Our Town downtown
December 4, 2006
About a week and a half ago there didn’t seem to be anything worth scavenging at the Tower Records liquidation sale in the East Village.
In early October, Tower, which went bankrupt due to a combination of mismanagement and rising real estate prices, auctioned off most of its assets for $135 million. Tower Records should be closing their doors for good just before Christmas.
I walked in twice during the sale, to look for a handful of titles by artists my Yahoo! Music station turned me on to this year, and some others I liked long before that. Most of “When It Falls” by Zero 7; “Beautiful Brother: the Essential Curtis Mayfield,” especially “Little Child Runnin’ Wild” (track 8); and “Brushfire Fairytales,” Jack Johnson’s first album, especially “Inaudible Memories” (track 1) and “Fortunate Fool” (track 7).
These CDs weren’t a list of things I had to buy. But they were resting on my mental dashboard and they popped into my consciousness once I saw the crates and the mark down signs.
But I couldn’t find those or the Barrington Levy album with the original version of “Under Me Sensi” on it. Yahoo! kept playing some bad remix of it instead.
There was little elbowroom on those first two visits, but on Thursday in the late afternoon, the crowd at Broadway and East Fourth Street was slimmer, and so were the pickins’. Up in the makeshift used-CD section, which was in a corner room on the top floor, there were 26 copies of “MET.A.MOR.PHIC.” by someone named Dalvin DeGrate; 33 copies of “Ride” by Boney James; and 56 copies of “Music From And Inspired By Light It Up The Movie” (starring Usher).
The signs in the street-level windows explained why bargain hunters swarmed in the earlier days of the sale. “Every CD is now 1/2 off” was one. “70% off all rap and singles” was another. Perhaps the most succinct was this one: “Everything must go.”
Even the fixtures were for sale. There was a section sign lying behind an aisle of jazz CDs, on the floor: “Americana and Roots.” There were stools and office chairs near the revolving doors. One cashier even said that a woman wanted Tower shopping bags so she could sell them on eBay.
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But back upstairs,a salesperson in the classical department seemed to quietly insist that the essence of the store was still in tact and that the deforestation going on around him wasn’t real. “Can I get the cart out of your way?” he gently asked a young customer who declined, but asked for help locating a CD.
The salesperson was sitting on a chair, facing the crates. He had long hair, a long whitish beard, glasses, a t-shirt with suspenders over it, a fanny pack around his belly and clogs on his feet. There was a hole in the back of one of his sweat socks.
Billboard’s Ed Christman, who covered the Tower closing, said in a phone interview that the company “probably had one of the most unique corporate cultures in the business world…you could have blue hair or orange hair and [you’d] still be taken as someone who’s credible, who still has a chance for advancement in the company.”
When the closing was announced, there were about 60 employees, and before cuts in the 90s, when the store was at the height of its success, there were over 200, said Jim Kaminski, a manager who’s been at the store for almost ten years, and was the pop rock buyer for almost seven.
According to Kaminski, departing members of Tower’s 2,700-person workforce, nationwide, are in high demand in the music industry, and many have already secured jobs.
Before Tower Records began to decline, due less to industry-wide trends than internal tone deafness, this specific location was a neighborhood institution.
It was known as a place where customers could get just about any recording they wanted, and quickly, since Tower managers didn’t have to go through the chains of command prevalent at other music retailers. It was known as a place where the staff was just as obsessed with music as many of the customers. “We were not people who said ‘okay we’re gonna go work in a retail store. What should we sell, CDs or taco sauce?’…We love music and that’s why we’re here” Kaminski said.
It was known as a place where the selection was in touch with local tastes because store managers made choices based on the customers’ input rather than receiving their products from higher ups in an offsite, corporate headquarters somewhere far from the community.
“The store manager was definitely the master of his own universe,” said Kaminski, until outside corporate management with no background in music, was forced on the company when it was struggling.
The store was also known as a place where artists came to showcase their latest music. The long list of artists who played and often previewed their music in this Tower location goes back three decades, and reads like a musical thermometer. In the 80s it was Hall & Oates, Prince, Ray Davies, Public Enemy, and New Edition, Kaminski said. In the 90s, it was Jeff Buckley, and Nirvana – before “Nevermind” came out.
Madonna performed here for just 275 people, which she did, he said, for the “street cred” that was part and parcel of playing at the store.
When artists weren’t playing at Tower, they were shopping there because of the knowledgeable staff. “Whether it was Cyndi Lauper looking for old soul records or Nick Valensi from The Strokes looking for post-punk albums, or Lou Reed looking for kung fu movies, there was always somebody here that could help even the most cultured connoisseur find something” Kaminski said.
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Russ Solomon, who founded Tower Records in Sacramento, inside his father’s pharmacy in 1960, opened the East Village location in 1983, swayed by real estate developer David Walentas, and music industry friends.
The Fourth and Broadway location “really changed the face of retail” in the East Village, Ed Christman said. He remembers what the neighborhood was like before the store, which built its reputation on catalog (having all of an artist’s records), rather than hits, came to town. “There was all warehouses and factories, and flophouses. I mean it was really like the Bowery…and at nighttime it was deserted.”
“It was known as a place to come and score heroin…If you listen to the…Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers songs and the Ramones and things like that—this area was…not a desirable area” Kaminski said.
