Tower Records is closing at last. The end comes in about two weeks. Bargain hunters and music freaks are poring over ever-dwindling shelves of stock, back stock and understock -- the warehouses disgorged. CDs, DVDs and even some of those things called records are flying off the shelves, making a lot of people very happy and very sad at the same time.
What started as a 10% liquidation sale is now a 50%-off free-for-all. That’s not to say that it’s like Filene’s Basement or one of those other ladies-only hair-pulling death matches over undergarments or like Wal-Mart in Wilmette on the day after Thanksgiving. It’s more like a wake with a really good buffet. A nice cross-section of Nashville is browsing the shelves on West End Avenue, just as they have since 1988. The difference this time – there are bargains.
I don’t mean to be smug at the funeral of a great American institution. I’m just observing that Tower presented an interesting trade-off: premium prices in exchange for depth of content and an experience that you couldn’t have at most record stores and that you sincerely can’t replicate in net space. It was in every way worth it, and I’ll miss the place. A visit was always a lark. Never did I go with a limited agenda. I might have been picking up that copy of an opera DVD I’d meant to get for my dad, but I wasn’t going to leave without browsing through the bluegrass and the jazz sections. I rarely got out of there on time and under budget.
Tower Records nationally pioneered the in-store live show, and here in Nashville, during my time here, Bob Goldstone, whose title I believe was community relations manager, put on fantastic mini-concerts with the likes of Jerry Douglas, Cyndi Lauper, Buddy & Julie Miller, and a huge swath of Nashville and national acts. I fondly recall a show by the Bad Livers, where cockeyed genius Danny Barnes remarked to the crowd that he was grateful to be in the Tower West End because it finally had the Erik Satie record he’d been looking for.
That’s the kind of store it was. Complete. It was hard to stump them. Bob Goldstone, who’s been a friend of mine for a long time, told me this week that Russ Solomon’s goal when he founded Tower in 1960 was to stock, as near as possible, every in-print record by every significant musician, from L.A. to Laos. They were, Bob said, always the musicians’ best friend and ardent champion. That’s what it always felt like to me. Tower West End’s local section was fantastic, and they were fantastically local, even as they were part of a national company.
I’m at work on a story about the closure for WPLN. Damn assignment has already cost me $160 trying to get a first-hand understanding of what it feels like to ransack a dying music store. Watch for the piece later this week.
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