Tower Records Committed Suicide
from the October issue of Rock & Rap Confidential
www.rockrap.com
The calamity caused by the liquidation of Tower Records
doesn't just consist of the 2700 workers fired and the
dozens of small label releases that will lose their
most important national outlet. It isn't just that
Tower will certainly take down with it some indie
labels and distributors to whom it owed a fortune. It
certainly isn't just the eight-figure losses each of
the major labels will absorb, probably resulting in
more firings at those that aren't already pared to the
bone.
You're going to feel the demise of Tower too, even if
there isn't a Tower anywhere near you. Tower died not
because of illegal downloading or any other record biz
boogeyman. What killed the chain, in the final
analysis, is the breakneck expansion and consolidation
of the past 20 years. Although Tower didn't participate
in the merger and acquisition of other chains which
have led to so many other bankruptcies, it did attempt
to spread tentacles coast to coast and continent to
continent.
Tower CEO Russ Solomon is revered in the music
industry. But why? In the name of profit, Solomon made
Tower one of the chains that most avidly championed
Tipper stickers and record label lyric screening
committees. Combined with the equally crazy campaign to
condemn fair use of copyrighted material to the dustbin
of history, this shrewd maneuver choked the most
exciting record-making climate since the dawn of
rock'n'roll. Then he expanded his California business
all the way to New York and Tokyo, without managing to
figure out how to do anything but lose money.
Now, consider what you'll do for an alternative.
Probably, if you're a big music fan, you'll do more
ordering from the Internet--meaning a wait of a day to
a week before you can hear the music you've paid for.
What you won't be doing is going to your town's record
store with the knowledgeable staff . That store doesn't
exist any more. Most likely, price competition from the
chains drove it out of existence. So what we get out of
the process is a temporary set of lowball prices,
vastly fewer musical options, and a long-term lack of
convenience and absence of expertise.
This phenomena operates throughout our society. It's
the reason airlines and oil companies, insurers and
drug corporations, even electricity providers, jack up
prices and strip down their services. Most of the time,
the only people who come out smiling are the
financiers, who peel off a part of every dollar in
order to hire sometimes great artists to play at their
birthday parties.
Tower Records was a poster child for "hip capitalism,"
a fig leaf term meant to cover a system which
justifies itself by providing "competition" that leads
to "innovation"--until the reckoning comes and the
cartel or monopoly begins to take shape, driving out
all not on the inside. The idea that this has made our
society wealthy, efficient and convenient is lunacy, as
Tower's demise confirms.
Tower Records was a suicide. The choice we face is
whether we'd like our entire society to do the same or
whether we will begin working to change it
fundamentally.
R.I.P. Tower Records
By coincidence, this article was in today's New York Times:
CITY LORE
BOOKSTORES THAT LIVE ONLY IN THE MIND
By Dan Kois
MODERN Manhattan is hardly a book desert. The borough is dotted with thriving independent bookstores, from Labyrinth Books near Columbia University to the St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village. Then there are the superstores. “I’m crazy about Barnes & Noble, actually,” said the writer Joan Didion. “Superstores have deeper selection in backlist books, naturally, because they have the space.”
But when Coliseum Books announced two weeks ago that it would close by year’s end, the news revived for many New Yorkers sharply etched memories of hours browsing at bookstores long gone. Here are some stores that live only in the mind.
EIGHTH STREET BOOKSHOP
1947-1979
The center of Greenwich Village’s feverish literary culture in the 1950’s and 60’s, the Eighth Street Bookshop was jammed — “everything from the I Ching to comic books,” recalled Sean Wilentz, the Princeton historian, whose father, Eli, was one of the owners. “My father always used to say, ‘If you can hold it together with staples, we’ll sell it.’ ”
Eli Wilentz hired down-on-their-luck poets as clerks, lent them money, kept them company, even held their mail. From a customer’s perspective, said Harold Bloom, the author and Yale professor, “it was a marvelous bookstore.”
“When that shop closed,” he said, “the block became a horror of endless shoe stores — the worst block in the Village.”
NEW YORKER BOOKSHOP
1964-1982
Ramshackle and beloved, the New Yorker did business at 89th Street, just west of Broadway and around the corner from the equally beloved New Yorker theater. A tiny entryway led to a first-floor space jammed with magazines and neighborhood notices. Bill Zavatsky, a longtime customer who teaches English at Trinity School, a few blocks away, remembers negotiating “a rickety stair that went up to the second floor, where most of the books were.”
