Tower Records Files for Bankruptcy

I've been through 4 different Tower locations during this sale.

I'm confident that they will have tons of this particular CD left at the end. It may be all that is left, actually.

Sly and the Family Stone - Back on the Right Track
Phyllis Hyman - The Essence of Phyllis Hyman
Leonard Cohen - Death of a Ladies Man
Rob Base & DJ E.Z. Rock - It Takes Two
Jack Dangers - Loudness Clarifies
Superlongevity Four
Isolée - Western Store
Pharoah Sanders - Karma
Yello - Solid Pleasure
Mouse on Mars - Varcharz
Chick Corea/Return to Forever - No Mystery
John Coltrane - Live at the Village Vanguard Again!
The Ornette Coleman Trio - At the Golden Circle Stockholm

Hehe, I snagged this as well (V. 2)

Not much left in classical music but rude people with backpacks.

Mark my words, it will be the deluxe boxed edition of the new RHCP cd.

Harry Taussig - Fate is Only Once
Henry Flynt - Raga Electric (they had a few other Flynt titles including both volumes of Hillbilly Music)
Michael Hurley - Blueberry Wine (have needed this since selling my "First Blues" on the Bay)
Jerry Yester and Judy Henske - Farewell Aldebaran

also from Blues I picked up

Otis Rush - All Your Love I Miss Loving: Live at Wise Fools Pub

(all 40% off)

Paul Westerberg - Open Season (soundtrack)
Johnny Cash -- Personal File
The Paul Butterfield Blues Band -- s/t
Billy Joe Shaver -- Restless Wind (1973-1987)
The Mountain Goats -- Get Lonely
Dead Kennedys -- Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (re-issue)
Charlie Patton -- Primeval Blues, Rags, and Gospel Songs
Destroyer's Rubies
The DFA Remixes Chapter One
Billy Joe Shaver -- Billy and the Kid
The Firesign Theatre -- Shoes for Industry!
June Carter Cash -- The Best of June Carter Cash
Willie Nelson -- The Complete Atlantic Sessions
Mississippi Fred McDowell -- I Do Not Play No Rock 'n' Roll (Complete Session Recordings)
The Golding Institute -- Final Relaxation
The Undertones -- True Confessions (Filed under: Blues)
Steve Martin -- The Steve Martin Brothers

Blues and Country sections >>>>>> everything else

also both patty waters cd's, which i JUUUUUST couldnt pull the trigger on.

-- hstencil (hstenc!...), November 21st, 2006. (hstencil)

yeah youve been big-uppin that - ill let you know what i think

-- Smegma Pi (plsmit...), November 22nd, 2006 3:06 AM. (plsmith) (later)

d'oh, YOU LOSE.

BTW THIS EM-BRO-YO CD IS SWEET

That's why I was super-psyched to find stuff by Taussig, Flynt, Henske/Yester, etc. And all without having to set foot on the north side thank god.

my vote for last record standing is the Bronson Arroyo CD...

Toots & the Maytals Funky Kingston/In The Dark
Downbeat The Ruler: Studio One Instrumentals
Dream Babes 5: Folk, etc
Thomas Mapfumo Spirits To Bite Our Ears: THe Singles Collection
Funkadelic Let's Take It To The Stage

$45 including tax and all.

This was posted on former industry bizzer Bob Lefsetz's e-mail thing:

A related recent circumstance involved many now former Tower Records employees.

Several hoarded the prime CDs and hid them in stores nationwide.

During the liquidation the best CDs were likely above anyone shopping the stores
hidden in the ceiling panels. Employees stayed on past Tower's handing over to
the liquidation companies at lower wages until the store closed, and then bought
that product at over 90% off on closing day. Odds are they all ended up on Ebay,
Amazon, or in used bins where those employees made a decent profit...

Wouldn't be in the least surprised.

wouldn't be in the least offended by this either.

makes me wanna sneak into the still-vacant Harvard Square location to see if any of those stashes remain...

wouldn't be in the least offended by this either.

Not in the least!

In memory of the one year anniversary of the final sales date. Or something like that.

Tower Records in Shibuya, Tokyo (and Shinjuku) still standing tall!

Tower sold their rights to the name and business in Japan years ago. It's not the 'same' Tower.

