsteen, whose early days were spent at California-based Tower Records locations. “It’s a place where your dreams [as an artist] meet the listeners.”

This is how I felt watching “All Things Must Pass.” I imagine millennials will hold up digital music players and roll their eyes at us old people crying in the audience; “All Things Must Pass” will play as an entertaining history lesson for them. But any movie that starts and ends with the sound of a phonograph needle hitting vinyl knows exactly who its audience is, and for those people, “All Things Must Pass” is an absolute delight.

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