For S.F. rockers, Tower Records was where it was all happening -- now the party's over

Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Record promotion men Jeff Trager and Bill Perasso used to sit around drinking with pal Russ Solomon at their favorite hangout, the cocktail lounge at Villa Roma at the busy intersection of Columbus and Bay streets. Solomon, who owned record stores in Sacramento, would point to the supermarket across the street. "One day I'm going to open a store there," he told them.

Nursing a hangover at a nearby drive-in one morning, Solomon saw a "For Rent" sign on the lot, walked across the street to a pay phone and made a deal to lease the property. He had a cousin who was a good carpenter, and he put him to work.

"We painted the place, hung some lights and filled it up with records," Solomon says. "It was something else."

He opened the San Francisco Tower Records in April 1968. The sign outside boasted "Largest Record Store in the Known World -- Open Nine to Midnight 365 Days a Year."

It was a good time to enter the retail record business in San Francisco. The Beatles were at the top of the charts. Bill Graham was running concerts every weekend at the Fillmore featuring a never-ending procession of exciting new rock bands -- Fleetwood Mac, Traffic, Ten Years After, the Chambers Brothers. The San Francisco rock scene was flourishing with groups emerging almost daily, such as Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana and It's a Beautiful Day. Over in North Beach, disc jockey Tom Donahue was inventing FM rock radio on KSAN and playing all the great new records by these bands and more.

At the opening party, revelers spilled out the door, plastic drop cloths protected the record racks and the long-forgotten rock band West, which had just released an album on Epic Records, performed.

"The drummer dosed me with something," says Stan Goman, who was working in the Sacramento operation at the time, but would serve for 10 years as the San Francisco store manager, beginning in 1972. "Driving back to Sacramento that night was a trippy drive. What a store."

Solomon would eventually open more than 75 other stores with the soon familiar red and yellow signs. The Greenwich Village store spanned three blocks and was touted as the largest record store in the country. The London store was on Piccadilly Circus. The Sunset Strip store was famed for star sightings; it used to open early in the morning to accommodate Elton John while he abused his charge account. Now the international chain Solomon built is defunct.

Sacramento always remained the corporate headquarters and the heart of the chain. That was where, in 1952, Solomon had begun stocking the record department of his father's shop, Tower Drugs, a landmark retail location with a tower on the building. But the Columbus and Bay store was where the party always was.

"You couldn't have opened a record store at a better time," Solomon says. "You had the Summer of Love, the Fillmore-Avalon action, the Haight-Ashbury just starting to explode. Everybody came into San Francisco, and they were just mad about music. It was a mysterious, wonderful miracle."

"It was a new style," says Dave Haynes, who managed the store for a couple of years in the '60s. "The timing came together. All of a sudden the store showed up and fed all that. I don't know whether it was a stroke of luck or genius."

"He wanted to fill all the racks up and have turnstiles like a supermarket," says Rudy Danzinger, who went to work for Solomon in Sacramento in 1958 for a princely $70 a week. "He had this vision."

Of course, the party is now officially over. Tower was turned over to liquidators just weeks ago. Truth told, the store was never the same after CDs. But neither was the record business. When the store sold those black vinyl discs in 12-inch cardboard sleeves -- some of which opened up on a gatefold -- for around 5 bucks, there was magic in the place. Tower used to have a sign outside the store during the holidays that read "Thousands of Gifts for Under $10."

When the product changed to a small shiny wafer in a crummy plastic box that cost 20 bucks, that was the tectonic shift that led to the ugly, prolonged collapse of a chain store that people at one time actually loved.

"Tower was where music nuts, not a socially adept breed, had to face each other in the flesh," wrote Los Angeles Times pop music critic Ann Powers, who worked as a clerk during her college years at the Columbus and Bay store.

Before Tower Records opened, all record stores were little mom-and-pop shops with limited inventory that kept business hours and charged list price. Tower sold records cheap, all day and night, and stocked everything. "We liked to make sure we had every single record in stock," says Tower's Goman, who has run a printing shop in Sacramento since he lost his job in the Tower corporate hierarchy four years ago. "If you wanted the Amazon tree frog noises, we had it."