“They were particularly hospitable to small presses,” Mr. Zavatsky said, “and they had bins of old movie stills you could buy for a dollar, pictures of Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers.”
When the shop closed, Peter Martin, who had founded both it and the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, explained its demise by saying that he “couldn’t come up with miracles anymore.”
SCHULTE’S BOOKSTORE
1917-late 1960’s
One of the last of the great bookshops on Booksellers’ Row — the stretch of secondhand stores on Fourth Avenue just south of Union Square — Schulte’s survived labor strife, including a strike right before World War II, and prospered. “It was a huge barn of a store,” said Marvin Mondlin, co-author of “Book Row,” a history of Manhattan’s secondhand bookstores.
The store had four owners in its lifetime, among them the professedly unbookish Wilfred Pesky, who, according to Mr. Mondlin, once announced: “You don’t have to read a book to sell books. I never read a book in my life.”
BRENTANO’S 1926-1983
SCRIBNER’S 1913-1989
DOUBLEDAY BOOK SHOP 1961-1997
These three stores on Fifth Avenue in Midtown — sleek, elegant Doubleday at 46th, gorgeous, opulent Scribner’s at 48th, and the more utilitarian Brentano’s flagship across the street — served as national barometers for the publishing industry in their eras. “In the old days,” said Carl Lennertz, a vice president at HarperCollins, “publishers would ship from east to west. The Doubleday store would have new books on the floor by 4 p.m. on Friday, and you would know by 5:30 if a book was a hit or not.”
A special attraction of Doubleday was that it stayed open until 11 p.m., reminding the writer Fran Lebowitz of a time when “Midtown was for New Yorkers, not just tourists; you could go there late at night and pick up anything.”
Scribner’s had a grand staircase, a 30-foot vaulted ceiling, and Beaux-Arts detail. “It was a beautiful palace,” Mr. Lennertz said. “It was like something in The New Yorker, what a New York bookstore should be.”
Phyllis Grann, a pioneering publishing executive who is now an editor at Doubleday, also has vivid recollections of the place. “My mother used to take me to Scribner’s and would leave me with the saleslady in the children’s department,” she said. “I must have been 10 or 11. She’d just leave me sitting there and reading while she went shopping for an hour. It was quite a feeling, to be surrounded by books like that.”
Brentano’s first achieved prominence at the turn of the century, when, as the writer Luc Sante recalled, it was the only store willing to sell Stephen Crane’s first novel, “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets.” But Mr. Sante is grateful to the place for another reason: “It was very easy to shoplift from when I was a teenager.”
MACY’S BOOK DEPARTMENT
1975-1994
For decades, department stores were the nation’s leading purveyors of books, and Macy’s sold best sellers, guidebooks and, to tourists, “about 250 copies a week of any picture book of New York City,” said Mr. Lennertz of HarperCollins, who worked there as a young man. The large store held celebrity author events that smaller stores could not handle; for example, Charlton Heston read from his memoir “An Actor’s Life” in 1979.
By the 80’s, Macy’s book business could not compete with mall stores or the emerging superstores, and books couldn’t compete with clothing and electronics in the hierarchy of department store profit margins. In 1989 the book department was halved, and today it is gone.
BOOKS & COMPANY
1977-1997
Jeannette Watson’s glittering bookshop at Madison Avenue and 74th Street was beloved by New York’s literary elite. Its farewell party in May 1997 drew literary luminaries like Paul Auster, Katha Pollitt, Ms. Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Asked what bookstore she misses most, Ms. Didion answered instantly, “Oh, Books & Company, of course.”
Mr. Bloom recalled “a marvelous display called ‘the Wall.’ ” It was a broad survey of contemporary literature selected by Ms. Watson and her staff. “No clinkers in there,” Mr. Bloom said, “and no concessions to either popular taste or, shall we say, political correctness.
“It was invariably where you’d go if you’d lost a book, or left it somewhere, or lent it to a graduate student and she’d never returned it.”
Upstairs, memorable readings and parties were held. “The space fit about 52 people comfortably,” said Alice Quinn, poetry editor of The New Yorker. “So if you had 90, everyone was spilling down the stairs and the room was bursting open like a shoe and you felt so exhilarated.
“I have memories of readings like memories of great country weddings. Those readings just filled you with that wonderful balloon feeling.”
