Do we look like the kind of store that sells "I Just Called to Say I Love You"? Go to the mall.
I can't believe the year's almost over. Thanksgiving is less than 2 weeks away! Insane. My boss has been away this week so I've had a little extra time on my hands. That's code for "I was bored a lot and spent too much time messing around online". Anyway, I was looking back through my LJ in the hopes of finding out where the days went, and I noticed that I've "only" posted about 80 entries this year. And there were countless entries that I would start on, then get distracted by something else, and then come back to later on only to give up and scrap it. Those half-formed entries are all privatized and for my eyes only, but trust me, you're not missing anything.
Clearly, someone who actually goes through drafts before hitting the "post" button is a class-A geek and probably taking this LJ business entirely too seriously, but hi, that's me. My LJ is littered with such entries, along with essays that I've saved and meant to share in the hopes of sparking some dialog, but I just never got around to doing so. Therefore, I've decided to do a little housekeeping. It's Friday, and there's not a whole lot going on, so if you've got some time to kill, here are a few lengthy but well-written essays that eulogize the demise of the record store far more articulately than I ever could. This is a topic that's pretty dear to me, and these writers have managed to capture my feelings of nostalgia and sadness almost exactly. The first one was written earlier this year about Aron's Records, which was my favorite store. The other two are about Tower Records, one of which was written by Alec Baldwin and brought to my attention yesterday by understandish. 2006 was a pretty bad year for record stores, and, I'm afraid, it's just the beginning of the end. There's a good chance that my children will never know what a record store is, and that sort of kills me a little. I'll probably have more to say about this subject later, but for now I just wanted to post these articles because they're so good. So enjoy. Or don't. Whatever.
By Lynell George
March 26, 2006
LONG BEFORE AMOEBA MUSIC opened its landscape-altering Hollywood flagship, and nearly a decade before "High Fidelity" immortalized that singular breed of retail animal - the completist record store clerk - there was a holy strip of scuffed-up, indie new-and-used record shops lining Melrose Avenue. Vinyl Fetish, Bleeker Bob's, 2nd Time Around and my two favorites: Rene's All Ears and Aron's Records.
When vinyl still reigned (in various versions - 78, 45 and 33 1/3 ; import or domestic; picture discs and colored vinyl; sexy little EPs), these shops and a few others scattered across Los Angeles played host to all manner of yearnings, discovery and invention in my life. They felt as essential as the ampersand in R&B.
On any given weekend a couple of decades ago, I could be found lurking among the bins in my painter's overalls and my once-white, low-top Jack Purcell's, flipping one-handed through "Jazz," bending over this or that artist until my neck went numb, carrying a hefty stack of LPs, a load heavy enough to leave red creases on my arm. I wouldn't set them down for fear that someone would swipe that long-out-of-print Cannonball Adderley LP that I'd spent not hours but years hunting for. I couldn't take that risk.
I invested in these places - not just money, but time. And then, like the changer arm lifting and the stereo switching off, my habits changed. I somehow slipped out of my routine. I eased up on my record store fetish; I invested elsewhere.
And maybe that's why I didn't shed a tear or show up to mourn when Rhino Records and now Aron's (both long relocated from former addresses) began shutting their doors for good in the last few months. I'd already said my goodbyes - to old locations, to overpowering memories, to bins that had long since been picked over. I'd seen the shift coming, the back-stock thinning, all manner of new media - DVDs and DATs - taking up shelf space. I couldn't stomach the emptying bins, the death of an era.
It wasn't me that changed, it was the business model: a general slump in record sales (down 7% last year, according to SoundScan), a great big uptick in digital downloading, a rush to shop online. Statistics underscore what our eyes already tell us: The Amoebas stay in business, but there are only about half as many independent record stores as there were 10 years ago countrywide.
Last year, downloaded tracks from online retailers soared to 332.7 million, compared with 134.2 million in 2004 - an increase of 148%. And when former customers weren't downloading music, they were burning friends' CDs. The landscape for bricks-and-mortar storeowners has been nothing less than a disaster zone.
Yet I can't imagine what my life, my worldview, would have been like without record stores - particularly the independents with their idiosyncratic rooms plastered with posters, speakers booming, smelling alternately of patchouli or herb and always crammed with persnickety customers arguing with even more persnickety clerks.
