Hello Friend and Music Lover–
There’s a new documentary about TOWER RECORDS coming out in the next week or two. Here’s a great article about the store and check out the voice over by John Lennon below. Quite cool.
Those of us who remember stores like these….I suppose we do get emotional about them all disappearing. And many of us are so busy these days, that we haven’t taken the time to reflect on the time when we’d go to a record store, with the anticipation of a new album by a favorite artist.
I remember going to LA some years ago, and finally getting to the TOWER on Sunset. Probably in the mid-1980s….There was so much stuff. I spent about $500 and came home with a huge pile of records on my flight back to the Bay Area. The San Francisco Store was one of the best to find almost any release…or they could order it for you and get it quick. The Berkeley store had a huge selection of 45s, and some of the coolest staff, who would sometimes open an album and play it for you, if you wanted a listen before you might buy it. Both stores had so much selection, you could spend hours going through the stacks to find that Gem. Yeh..the good old days. (And I do need to mention the great TOWER RECORDS stores in Campbell, Sacramento, and of course Picadilly Circus in Downtown LONDON… Those who’ve been to Japan tell me the TOWER RECORDS in TOKYO is also phenomenal, and I believe is still opened for business…)
The internet has made things different, and even though it’s a great tool for communicating and staying in touch with your friends worldwide…There was still nothing better than getting together with a friend or two to go “record shopping” on a Saturday afternoon, with the hope that you’d find something that you’d be talking about with each other until you finally got home to play the record on your turntable. I still have a few friends who like to “record hunt” from time to time, but the stores (other than maybe Ameoba and Rasputins) are mostly gone now. This “ipad” generation is missing out on some of these things. And they have no “record” of a song when you’ve downloaded it onto your Computer or Ipad and then when you’re tired of it you delete the MP3 and it’s gone forever. Well, maybe not completely, but 20 years later, somes of the songs will be remembered, but this ipad generation won’t be able to go into the back of their closet to find an old box of records which document their past and bring back the memories, which are attached to the music from this time. It’s just not the same with an MP3 in my opinion. A bit sad really.
Still…I’m glad to see vinyl records making a comeback, and hopefully some of the ipad generation, will catch on to what I’m talking about above.
Dig,
Pany