"On Friday nights, the place was like an event," says record promotion man Dave Sholin, who back in the '70s ran the city's ruling Top 40 station, KFRC. "Just going in and seeing everybody in the place, the aisles jammed, all the new releases -- it would be hard to describe to someone who wasn't there."

Clerks like Powers were the rule, not the exception. They knew music and they worked at Tower because they liked it. They also recognized musicians and treated them to employee discounts. Michael Carabello, the original conga drummer with Santana, remembers going down to Columbus and Bay with his band's guitarist, Carlos Santana, and raiding the jazz section for Gabor Szabo albums, which miraculously cost nothing when they went to the cash register. That Santana went on to record Szabo's "Gypsy Queen" on the band's breakthrough album, "Abraxas," makes Tower a fairly direct tributary into the cultural mainstream.

It was a place that could be packed for in-store appearances by Joan Jett or Luciano Pavarotti. The opera in-stores were an annual event, in fact, and all the big names in the field made appearances. Tower always had the best selection of classical records at the lowest prices, too. Former manager Haynes remembers knocking down a wall in the store's warehouse to build the first opera room, laying down the tiles after the store closed at midnight. Inventories were also all-night affairs and such a party that employees vied for the assignment.

The store was decorated on the outside by giant airbrushed paintings of album covers of new releases, clearly visible to people driving past the busy intersection. Tower did not charge for those advertisements -- Solomon likes to refer to himself as an "aging hippie" and this is just one of his store's unconventional, non-corporate approaches to marketing -- but let the record labels and the airbrush artists work out the cost between them. It was a custom that started when the local Warner Bros. promo man persuaded the Columbus and Bay store management to allow him to paint over the store's large white wall as an advertisement for the new album by the Grateful Dead. The paintings soon became a trademark of Tower stores everywhere.

Another Tower trademark, the stacks of current hit releases piled on the floor in the front of the store, happened by accident. Solomon almost opened an earlier San Francisco store in 1960. He had a location at Mission and Van Ness streets, but the banks pulled the loans at the last minute. He shipped the store's inventory to the Sacramento store but didn't have the shelf space, so he dumped the lot on the floor and there they sold.

Tower was more than a record store; it was a cultural hub. Tower was one of the main outlets for concert tickets in the days before computerized ticketing, and fans would line up for blocks outside the store when tickets for popular concerts went on sale. The chain also produced a giveaway tabloid called Pulse, full of record reviews, interviews and, of course, record company advertising. Tower was a market leader in innovations, such as in-store video plays or listening posts, which must have reminded Solomon of the old listening booths he used to maintain in his father's store.

Journey manager Herbie Herbert had an office next door to the Columbus and Bay store. "Studying Tower Records, going there and observing how people browsed really taught me a lot about how to proceed with Journey," Herbert says. "Tower really taught me that the most effective means of promotion was actually point-of-purchase advertising. You had a captive target demographic. I went crazy spending money on point-of-purchase materials. It was very, very, very effective. It wasn't long after that success was observed."

Although the Tower chain is on its way out, the 81-year-old patriarch of the stores still keeps his office in the building and goes to work in Sacramento every day planning to open more record stores, a chain he wants to call Resurrection Records. "If I can get the money and the real estate," he says. "It's the only thing I know how to do."

Solomon is philosophical about the sealed fate of Tower. But he's not ready to write off the whole record business.

"Everybody in the world -- except a few people in the record business -- believe that the physical business is dead. How can they still sell 10 million CDs a week if the physical business is dead? There's a vast amount of people. The only issue is the record industry isn't doing anything to get kids in the stores. They believe their future is in downloads, and maybe it is. But who's going to download an opera? The only place to see it properly is a record store."

Solomon obviously had a vision of record retailing that would sweep the globe. His first few stores in Sacramento were the laboratory experiments; San Francisco at Columbus and Bay was the big city. Key to his success was his own love of music. He could be seen on the side of the stage two weekends ago at the B.R. Cohn Winery benefit in Sonoma snapping photographs. "He was always in it for the music," Haynes says.