Through junior high school and high school, I saved my lunch money and once a week made my way to the various neighborhood record stores not only to update my collection but to augment my sense of the world - its tongues, its rhythms, its stories, its very vastness. Not to sound too much like some old-school crank, but I can't imagine that watching a bar load on-screen equals the awe of opening a double-album set with both your hands.
When I first learned to drive, getting up the hill without rolling backward on La Cienega, just so I could get to Tower Records on the Sunset Strip, became an important rite of passage. The clerks there steered me toward the essential Sonny Rollins; the "forget about all others, this is the best" Bill Evans. But I soon discovered that Rene's and Aron's were where the most unique treasures could be found.
Emblazoned with the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, Rene's All Ears stood at the corner of Melrose and Spaulding, near what I was told was Rene's other passion: an auto/motorcycle repair shop. It was smallish, but size, I learned quickly, didn't matter.
I bought a lot of imports there - blues and early roots music, R&B, regional voices - the Honey Drippers and blues shouters Chicago Carl Davis and Big Joe Turner. But it was also where I dipped into the Washington go-go scene (Chuck Brown and EU) and wandered into my first King Crimson, New Orleans guitarist Danny Barker and Automatic Man's elastic blend of space rock and funk. For a buck a disc you could take a chance on anything. I bought my first Rahsaan Roland Kirk at Rene's, from a man with a huge smile and a mohawk the color of cotton candy.
Aron's, back then, carried me through eras and genres and styles - Brazilian samba and Cuban son and Portuguese fado. Before artists' out-of-print catalogs were mercifully reissued on CD, Aron's provided a way to fill in so many holes - used but pristine copies of Thelonious Monk's "Brilliant Corners," Stan Getz's "Didn't We," Charles Mingus' "Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife." And for less than 10 bucks, I got my hands on a collector's pressing of Billie Holiday's "I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone," recorded at the old Fox Million Dollar Theater in Los Angeles one June evening in 1949.
I shopped among the safety-pin-pierced, the men in fishnets, eccentrics in bathrobes and Buddy Holly glasses. That's what I liked most about the indies, particularly the tight spaces at Rene's. You were thrown together with people you might never have been shoulder-to-shoulder with in your other life. Motörhead fans up next to B-Boys, punkers in their oxblood Doc Martens, neo-mods in parkas all listening to a wash of ear-pricking sounds - Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Frank Zappa, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Big Daddy Kane, Nina Hagen, Charlie Christian, Machito - the hither-and-yon soundtrack dreamed up by whoever was on shift at the moment. It was like a dorm at a particularly tolerant college. But with a better stereo. And because of it, I took home things that would have never otherwise fallen into my hands.
I don't have an iPod, though many have tried to nudge me in that direction. "It's time," they say. They talk up the ease of downloading. Of acquiring songs just when you think about it, in the middle of the night. Of the portability; the idea that your collection is both "virtual" and "infinite." Most of all, they tell me, I'll never look back.
But I do. And always hope to. My record collection is a life mosaic so vivid, so touching, I can't chuck any of it - can't even thin it out. I remember the clerks - imperious or exultant - who passed the sleeves across the counter to me. I remember the time and the place. An iPod, yes, would be convenient, but the decades spent exploring music in real stores with real people are my bricks and mortar. These records built me. They are me.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Mark Swed
October 22, 2006
There goes the free parking.
The choice spot off Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood behind the Tower Video/Classical Annex has been for years a closely guarded secret. An hour for Tower shopping, no validations needed and most of the time no one checking. That couldn't last forever. Neither, apparently, could Tower Records.
Two weeks ago, Tower was auctioned off for $134.3 million to a liquidator, which is a tragedy for music and particularly for classical music. The gallingly named Great American Group will go down in infamy. It beat out Trans World Entertainment by $500,000. Trans World promised to keep many of the Tower stores open. Now all the stores will close in a few weeks, after the stock is sold off at discount.
"Sometimes the highest bid is not the best bid," the attorney representing Towers' creditors argued unsuccessfully before the bankruptcy court. Instead, the court ruled that one measly increment in the bidding (less than half of 1% of the total) must be valued above the good of culture and society, to say nothing of music.