But once the store opened, it attracted a steady stream of customers to the neighborhood, and other retailers.
“That was the store where Russ Solomon showed that he can make real estate,” and it started even before NYU became active in the local real estate market, though NYU “takes credit for reviving the neighborhood” Christman said.
In a phone interview, Russ Solomon spoke about the store’s “overnight” success. And after Tower arrived, he began seeing rents go up.
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Though in recent years Tower was trailing big box retailers like Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Circuit City, who could afford to sell music for less, Ed Christman said that a bigger nail in Tower’s coffin was its decision to create new overseas shops that were mostly money losers, instead of modernizing its existing stores.
But while all these were factors, it seems safe to assume that had Russ Solomon been allowed to retain real control of the company (he lost control to the bank and then to bondholders during the earlier stages of restructuring), Tower could have survived.
In a phone interview, Stuart Jamieson, a managing director at Radius Equity Partners, which tried to save the company, said that another huge mistake the new management made was to sell off properties to stay afloat. “You need to fix your problem. Don’t just burn through your assets.”
And while Tower’s demise was due mostly to company-specific problems, its sales were affected by industry trends, as well, perhaps the most obvious being the high price of CDs.
Online retailers like Amazon, and the advent of CD-burning, also took away a sizeable chunk of the catalog business, which Tower depended on.
Christman said that industry-wide, “the main thing [hurting retailers] is CD-burning” from person to person. Downloading, legal and illegal, is a smaller factor, he said.
But the huge response Solomon said Tower got from New Yorkers from the beginning was youth-driven.
Christman, Solomon and Kaminski all painted a picture of an industry that’s losing that base of young music lovers.
They cited a move away from a model in which artist development and catalog were emphasized to create lasting customers drawn in by a single or two, to a reliance on quick fix hit singles on albums that are overpriced, here today and gone tomorrow.
Kaminski, who noticed a drop in young customers between 2000 and 2003, often tells the story of how he got into Led Zeppelin as a kid to illustrate the way the record industry is losing the kids it counts on. A big fan of Def Leppard in the early 80s, he read an article that quoted the guitarist Steve Clark as saying that, “growing up I loved Led Zeppelin.”
“‘What’s Led Zeppelin about?’ asks a young, ten-year-old kid. And he goes to his local record store, sees ‘Houses of the Holy’ for $3.99. So I buy it. A year later, I’ve got all nine Led Zeppelin albums.”
Fast forward to 2004: “A younger kid in the suburbs is listening to The White Stripes, and Jack White says ‘I was always a big fan of Led Zeppelin.’ Well he comes into a store, he sees ‘Houses of the Holy’ for $18.99. He doesn’t buy it. He goes and downloads it illegally, and maybe in a year he’ll have downloaded all the music illegally. And he’s into the band, and is a fan, but Atlantic has not sold another Led Zeppelin catalog.”
The industry is “sick” and is having a lot of trouble deciding whether the future musical product will be digital or physical, Solomon said. “And they’ve mortgaged their own future by their lack of paying attention to the development of new customers, meaning kids.”
Rachel Katz came out empty-handed on Thursday. Even at 50 percent off, she didn’t think the sale was a great deal. And though she doesn’t have any real attachment to this particular Tower, she can appreciate the sadness many feel about its closing. “I guess it’s also my fault cause I buy music online. But I feel CDs are overpriced.”
The model has shifted for artists too, whether they know it or not. Now, when musicians ask Kaminski what they can do to make it, he tells them to stop looking for a record deal and hit the road. Dave Matthews, who focused on touring and producing his own CDs, is a prime example, he said. Other recent bands like The Strokes and the White Stripes did the same thing. “The record industry has not broken them. They’ve chased them.”
Russ Solomon just registered a new corporation and hopes that if he can get the money together somehow, he can open a store early next year in Sacramento.
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Sitting in the newly barren, underground warehouse at Tower, Jim Kaminski told me one of the “funniest things” he ever saw at Tower. Lou Reed was shopping and a woman came up to him. “She was obviously from out of town.” She told him how much she loved him, and how much his music meant to her, and what a great surprise it was to actually see him in the flesh. “Lou Reed, probably the king of New York rock … put his hand over her mouth and said ‘honey, this is New York. We don’t do that here.’
And that pretty much described the culture of this store.”
The Tower Records Kaminski and Solomon described was a major chain with an independent spirit. Kaminski hopes that with Tower gone, its customers will support independent music shops rather than the big boxes, and thinks that stores that cater to a niche market have the best chances of success.
When I asked him whether a myth I heard about Tower employees snarling at customers who made less than hip requests was true, he smiled, but said he had no comment. I wondered what he would say about the titles I was looking for. It’d probably be best not to mention the Jack Johnson, I figured.
We walked back upstairs and he suggested I take advantage of the 50 percent discount on CDs.
“All the good stuff is gone,” I said.
“There are some nuggets.”
On my first two visits the sections seemed well organized, so I looked for everything in exact alphabetical order. But this time around, encouraged by what he had just told me, I looked for albums that may have been misfiled by their second or third letters. And after just a short amount of digging, there he was—a soaked Jack Johnson on the cover of “Brushfire Fairytales” staring me in the face from under the hood of a raincoat.
Music aside, the great allure of records may be the thrill of the hunt.
-- Matt Elzweig
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