"That's what I liked about working with him," Trager says. "He talked music."

"I was the only promo man who ever came up to Sacramento and worked the store. I came and said, 'These are my new releases,' " Trager says. "If Russ liked something, he'd go all out for it. He'd play it in the stores. He'd tell his people to play it in the stores. He'd try to break acts."

He also remembered friends. When Trager came out of rehab -- years after he, Perasso and Solomon used to look at the future site of San Francisco's first Tower Records over the rim of a cocktail glass -- he had to start working his way up in the business all over again. He put together a partnership to promote alternative rock on independent labels and was getting airplay on college radio stations, not exactly the big-money wheelhouse of the record biz.

Solomon gave Trager an end rack in all the stores to display whatever he wanted. "Do you know what record companies would pay for that? There were guys coming up to me saying, 'How did you get that? We spend millions.' "

sad sad sad. in the crevis's of all the overpriced cd's, there were always gems to be found, and when they had sales, they were always better then Virgin Mega and such.

im gonna hit the Village one this weekend.

even just a few years ago, i remember being in that 4th & broadway tower in nyc on a friday night and it was packed at 11pm. and people had shopping baskets filled with CDs. those were good times.

I'll probably scavenge the carcass of two local Towers in Campbell and Mountain View. Maybe that Thievery Corp. album of re-mixes will be reasonable. $18.99... Kiss my ass. Seeing how we've lost three major record stores in a twenty mile radius here on the peninsula, now would be a good time for someone to swoop in and open a nice independent minded shop. Best Buy and Circuit City just aren't cutting it and I hate that I'm now reduced to mail ordering stuff from Parasol. I love Amoeba, but I hate traveling that far.


Oh, thanks for the article. This baby boomer nostalgia is getting tiresome, however. Things were so much better in the sixties. STFU. I think I'm gonna cancel my subscription to Newsweek as well if they keep up these boomer fluff pieces. Enough, already.

bastard! some people just don't know what they have!!!!!

I'll miss it. I support the indie stores here, but they aren't fun to shop at.

I go once every two months and spend about $300 each time (so I always get the free t-shirt!). I know how lucky I am to be a BART train away from Amoeba.

Exactly. I easily spend about 2 hours in there whenever I go.

I usually grab several mags and sit down on one of the couches in there and read up on new stuff. Then you gotta hit the used section to see if there's anything there. Then I usually hit the listening stations which is then followed by the Vinyl section.

I'm going to miss it.

i ended up at the store in the village last night, and walked out with 4 records i wasn't planning on. but i got decent deals, averaged about 12 bucks a record with tax.

When I was in high school (Class of '95), Tower was the shit. Wasn't as overpriced as it was several years later, plus it had a whole video section for purchase or rental. One whole wall was 99 cent rentals, with some bizarre as shit like 2nd rate Faces of Death showcases or Meet the Feebles. Cheaper than Blockbuster and all sorts of fun oddball shit you couldn't find at the normal stores.

They also had a big periodicals section on every topic imaginable. That's where I first picked up The Onion. "Alzheimers Patients Demand Cure for Pancakes" right there on the rack. SOLD.

I quit going until probably 2003, when they started running some pretty crazy sales that would fill out the back catalog of artists like Springsteen or Neil Young pretty quickly and affordably.

I still have a decent local shop in town, but it's a pisser to get in and out of. I had a good run at Tower, and I'll miss it.

Same case with me. Tower wasn't the shit with others, but my friend and I made many trips there to browse and waste time. And their video rental sections were always way better than what you'd find at a fuckin Blockbuster. Then, when I was in college I used to head over to Sacramento and go to those original Towers. They also had an outlet across the street where I picked up some good deals. I haven't bought a cd from Tower in probably 10 years (except for last weekend), but I'm still kinda bummed about them closing.

Ah, redundancy.

Good article. Thanks.