Now, New York City will no longer have a decent classical record store. Neither will Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle or many, many other cities. London will certainly feel the loss of its Piccadilly Tower. Tokyo will get by, but nothing compared with the multistory Tower stores in the Shibuya and Shinjuku districts; their acres of deep-catalog CDs - stuff you never even imagined existed - once offered the best selection in the world.
Tower ran the CD department in the gift shop in the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Last week the Los Angeles Philharmonic released its first commercial disc recorded in Disney, which features a spectacular performance of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. At the moment, the orchestra is scrambling to figure out how it can sell its own disc in its own hall, since the major labels, in this case Deutsche Grammophon, are not supposed to ship product (the business term for music) to Tower any longer.
Tower is not blameless. It was, in its heyday, a great record store, but it was not a good one. Tower all but invented the model for chain book and record stores, which have been eliminating independent retailers.
As a freshman at UCLA in the 1960s, I hung out in a wonderful independent record store on Westwood Boulevard, where its grizzled clerks knew a lot better than my music professors did in terms of what direction to point a young enthusiast, what Beethoven quartet, played by whom, I was ready for. The conductor and Stravinsky intimate Robert Craft might swing by to pick up some LPs he wanted to play for the old man. I dutifully bought the same ones.
When Tower Records came to town, it opened a store in Westwood directly across the street from the independent and undersold all competition (undoubtedly at a loss). Once the independent was forced out of business, Tower's prices went up. This scenario was played out often.
But Tower did take seriously its mission to be the world's most important record outlet. It tried to stock everything (I think it actually succeeded in Tokyo). During the early '90s, Tower published a not-half-bad handout record magazine. I wrote a few pieces for it and reviewed some records, never pressured to promote anything.
The Tower Records next to Lincoln Center in New York has been an important institution in the city's artistic life. The classical room was always a good place in which to schmooze after concerts. The hours were fabulous - open until 1 a.m. It was there that I got to know Susan Sontag, who was a record freak. It was there that I discovered that, despite disagreeing about nearly everything else, John Simon, the outspoken theater and film critic, and I like many of the same recordings.
You will still be able to find classical CDs. They are on the way out but not gone yet. Just about everything is available one way or another online. Ever since it started selling CDs, Amazon.com has been a godsend for those not in the vicinity of a Tower or in want of something obscure.
But you lose the whole social dimension of spending time in record stores, meeting like-minded music lovers, making discoveries, developing passions. I doubt I would have had the courage to change my major to music in my sophomore year of college and move up to Berkeley (where there were - and still are - better record stores) had I been ordering over the Internet.
Record stores are good for the record geek community, and good for the community at large as well. We don't pay sales tax when purchasing out of state, and the savings is often seen as an attraction for buying online. But these are the taxes that typically fund local schools, roads, hospitals, police, parks and playgrounds.
The trouble with downloading
Many culprits contributed to the demise of Tower. It got out-chained by the likes of Wal-Mart and other mass retailers who now promote bestselling CDs, probably under cost. It got hit by the big record labels' indiscriminate releasing of junk in all genres. The downturn in DVD sales hasn't helped.
And the ever-infuriating iTunes came along. Once Apple marketed its cute players as objects of lust, the CDs became prehistoric media.
Downloaded music isn't inherently bad. But in its quest to rule the world, or at least become another Microsoft-ish monopoly, Apple can be.
Like Amazon, iTunes serves as a useful adjunct to retail CD stores. But with its insufficient catalog and its pop orientation, Apple's download service is a long way from being able to replace them.
You can, in fact, find the new Los Angeles Philharmonic "Rite of Spring" on iTunes, but in inferior sound to the Super Audio CD. If you already have the disc, you can purchase separately from the site Salonen's exclusive 3 1/2 -minute interview about the "Rite" for $3.99. It is also broken into four sections, each 99 cents - and one lasts just 36 seconds! Do you really want these folks running the sale of classical recordings?
So what's to be done?
Los Angeles is luckier than most cities, thanks to the Bay Area's Amoeba Music, the massive new and used store, having opened a branch in Hollywood. But there isn't much else. Virgin Records once had a classical room. Last time I looked, classical was but a shelf or two hidden in the back of the store. Two of my old haunts, Aron's and Rhino, have closed in the last year. Barnes & Noble and Borders have music departments, but they are basic and seldom staffed by knowledgeable clerks, which is one of the necessities for all classical stores given the bewildering choices.
