"Oh, Ben, that’s the whole beauty of it! I see it like a diamond, shining in the dark, hard and rough, that I can pick up and touch in my hand."
-- Willy Loman to Ben, "Death of a Salesman"
ALL THINGS MUST PASS (A-minus) - Aside from my homes and the newsrooms I worked in, the place I most likely spent the most time in during the 1990s was any given Chicago record store - the chains, Tower, Rose and Reckless, the suburban indies, Rolling Stones, Beautiful Day, Val's Halla. In that era, CDs had displaced vinyl, as my collection ballooned beyond the 1,000 mark.
I was a record-store rat. I could spend hours at Tower Records' 28,000-square-foot megaplex on North Clark Street, usually emerging with fistfuls of discs. The record store wave was yet another bubble created and sustained by our immediate elders, the baby boomers (who also floated me generously in my first career -- the last golden age of newspapers, which funded my habit). The bursting of the music bubble has been a source of genuine sadness. When I upgraded to a new car a few weeks ago, I didn't even think to check to see that it came with a CD player. I just assumed it did. It doesn't.
Call it naked nostalgia. I'm an unreliable narrator for this post. "All Things Must Pass" tells the story of Tower Records, born in the 1960s in Sacramento, Calif., and run like a family business while expanding to L.A., then New York, Japan, London and, of course, Chicago (in 1991). A cohesive team of raggedy teens, under the lenient leadership of founder Russ Solomon, congealed in the 1970s and stuck together for a couple of decades, ending up as a funky middle-aged management team. As the opening cards tell us, by the late '90s Tower Records had annual sales of $1 billion from nearly 200 stores; but by 2006 the company -- saddled with the burdensome debt that had fueled the explosive growth -- had gone belly-up.
Colin Hanks (Tom's kid), in his debut behind the camera, assembled this valentine to the glory days of vinyl LPs, 45s, cassettes and compact discs -- tangible music, complete with cover art, protective sleeves and jewel cases. He sits down 80-something Solomon and his former loyal employees for lively interviews and reminiscences (they are heavier and jowlier, but better groomed than their young selves as glimpsed in old images). He mixes in a knowledgeable industry expert (Steve Knopper from Rolling Stone magazine) and a few rock legends stripped of their artifice: Bruce Springsteen, David Grohl (who worked at the D.C. store because it was the only place he could get hired without having to cut his hair), Elton John and exec David Geffen. We get video of "Rock of the Westies"-era John prowling the record bins, his detailed shopping list in hand, during the hour he had to himself every Tuesday morning at the Sunset Boulevard landmark before it opened for the day. Interviewed today, the rock star is truly saddened by the demise of the music warehouse, calling it one of the great tragedies of his life.
I know how he feels.
* * *
Bin binges are a way to mark history. I bought R.E.M.'s "Green" on Election Day in 1988 at Beautiful Day Records in La Grange. I visited the U.K. in 1990, and still have the plastic sleeve on the XTC disc I bought at Tower Records in London ("The Compact XTC: The Singles 1978-85," £11.99). I discovered Radio Birdman when some hipster store clerk spun "Radios Appear" on the store CD player at Reckless Records on Broadway, and, instantly hooked by the surf guitars in "Aloha Steve and Danno," I bought a copy on the spot. Undeterred by a terrorist strike on our nation, I spent an entire afternoon traversing Chicago and its suburbs to find an open record store on 9/11 to buy Bob Dylan's "Love & Theft" on its release date. Tower closed even earlier than they had promised me on the phone (the cowards!), so I drove across the city, the length of Lake Street under the L tracks, to Val's Halla, the hole in the wall in Oak Park, where it was business as usual, a dinky black-and-white TV on a shelf near the ceiling flashing news images of members of Congress reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
* * *
The film blissfully riffs on an outdated scene, and I was transported back to the stacks. On one level, this is what the documentary seemed like to me: "Blah-blah-blah" ... footage inside a record store ... "Blah-blah-blah" ... footage inside a record store ... "Blah-blah-blah" ... footage inside a record store (CD listening stations!) .... But, I watched it twice, and it's more than that. It's a fond and surprisingly clear-eyed look at a movement, a business, and one of its visionaries.
Hanks is thorough in his research, presentation and attention to detail. He digs up John Lennon's 1974 radio promo for Tower's Sunset Strip store (an oldie but a goodie). He learns that the yellow and red colors of the logo were borrowed from that of oil giant Shell. The camera in archival footage zooms in on those great sale prices blaring from handmade signs: $3.88 for LPs that listed for $5.98 and $6.98. And there was the simple "Peanuts"-style font of the store's slogan: "No Music No Life." He celebrates Tower's art department and the publishing wing (Pulse magazine).
The filmmaker captures the emotion of several Tower veterans trying to describe the corporate takeover and purge of the old guard, the harshing of their vibe -- particularly with Bob Delanoy describing the inscription on the watch he was given on his way out the door (it said, in part, "We love you"). Another disciple of Solomon's chokes up completely, signals a timeout, shakes his head apologetically and just walks off camera. The giddiness of passionate hippie entrepreneurs had eventually fallen victim to over-exuberance brought to heel by Wall Street. (Like the baby boomers' indulgent boosterism of the newspaper industry, the housing market and their Reagan-Democrat trickle-down politics, that generation's goosing of the record industry was evidence that greed and materialism merely created the illusion of a prosperity bought on credit, one that masked a culture approaching burnout.)
Hanks shapes the narrative with a classic VH-1 "Behind the Music" arc. Exploiting the company's unsustainable debt load, the banks swooped in and seized Tower by the throat. Solomon was forced to step aside and let his unpopular son take over as a figurehead and puppet, overseeing the gutting of the company. No one interviewed is a fan of the faceless Betsy, the banks' hatchet woman. Solomon, never losing the glint in his eyes, says of her, "If I ever came close to killing someone ... with my hands ... it was her." Hanks doesn't leave us hopeless, though. An absolutely lovely coda (to the strains of the wistful title track by George Harrison), hinted at in the opening scene, assures the viewer that the spirit of Tower Records remains alive.
Solomon knew the significance of rock 'n' roll in the postwar era and how deeply meaningful it was to his young customers. Music played a significant part in people's lives, he reckoned, "And we were how they got it." Heidi Cotler, one of Tower's first female clerks (who survived years of sexism, ending up in an executive position), summed it up concisely and a little poetically: "It was here, we were part of it, we fell in love, then it went away."
***
"What are you building? Lay your hand on it. Where is it?"
-- Ben to Willy, "Death of a Salesman"
I can mark the month and year of my buddy Ed's wedding, because it was held in Sacramento, and during that weekend I went to (the original?) Tower Records to pick up Dylan's "Time Out of Mind," carrying it back to the hotel room to play on my portable Discman. I placed the foam pieces of the headphones against my ears, pressed play, and my heart jumped at the piercing pulsing organ notes of the opening track, "Love Sick," with the haunting Daniel Lanois production and the opening line: "I'm walking ... through streets that are dead." I don't remember anything about the wedding itself.
That was October 1997. Since then, something significant slipped through my fingers.
Ed's marriage endured.
BONUS TRACKS
From the end credits, a new one on me -- the rootsy workout "Violent Shiver" by a young punk Benjamin Booker -- my latest favorite song:
Lennon's promo:
My own choice for theme song -- Australia's surf punks Radio Birdman slashing and burning through Roky Erickson's "You're Gonna Miss Me":
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