That would be why then. They don't seem to have deviated much from the original Tower template over here. Can't say I buy much from them but they can make for a nice browsing environment when I've had my fill of the (excellent) Disc Union shops.

WHY CAN'T THEY BE GOING OUT OF BUSINESS FOREVER?!?!

Never forget. (Someone good with photoshop please post crying bald eagle with Tower Records graphics.)

When did the Tower store at Piccadilly close? It was replaced by Virgin when I was there in October 2000.

http://towerrecordsproject.org/

Create kick-off event to announce the project, website, and fundraising efforts.

Subsequent year plans look ambitious

As a former Tower employee who stayed on until the very end, can I say that that "project" is a little nauseating?

The whole philosophy of the company in at least the last ten years of its existence was to cater towards the serious music fan, but they paid their employees minimum wage (or as close to it as they could get away with). So that's how you ended up with the scenario of people behind the counter that hated their jobs and knew very little about the products they were selling. They weren't paid to be the manifesto of the "No Music, No Life / Know Music, Know Life" philosophy. They were paid to be bodies that took your money.

Going back through this thread and reading through (yes, the whole thing) the events as they unfolded was bittersweet. When the second bankruptcy was announced in the Summer of 2006, we were all told that there was nothing to worry about, the company would not be sold to a liquidator.

All of the distributors finally cut Tower's credit line in June. For years (at least the entire time I was there from summer 2004 onwards), the company's philosophy was to order a massive amount of catalogue releases, price them for cheap and hope to turn a bit of profit. In the meantime, when the next month rolled around, every store would take all of its unsold catalogue stuff from the previous month's sale and send it back to the distributors for credit. As you can imagine, this got extremely out of hand. As an example, in the store where I worked, we were basically changing out one-third to one-half of the store's entire stock every month. Little money was made or lost. It was basically breaking even because it was a plan that was seemingly designed to do that, and nothing else.

As far as employees hoarding the good stuff. . . yeah, it happened. A lot. Unauthorized extra discounts, clerks ringing up their buddies for one CD and then letting them take ten, hiding secret stashes in unknown portions of the store to buy on the last day at 95% off or whatever. . . yes, all of that. I never stole or assisted anyone in stealing — I did stash stuff, but I technically paid for it. There was no extra benefit for me sticking around until the end, so that was my parting gift to myself.

But yeah, this new "Tower Project". . . forgive me if I roll my eyes aggressively at that whole idea. It stopped being that "No Music, No Life / Know Music, Know Life" kind of store long before they were in any sort of financial trouble.

I miss the free monthly Pulse magazine they published every month (until their last few years, which is part of why I went there less frequently thereafter). They really should have had tiered pricing, discounting the big hits and catalog items to compete with the discounters that used them as loss leaders. I went to Tower only for obscure stuff that Best Buy or the strip-mall record store didn't sell.

I have some fairly good memories of making a day out of The Strand, Tower Records on Broadway and Other Music. At the same time, I can't say I have intense nostalgia for Tower. It was probably the best of the chains, by far. It had a lot of listening stations and a good selection. But the employees usually didn't know much and the store didn't have the greatest vibe -- very institutional and impersonal. I miss the days of spending hours in record shops in general, and Tower was a place I often did that, so to that extent I miss it, but I don't really care about this project tbh.

I always liked HMV more

Not sure if this was posted on another thread--amazing footage of Tower Records from 1971.

http://archive.org/details/casacsh_000018

I was never in there. But it looks to be pretty close to how I remember Sam the Record Man from the '70s.

There's a certain sameness to the testimonials in All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records, but it was actually better than I expected, mostly because of Russ Solomon. Glad I got a chance to work in a downtown record store for a couple of years just as vinyl was beginning to disappear ('86-88). For the decade before that, I spent half my waking hours in record stores; like Keaton in Sherlock Jr., I wanted to climb into the old footage of the store in the '70s and spend a few years browsing those $1.77 and $2.77 bins. I wish there had been even more time spent on the '70s--the film kind of blurs the years between the advent of the LP and the launch of MTV--but very good on the forces that brought everything to a close. Solomon visiting one of the still-thriving Japanese stores (with George Harrison's title song playing overtop) made for a nice ending.