Dutton's Books has small but extremely well-chosen CD departments in its Brentwood and Beverly Hills stores that come closest to the old-time independent retailer. These are among the last places where you can talk about music.
When the CD replaced the LP, the two shared shelf space for a few years, as the CD gradually took over. The same happened with the transition from videotape and laserdisc to DVD. But with the abrupt liquidation of Tower, we are now faced with the possibility of an alarming vacuum. So please support your independents, if you can find one. And don't forget to have plenty of quarters handy when parking off Sunset.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From here.
You know what's got me down even more than the election? That Tower Records is closing. That is a real drag. I remember when I first moved to Los Angeles to seek my fortune back in 1983, I lived on Larabee, just north of Sunset. My friends and I would go to Tower at night.
Or I'd go alone. An evening at Tower in West Hollywood was not a stop you made. It WAS the evening. You could hang out there for hours. Cool people worked there. Cool people shopped there. Cool people hung out there with nothing better to do. You could saunter across the street to the video store (some years later) or the classical department. If you wanted a break from the music, you could go to Book Soup. Crowds were gathering at the Whiskey and, later, the Viper Room. You could go eat at Duke's. Spago was just blasting off down the street. If you were a veggie, you could hit the Source on Sunset. If you had money you could go to Nicky Blair's. Something for everyone.
But Tower was the best evening. Listening to and hunting for music with a staff that knew music. The New York store was OK. The one on La Fayette was better than the one at Lincoln Center. But the one on Sunset...you could walk in and immediately go into a serious retail coma and when you came to, you were at the register with a thousand dollars worth of tapes, CD's and DVD's and no memory of how you got there. Bowie boxed sets. Deep Purple/ Made in Japan. The Stones at the El Mocambo. The Concert for Bangladesh, Live Rust, Thick as a Brick, Days of Future Past. Woody Allen records. Van Cliburn records. Sketches of Spain. Les Valses Nobles et Sentimentales. Page, Clapton, Hendrix. Joni Mitchell. Neil Diamond. Bonnie Raitt. The Who. The Clash. The Doors. Andre Previn. Andre Watts. She Loves You (yeah, yeah, yeah). All of it. You were in a total blackout for a couple of hours. And it was great.
Goodbye, Tower Records. One of my favorite stores to get lost in.
Clearly, someone who actually goes through drafts before hitting the "post" button is a class-A geek and probably taking this LJ business entirely too seriously, but hi, that's me. My LJ is littered with such entries, along with essays that I've saved and meant to share in the hopes of sparking some dialog, but I just never got around to doing so. Therefore, I've decided to do a little housekeeping. It's Friday, and there's not a whole lot going on, so if you've got some time to kill, here are a few lengthy but well-written essays that eulogize the demise of the record store far more articulately than I ever could. This is a topic that's pretty dear to me, and these writers have managed to capture my feelings of nostalgia and sadness almost exactly. The first one was written earlier this year about Aron's Records, which was my favorite store. The other two are about Tower Records, one of which was written by Alec Baldwin and brought to my attention yesterday by understandish. 2006 was a pretty bad year for record stores, and, I'm afraid, it's just the beginning of the end. There's a good chance that my children will never know what a record store is, and that sort of kills me a little. I'll probably have more to say about this subject later, but for now I just wanted to post these articles because they're so good. So enjoy. Or don't. Whatever.
By Lynell George
March 26, 2006
LONG BEFORE AMOEBA MUSIC opened its landscape-altering Hollywood flagship, and nearly a decade before "High Fidelity" immortalized that singular breed of retail animal - the completist record store clerk - there was a holy strip of scuffed-up, indie new-and-used record shops lining Melrose Avenue. Vinyl Fetish, Bleeker Bob's, 2nd Time Around and my two favorites: Rene's All Ears and Aron's Records.
When vinyl still reigned (in various versions - 78, 45 and 33 1/3 ; import or domestic; picture discs and colored vinyl; sexy little EPs), these shops and a few others scattered across Los Angeles played host to all manner of yearnings, discovery and invention in my life. They felt as essential as the ampersand in R&B.