MADISON AVENUE BOOKSHOP
1973-2003
This cozy boutique near 69th Street, run by the Wall Street heir Arthur Lehman Loeb, served the carriage trade. “I remember I was shopping there one afternoon,” Ms. Lebowitz said, “and I heard Arthur tell an assistant: ‘Mrs. Auchincloss is leaving for Paris and wants something to read. Pick out two books, and bring them to her apartment.’ ”
In 1978, when her first book, “Metropolitan Life,” was published, “I signed a number of copies at the store,” Ms. Lebowitz said, “and a few weeks later Arthur called me, and said, with a combination of annoyance and desperation, ‘You must come sign more books — I’m having to sell unsigned copies!’ ”
Laughing, she added, “I guess Mrs. Auchincloss does not buy unsigned copies.”
CITY LORE
BOOKSTORES THAT LIVE ONLY IN THE MIND
By Dan Kois
MODERN Manhattan is hardly a book desert. The borough is dotted with thriving independent bookstores, from Labyrinth Books near Columbia University to the St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village. Then there are the superstores. “I’m crazy about Barnes & Noble, actually,” said the writer Joan Didion. “Superstores have deeper selection in backlist books, naturally, because they have the space.”
But when Coliseum Books announced two weeks ago that it would close by year’s end, the news revived for many New Yorkers sharply etched memories of hours browsing at bookstores long gone. Here are some stores that live only in the mind.
EIGHTH STREET BOOKSHOP
1947-1979
The center of Greenwich Village’s feverish literary culture in the 1950’s and 60’s, the Eighth Street Bookshop was jammed — “everything from the I Ching to comic books,” recalled Sean Wilentz, the Princeton historian, whose father, Eli, was one of the owners. “My father always used to say, ‘If you can hold it together with staples, we’ll sell it.’ ”
Eli Wilentz hired down-on-their-luck poets as clerks, lent them money, kept them company, even held their mail. From a customer’s perspective, said Harold Bloom, the author and Yale professor, “it was a marvelous bookstore.”
“When that shop closed,” he said, “the block became a horror of endless shoe stores — the worst block in the Village.”
NEW YORKER BOOKSHOP
1964-1982
Ramshackle and beloved, the New Yorker did business at 89th Street, just west of Broadway and around the corner from the equally beloved New Yorker theater. A tiny entryway led to a first-floor space jammed with magazines and neighborhood notices. Bill Zavatsky, a longtime customer who teaches English at Trinity School, a few blocks away, remembers negotiating “a rickety stair that went up to the second floor, where most of the books were.”
“They were particularly hospitable to small presses,” Mr. Zavatsky said, “and they had bins of old movie stills you could buy for a dollar, pictures of Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers.”
When the shop closed, Peter Martin, who had founded both it and the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, explained its demise by saying that he “couldn’t come up with miracles anymore.”
SCHULTE’S BOOKSTORE
1917-late 1960’s
One of the last of the great bookshops on Booksellers’ Row — the stretch of secondhand stores on Fourth Avenue just south of Union Square — Schulte’s survived labor strife, including a strike right before World War II, and prospered. “It was a huge barn of a store,” said Marvin Mondlin, co-author of “Book Row,” a history of Manhattan’s secondhand bookstores.
The store had four owners in its lifetime, among them the professedly unbookish Wilfred Pesky, who, according to Mr. Mondlin, once announced: “You don’t have to read a book to sell books. I never read a book in my life.”
BRENTANO’S 1926-1983
SCRIBNER’S 1913-1989
DOUBLEDAY BOOK SHOP 1961-1997
These three stores on Fifth Avenue in Midtown — sleek, elegant Doubleday at 46th, gorgeous, opulent Scribner’s at 48th, and the more utilitarian Brentano’s flagship across the street — served as national barometers for the publishing industry in their eras. “In the old days,” said Carl Lennertz, a vice president at HarperCollins, “publishers would ship from east to west. The Doubleday store would have new books on the floor by 4 p.m. on Friday, and you would know by 5:30 if a book was a hit or not.”
A special attraction of Doubleday was that it stayed open until 11 p.m., reminding the writer Fran Lebowitz of a time when “Midtown was for New Yorkers, not just tourists; you could go there late at night and pick up anything.”
Scribner’s had a grand staircase, a 30-foot vaulted ceiling, and Beaux-Arts detail. “It was a beautiful palace,” Mr. Lennertz said. “It was like something in The New Yorker, what a New York bookstore should be.”
Phyllis Grann, a pioneering publishing executive who is now an editor at Doubleday, also has vivid recollections of the place. “My mother used to take me to Scribner’s and would leave me with the saleslady in the children’s department,” she said. “I must have been 10 or 11. She’d just leave me sitting there and reading while she went shopping for an hour. It was quite a feeling, to be surrounded by books like that.”
