VHS?

All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records (2015)
'All Things Must Pass' is a documentary that explores the rise and fall of Tower Records, and its legacy forged by its rebellious founder, Russ Solomon.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3272570/

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Damfino

I wasn't aware of this movie until today. Like most teenagers of that era, I spent a lot of time at various Tower locations. This just made my short list of movies to watch ASAP.

davidh777

I heard about this film recently and want to see it. I used to live at that place.

VHS?

I stated in another thread, it was like a religious thing to go to Tower Records. I would go even when I had no money to buy anything. Just browsing the place was something to do if you were bored. Just hop in the car and go.

Mabuse

Indeed. There was a great Tower near me when I was in High School and when I was in college in Los Angeles just as DVD was blowing up and Tower Video on Sunset was so fun to browse.

I heard Colin Hanks on the Adam Carolla show promoting this. It sounds great.

Supermallet

I saw this when it was playing at the Arclight. It's a decent documentary, but it's hard to feel sorry for the people involved when it all came tumbling down. I would say that it seemed like a very unique place to work, and definitely had a family atmosphere, but that didn't change the fact that Tower and Virgin and the like were ripping people off hand over fist with $18 CDs. They thought the gravy train would never end, and it bit them in the ass.

Mabuse

True, but that was the price everywhere. It's not like there was some secret place where you could get them for $10.

They did pretty good with sale prices on new stuff, and the bottom line is they offered a really pleasant and cool shopping experience. They would stock really awesome off the wall stuff. Their book and magazine selection was incredible. Everything from pop culture to manga to really classy hard core porn.

Compared to places like Music Plus (later Blockbuster Music), The Wherehouse, and Sam Goody they were a fucking oasis in the desert.

Why So Blu?

They were cool for the hard to find stuff and they had a Ticketmaster and laserdiscs. The first laserdisc I ever bought was from a Tower Records. It was Strange Days.

Mike86

I never went to Tower Records but I've heard good things about the documentary. Will probably check it out at some point.

hdnmickey

Yeah, if anything Tower more often than not had the best prices on music. Especially during release week. But the real key for me was the in-stock selections. It was very rare they didn't have a title I went to get. The mall stores not only had higher prices, they barely has any selection beyond new releases and the top selling album, or best of collection, for each band or artist.

Chrisedge

Funny, I just watched this yesterday! I loved it, and was a hard core Tower guy in the 80's and 90's. They did have the best prices when you caught the sales (release week, etc...) and I never had a problem paying for the stuff that was high because they had it!

Barth

That was true for a while but it didn't take long for Best Buy to step in and start offering them for 10-12 dollars. That's when I quit going to places like Camelot Music and the like in the mall.
Don't get me wrong when I was young and it was still cassette days, I could spend hours in a place like Camelot. I loved dedicated music stores. Although, when you're a teenage kid with limited funds you have to find the best place to stretch your dollar.
That "feeling" when your favorite artist releases a new album and you go to the record store to pick it up on release day died a long time ago unfortunately. I wish my daughter could experience it but now she just wants iTunes gift cards to pick and choose the songs she likes.

Giles

the stores also had great varied selection of magazines, music and / or otherwise

VHS?

Yeah, they were almost a head shop. All they needed were whip-its and pipes.

The LAST think I bought from Tower Records was Pink Floyd - Pulse double CD with blinking LED.
My ex-wife has it ... well she probably lost it. Fuckin bitch.

davidh777

Yeah, for me it was the selection of rare items I couldn't find before the days of the Internet. I studied abroad, and the Towers were great there too.

I think they had January clearance sales with a few dollars off everything.

milo bloom

Yeah, I used to love picking through the import singles section for oddities but for regular albums it was basically anywhere else that was cheaper ( or more likely just buy it used).

Alan Smithee

In the 80s, Tower regularly knocked at least a buck or so off the list price- it wasn't til the late 90s that they charged full list price for most things. That along with the greedy record labels raising the list prices up to $18.99 for single discs is what did them in. Some real tools were running Tower its last few years- one guy said that he felt people would be happy to pay full price "just for the experience of shopping in our stores." The rising costs of CDs certainly killed my excitement for buying them by the ton- I used to buy at least 5 per month but now I don't even buy that many in a year- and no, I don't buy mp3s or other digital nonsense in their place!

As I commented elsewhere, the real villains of the story told in the movie were Great American Group, the liquidation firm that bought the Tower company just so they could sell everything off and close it down, and I was very disappointed that they weren't even MENTIONED in it. (By watching the movie, it looks like Russ and company just said "That's it, we're screwed, let's have a Going out of Business sale.") Some other companies wanted to buy it and at least give it another chance, but the liquidators were the highest bidders so they shut it all down and lost about $1 million on the deal when all was said and done, so nobody won in the end.

morriscroy

Wonder if the liquidators were more interested in Tower's property holdings, than the actual business itself.

If they actually lost a million dollars in the overall transaction, most likely they used it as a tax writeoff.

DaveNinja

I still havent seen it even tough it was playing here (at the Tower Theater) last year. I live about 4 blocks from the original tower records. When Tower was on the decline there would be these awesome clearance sales where everything was super cheap, like 75-90% off the marked price. I would buy so much crap, lol. I still have some "Tower exclusive" Futurama figures that i got for cheap

islandclaws

I had a long, lovely relationship with Tower throughout all of my formative years. It was THE place to hang, spending hours browsing and maybe buying a CD or two.

I worked there for about six months in 2001, but I had a horrid little troll of a boss who hated me and saw that I was canned for... wait for it... drinking a soda behind the register. But, man, was that a fun job.

mndtrp

Tower was the first and only place I ever stood in line to get concert tickets. KROQ Weenie Roast in '99 that sold out in a couple of minutes, two people behind me.

Great store, had a lot of cool stuff. Suncoast was similar, and also highly priced.

Chrisedge

Suncoast and Tower could not have been more different other than the high prices.

hdnmickey

Exactly. I suspect the major difference between people thinking Tower had lower than average or higher than average prices was all about what era people shopped there. Personally for me it was mostly the 80's. By the time the mid 90's rolled around I lived much farther away from the closest Tower store and this are had finally got some of the chains people are claiming had lower prices. Those people should keep in mind that some areas had Tower stores, but didn't have many of the other chains that could have often been cheaper than Tower.

parker63

Really enjoyed this one. The ending of it reminded me of...

windom

This will be on Showtime tonight.