On any given weekend a couple of decades ago, I could be found lurking among the bins in my painter's overalls and my once-white, low-top Jack Purcell's, flipping one-handed through "Jazz," bending over this or that artist until my neck went numb, carrying a hefty stack of LPs, a load heavy enough to leave red creases on my arm. I wouldn't set them down for fear that someone would swipe that long-out-of-print Cannonball Adderley LP that I'd spent not hours but years hunting for. I couldn't take that risk.
I invested in these places - not just money, but time. And then, like the changer arm lifting and the stereo switching off, my habits changed. I somehow slipped out of my routine. I eased up on my record store fetish; I invested elsewhere.
And maybe that's why I didn't shed a tear or show up to mourn when Rhino Records and now Aron's (both long relocated from former addresses) began shutting their doors for good in the last few months. I'd already said my goodbyes - to old locations, to overpowering memories, to bins that had long since been picked over. I'd seen the shift coming, the back-stock thinning, all manner of new media - DVDs and DATs - taking up shelf space. I couldn't stomach the emptying bins, the death of an era.
It wasn't me that changed, it was the business model: a general slump in record sales (down 7% last year, according to SoundScan), a great big uptick in digital downloading, a rush to shop online. Statistics underscore what our eyes already tell us: The Amoebas stay in business, but there are only about half as many independent record stores as there were 10 years ago countrywide.
Last year, downloaded tracks from online retailers soared to 332.7 million, compared with 134.2 million in 2004 - an increase of 148%. And when former customers weren't downloading music, they were burning friends' CDs. The landscape for bricks-and-mortar storeowners has been nothing less than a disaster zone.
Yet I can't imagine what my life, my worldview, would have been like without record stores - particularly the independents with their idiosyncratic rooms plastered with posters, speakers booming, smelling alternately of patchouli or herb and always crammed with persnickety customers arguing with even more persnickety clerks.
Through junior high school and high school, I saved my lunch money and once a week made my way to the various neighborhood record stores not only to update my collection but to augment my sense of the world - its tongues, its rhythms, its stories, its very vastness. Not to sound too much like some old-school crank, but I can't imagine that watching a bar load on-screen equals the awe of opening a double-album set with both your hands.
When I first learned to drive, getting up the hill without rolling backward on La Cienega, just so I could get to Tower Records on the Sunset Strip, became an important rite of passage. The clerks there steered me toward the essential Sonny Rollins; the "forget about all others, this is the best" Bill Evans. But I soon discovered that Rene's and Aron's were where the most unique treasures could be found.
Emblazoned with the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, Rene's All Ears stood at the corner of Melrose and Spaulding, near what I was told was Rene's other passion: an auto/motorcycle repair shop. It was smallish, but size, I learned quickly, didn't matter.
I bought a lot of imports there - blues and early roots music, R&B, regional voices - the Honey Drippers and blues shouters Chicago Carl Davis and Big Joe Turner. But it was also where I dipped into the Washington go-go scene (Chuck Brown and EU) and wandered into my first King Crimson, New Orleans guitarist Danny Barker and Automatic Man's elastic blend of space rock and funk. For a buck a disc you could take a chance on anything. I bought my first Rahsaan Roland Kirk at Rene's, from a man with a huge smile and a mohawk the color of cotton candy.
Aron's, back then, carried me through eras and genres and styles - Brazilian samba and Cuban son and Portuguese fado. Before artists' out-of-print catalogs were mercifully reissued on CD, Aron's provided a way to fill in so many holes - used but pristine copies of Thelonious Monk's "Brilliant Corners," Stan Getz's "Didn't We," Charles Mingus' "Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife." And for less than 10 bucks, I got my hands on a collector's pressing of Billie Holiday's "I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone," recorded at the old Fox Million Dollar Theater in Los Angeles one June evening in 1949.
I shopped among the safety-pin-pierced, the men in fishnets, eccentrics in bathrobes and Buddy Holly glasses. That's what I liked most about the indies, particularly the tight spaces at Rene's. You were thrown together with people you might never have been shoulder-to-shoulder with in your other life. Motörhead fans up next to B-Boys, punkers in their oxblood Doc Martens, neo-mods in parkas all listening to a wash of ear-pricking sounds - Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Frank Zappa, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Big Daddy Kane, Nina Hagen, Charlie Christian, Machito - the hither-and-yon soundtrack dreamed up by whoever was on shift at the moment. It was like a dorm at a particularly tolerant college. But with a better stereo. And because of it, I took home things that would have never otherwise fallen into my hands.