Brentano’s first achieved prominence at the turn of the century, when, as the writer Luc Sante recalled, it was the only store willing to sell Stephen Crane’s first novel, “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets.” But Mr. Sante is grateful to the place for another reason: “It was very easy to shoplift from when I was a teenager.”
MACY’S BOOK DEPARTMENT
1975-1994
For decades, department stores were the nation’s leading purveyors of books, and Macy’s sold best sellers, guidebooks and, to tourists, “about 250 copies a week of any picture book of New York City,” said Mr. Lennertz of HarperCollins, who worked there as a young man. The large store held celebrity author events that smaller stores could not handle; for example, Charlton Heston read from his memoir “An Actor’s Life” in 1979.
By the 80’s, Macy’s book business could not compete with mall stores or the emerging superstores, and books couldn’t compete with clothing and electronics in the hierarchy of department store profit margins. In 1989 the book department was halved, and today it is gone.
BOOKS & COMPANY
1977-1997
Jeannette Watson’s glittering bookshop at Madison Avenue and 74th Street was beloved by New York’s literary elite. Its farewell party in May 1997 drew literary luminaries like Paul Auster, Katha Pollitt, Ms. Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Asked what bookstore she misses most, Ms. Didion answered instantly, “Oh, Books & Company, of course.”
Mr. Bloom recalled “a marvelous display called ‘the Wall.’ ” It was a broad survey of contemporary literature selected by Ms. Watson and her staff. “No clinkers in there,” Mr. Bloom said, “and no concessions to either popular taste or, shall we say, political correctness.
“It was invariably where you’d go if you’d lost a book, or left it somewhere, or lent it to a graduate student and she’d never returned it.”
Upstairs, memorable readings and parties were held. “The space fit about 52 people comfortably,” said Alice Quinn, poetry editor of The New Yorker. “So if you had 90, everyone was spilling down the stairs and the room was bursting open like a shoe and you felt so exhilarated.
“I have memories of readings like memories of great country weddings. Those readings just filled you with that wonderful balloon feeling.”
MADISON AVENUE BOOKSHOP
1973-2003
This cozy boutique near 69th Street, run by the Wall Street heir Arthur Lehman Loeb, served the carriage trade. “I remember I was shopping there one afternoon,” Ms. Lebowitz said, “and I heard Arthur tell an assistant: ‘Mrs. Auchincloss is leaving for Paris and wants something to read. Pick out two books, and bring them to her apartment.’ ”
In 1978, when her first book, “Metropolitan Life,” was published, “I signed a number of copies at the store,” Ms. Lebowitz said, “and a few weeks later Arthur called me, and said, with a combination of annoyance and desperation, ‘You must come sign more books — I’m having to sell unsigned copies!’ ”
Laughing, she added, “I guess Mrs. Auchincloss does not buy unsigned copies.”
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
Borders is fine. I feel as though they make an effort there by way of atmosphere. Their new coffee selection is nice too.
So, what happens when everything either shuts down or merges? Is that it? Game over? Do we put another quarter in and play the whole game again, for $hits and giggles?
So, what happens when everything either shuts down or merges? Is that it? Game over? Do we put another quarter in and play the whole game again, for $hits and giggles?
"How's the despair?"
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OscarGuy
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We have a B&N. We also have a Borders. The Borders people are significantly more friendly and the atmosphere is decidedly more warm. I shop only at Borders for books. I can't stand Barnes & Noble.
Wesley Lovell
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
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Sonic Youth
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I also have fond memories of Tower Records. On days when school was out, my father would sometimes take me to New York where he worked, and I'd spend part of the day exploring the city. Inevitably, I would always end up at the Tower Records a few blocks from Washington Square Park. (I don't know if it's still there.) The high point of my early adolescence was when Pulse magazine printed my Top Ten Desert Island Discs in the Letters section. ("Look, there's my name!") When I lived in Milton, Mass. for two years, my visits to Boston almost always included a trip to Tower.
I don't see what's overly dramatic about emphasizing the sad state of music retail. Putting aside the lost jobs, disappearing brick and mortar businesses weakens the essence of a community. There are no record stores where I live. If I want to shop for CDs, I have to either go to Circuit City or a Best Buy outlet that just opened. And what true music lover wants to do that? I don't want to buy my music at an electronics store. I want a music store, thank you. Music stores are great hangout places where you can make connections, find out what's happening on the local scene. And can one really explore music's deep catalogues online? Perhaps, if you're savvy enough, but it's nowhere near the same as going through the aisles of bins, music going on in the background, etc.