I don't have an iPod, though many have tried to nudge me in that direction. "It's time," they say. They talk up the ease of downloading. Of acquiring songs just when you think about it, in the middle of the night. Of the portability; the idea that your collection is both "virtual" and "infinite." Most of all, they tell me, I'll never look back.
But I do. And always hope to. My record collection is a life mosaic so vivid, so touching, I can't chuck any of it - can't even thin it out. I remember the clerks - imperious or exultant - who passed the sleeves across the counter to me. I remember the time and the place. An iPod, yes, would be convenient, but the decades spent exploring music in real stores with real people are my bricks and mortar. These records built me. They are me.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Mark Swed
October 22, 2006
There goes the free parking.
The choice spot off Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood behind the Tower Video/Classical Annex has been for years a closely guarded secret. An hour for Tower shopping, no validations needed and most of the time no one checking. That couldn't last forever. Neither, apparently, could Tower Records.
Two weeks ago, Tower was auctioned off for $134.3 million to a liquidator, which is a tragedy for music and particularly for classical music. The gallingly named Great American Group will go down in infamy. It beat out Trans World Entertainment by $500,000. Trans World promised to keep many of the Tower stores open. Now all the stores will close in a few weeks, after the stock is sold off at discount.
"Sometimes the highest bid is not the best bid," the attorney representing Towers' creditors argued unsuccessfully before the bankruptcy court. Instead, the court ruled that one measly increment in the bidding (less than half of 1% of the total) must be valued above the good of culture and society, to say nothing of music.
Now, New York City will no longer have a decent classical record store. Neither will Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle or many, many other cities. London will certainly feel the loss of its Piccadilly Tower. Tokyo will get by, but nothing compared with the multistory Tower stores in the Shibuya and Shinjuku districts; their acres of deep-catalog CDs - stuff you never even imagined existed - once offered the best selection in the world.
Tower ran the CD department in the gift shop in the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Last week the Los Angeles Philharmonic released its first commercial disc recorded in Disney, which features a spectacular performance of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. At the moment, the orchestra is scrambling to figure out how it can sell its own disc in its own hall, since the major labels, in this case Deutsche Grammophon, are not supposed to ship product (the business term for music) to Tower any longer.
Tower is not blameless. It was, in its heyday, a great record store, but it was not a good one. Tower all but invented the model for chain book and record stores, which have been eliminating independent retailers.
As a freshman at UCLA in the 1960s, I hung out in a wonderful independent record store on Westwood Boulevard, where its grizzled clerks knew a lot better than my music professors did in terms of what direction to point a young enthusiast, what Beethoven quartet, played by whom, I was ready for. The conductor and Stravinsky intimate Robert Craft might swing by to pick up some LPs he wanted to play for the old man. I dutifully bought the same ones.
When Tower Records came to town, it opened a store in Westwood directly across the street from the independent and undersold all competition (undoubtedly at a loss). Once the independent was forced out of business, Tower's prices went up. This scenario was played out often.
But Tower did take seriously its mission to be the world's most important record outlet. It tried to stock everything (I think it actually succeeded in Tokyo). During the early '90s, Tower published a not-half-bad handout record magazine. I wrote a few pieces for it and reviewed some records, never pressured to promote anything.
The Tower Records next to Lincoln Center in New York has been an important institution in the city's artistic life. The classical room was always a good place in which to schmooze after concerts. The hours were fabulous - open until 1 a.m. It was there that I got to know Susan Sontag, who was a record freak. It was there that I discovered that, despite disagreeing about nearly everything else, John Simon, the outspoken theater and film critic, and I like many of the same recordings.
You will still be able to find classical CDs. They are on the way out but not gone yet. Just about everything is available one way or another online. Ever since it started selling CDs, Amazon.com has been a godsend for those not in the vicinity of a Tower or in want of something obscure.
But you lose the whole social dimension of spending time in record stores, meeting like-minded music lovers, making discoveries, developing passions. I doubt I would have had the courage to change my major to music in my sophomore year of college and move up to Berkeley (where there were - and still are - better record stores) had I been ordering over the Internet.
Record stores are good for the record geek community, and good for the community at large as well. We don't pay sales tax when purchasing out of state, and the savings is often seen as an attraction for buying online. But these are the taxes that typically fund local schools, roads, hospitals, police, parks and playgrounds.
The trouble with downloading
Many culprits contributed to the demise of Tower. It got out-chained by the likes of Wal-Mart and other mass retailers who now promote bestselling CDs, probably under cost. It got hit by the big record labels' indiscriminate releasing of junk in all genres. The downturn in DVD sales hasn't helped.
And the ever-infuriating iTunes came along. Once Apple marketed its cute players as objects of lust, the CDs became prehistoric media.
Downloaded music isn't inherently bad. But in its quest to rule the world, or at least become another Microsoft-ish monopoly, Apple can be.
Like Amazon, iTunes serves as a useful adjunct to retail CD stores. But with its insufficient catalog and its pop orientation, Apple's download service is a long way from being able to replace them.
You can, in fact, find the new Los Angeles Philharmonic "Rite of Spring" on iTunes, but in inferior sound to the Super Audio CD. If you already have the disc, you can purchase separately from the site Salonen's exclusive 3 1/2 -minute interview about the "Rite" for $3.99. It is also broken into four sections, each 99 cents - and one lasts just 36 seconds! Do you really want these folks running the sale of classical recordings?
So what's to be done?
Los Angeles is luckier than most cities, thanks to the Bay Area's Amoeba Music, the massive new and used store, having opened a branch in Hollywood. But there isn't much else. Virgin Records once had a classical room. Last time I looked, classical was but a shelf or two hidden in the back of the store. Two of my old haunts, Aron's and Rhino, have closed in the last year. Barnes & Noble and Borders have music departments, but they are basic and seldom staffed by knowledgeable clerks, which is one of the necessities for all classical stores given the bewildering choices.
Dutton's Books has small but extremely well-chosen CD departments in its Brentwood and Beverly Hills stores that come closest to the old-time independent retailer. These are among the last places where you can talk about music.
When the CD replaced the LP, the two shared shelf space for a few years, as the CD gradually took over. The same happened with the transition from videotape and laserdisc to DVD. But with the abrupt liquidation of Tower, we are now faced with the possibility of an alarming vacuum. So please support your independents, if you can find one. And don't forget to have plenty of quarters handy when parking off Sunset.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From here.
You know what's got me down even more than the election? That Tower Records is closing. That is a real drag. I remember when I first moved to Los Angeles to seek my fortune back in 1983, I lived on Larabee, just north of Sunset. My friends and I would go to Tower at night.
Or I'd go alone. An evening at Tower in West Hollywood was not a stop you made. It WAS the evening. You could hang out there for hours. Cool people worked there. Cool people shopped there. Cool people hung out there with nothing better to do. You could saunter across the street to the video store (some years later) or the classical department. If you wanted a break from the music, you could go to Book Soup. Crowds were gathering at the Whiskey and, later, the Viper Room. You could go eat at Duke's. Spago was just blasting off down the street. If you were a veggie, you could hit the Source on Sunset. If you had money you could go to Nicky Blair's. Something for everyone.
But Tower was the best evening. Listening to and hunting for music with a staff that knew music. The New York store was OK. The one on La Fayette was better than the one at Lincoln Center. But the one on Sunset...you could walk in and immediately go into a serious retail coma and when you came to, you were at the register with a thousand dollars worth of tapes, CD's and DVD's and no memory of how you got there. Bowie boxed sets. Deep Purple/ Made in Japan. The Stones at the El Mocambo. The Concert for Bangladesh, Live Rust, Thick as a Brick, Days of Future Past. Woody Allen records. Van Cliburn records. Sketches of Spain. Les Valses Nobles et Sentimentales. Page, Clapton, Hendrix. Joni Mitchell. Neil Diamond. Bonnie Raitt. The Who. The Clash. The Doors. Andre Previn. Andre Watts. She Loves You (yeah, yeah, yeah). All of it. You were in a total blackout for a couple of hours. And it was great.
Goodbye, Tower Records. One of my favorite stores to get lost in.