A 4.8'' by 4.8'' disc... BULKY! Ye gods.
On the other hand, I have to defend Barnes & Noble. You have every right to decry the "disneyfication" of the bookstore, especially if you live in New York (or New Haven, or St. Petersburg, where there are excellent independent bookstores). But they are building a Barnes here in Altoona, and you know what? I'm thrilled. There are NO bookstores in this area... unless "Lamb of God" and "Adult World" count, there are half a dozen of those types. But in between the sacred and the profane, there is nowhere to go. Hell, build a Borders' too. If that's what it takes to fill a gap, I'm all for it. Better these bookstores than none.
I don't see what's overly dramatic about emphasizing the sad state of music retail. Putting aside the lost jobs, disappearing brick and mortar businesses weakens the essence of a community. There are no record stores where I live. If I want to shop for CDs, I have to either go to Circuit City or a Best Buy outlet that just opened. And what true music lover wants to do that? I don't want to buy my music at an electronics store. I want a music store, thank you. Music stores are great hangout places where you can make connections, find out what's happening on the local scene. And can one really explore music's deep catalogues online? Perhaps, if you're savvy enough, but it's nowhere near the same as going through the aisles of bins, music going on in the background, etc.
A 4.8'' by 4.8'' disc... BULKY! Ye gods.
On the other hand, I have to defend Barnes & Noble. You have every right to decry the "disneyfication" of the bookstore, especially if you live in New York (or New Haven, or St. Petersburg, where there are excellent independent bookstores). But they are building a Barnes here in Altoona, and you know what? I'm thrilled. There are NO bookstores in this area... unless "Lamb of God" and "Adult World" count, there are half a dozen of those types. But in between the sacred and the profane, there is nowhere to go. Hell, build a Borders' too. If that's what it takes to fill a gap, I'm all for it. Better these bookstores than none.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
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anonymous1980
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Yes I distinctly recall that mezzanine. It was Brentanno's when I used to visit.Damien wrote:Reza wrote:There was this great bookshop very close to Saks on Fifth Avenue (was it Brentanno's?). I recall going there all throughout the '80s upto 1991. When I was in Manhattan in 2004, it was the first place I headed. What a shock to find a different store in it's place!
It's probably Scribner's you're thinking of, Reza -- beautiful old beaux arts space with a narrow mezzanine? If memory serves, after Scribner's closed, Brentanno's moved into the space for a while. It is now a Benneton.
My memories of Manhattan are full of visiting the assorted bookshops and returning to Jamaica laden with books. My arms would be so sore from carrying books through assorted airports on my way back. In 2004 (the year I narrowly missed meeting up with you), my wife really put up with me walking all over town in search of obscure bookshops. My backpack would be bursting at the seams. I must have bought over 100 books on that trip alone - mainly at rock bottom prices in Texas. Shipped a huge box back home.
Can't wait to get back to Manhattan! Will have to make do with my upcoming trip to Hong Kong for the time being.
Reza wrote:There was this great bookshop very close to Saks on Fifth Avenue (was it Brentanno's?). I recall going there all throughout the '80s upto 1991. When I was in Manhattan in 2004, it was the first place I headed. What a shock to find a different store in it's place!
It's probably Scribner's you're thinking of, Reza -- beautiful old beaux arts space with a narrow mezzanine? If memory serves, after Scribner's closed, Brentanno's moved into the space for a while. It is now a Benneton.
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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Big Magilla
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One of the things that made New York unique prior to the Disneyfication of the city was the many wonderful bookstores, inparticular the three that Damien mentions. The spiral staircase visible through the window at the Doubleday on 53rd and 5th was legendary.
Another was the many different department stores. I used to love shopping at Bloomingale's and Macy's, which one can still do, but also the lower priced stores like E.J. Korvette's, Alexander's and Macy's old rival, Gimbels.
Another was the many different department stores. I used to love shopping at Bloomingale's and Macy's, which one can still do, but also the lower priced stores like E.J. Korvette's, Alexander's and Macy's old rival, Gimbels.
Oh, it was the wonderful B. Altman's and very classy department store -- with its unique restaurant, The Plantation Room.
Gee, I hadn't thought of B. Dalton's in years, but wasn't that another chain, one which helped push out the independent stores? The book stores whose passing broke my heart were Doubleday, Brentanno's ad, most especially, Scribner's.
Gee, I hadn't thought of B. Dalton's in years, but wasn't that another chain, one which helped push out the independent stores? The book stores whose passing broke my heart were Doubleday, Brentanno's ad, most especially, Scribner's.
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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Mister Tee
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