Tower Records is going out of business. Every Tower Records outlet in the world is selling off its inventory at still-overpriced liquidation markdowns. All that will remain of Tower will be its web site.
Tower’s demise would mean little to me except that my first sustained job in New York was at Tower Records’ Lincoln Center location, at Broadway and 66th Street. For 8 or 9 months I organized and shelved inventory in the classical cassette department. No one else wanted to do cassettes, and management did not take them seriously. CDs had already usurped LPs, and cassettes were the next format headed for obsolescence.
In the meantime, Laserdiscs (another ill-fated but much hyped format) occupied a fat corner of the classical department real estate.
At Tower I met my first New York girlfriend. A rail thin gymnast, Julia contributed mightily to the mental claustrophobia that characterized my life in the early 1990s.
She was white but, as with every woman I dated up until then (and many others since) she had dated only black men before dating me.
Julia had a theory about this, but I’ll never tell.
The coincidences extended well beyond the fact that she, like all my exes, dated inter-racially. Her previous boyfriend’s name was Mark; his middle initial was also A; not only were we born on the exact same day, we were also born in the same city. A strange set of coincidences, and one of our long-running jokes was to invent new ones.
I would call and leave long messages on her answering machine. Because our schedules did not always line up I thought this a clever way to keep communication going. Then one day, talking about me as if I was not present, she said “He doesn’t need me, he needs my answering machine,” a curiously insightful accusation that I nevertheless resented. I would never have left such desultory, endless ramblings on her answering machine if she hadn’t said she liked them. Oh boo fucking hoo.
My most vivid memory of Julia is from an October night at the southwest corner of Broadway and 72nd Street. PMSing like it was her duty, her face was in the path of a bright red neon light and she stood there ripping me a new asshole for what seemed like an hour (it could not have been that long). Unlike 24 hours previous she utterly hated me as a cursed villain, my every breath a waste of precious air better used by serial murderers and dying nazi scum.
I watched her face. Its machinations careened from one extreme facial tic to another. Moths and other bugs from the neon light flew into her face, but she was apoplectically oblivious. Her eyeballs, darting about in search of her next curse word, moved so fast I thought they might turn backwards and look into the back of her skull, seeking unused recesses of vitriol and bile. Spitting more than she could have realized, delivering the hard letters (C, K, T) into the air with a pointed yet blunt thudding sound, she was a human possessed.
As vividly as I remember her facial torpor that night, I do not remember how this encounter ended. Maybe it never ended. She went home to her place on Riverside, I went to room 317 at the Parc Lincoln on West 75th Street, that room where once we fucked like dogs to the sounds of big, fat pigeons clucking on the window sill.
The next day, at Tower Records, I wanted nothing to do with her. Serene and emptied, she explained that “this is what you get with me.” She had a non-grin on her face, the flat-lined non-smile of someone who might think they went too far but would never admit it.
We spent the next 6 months breaking up. Long, complex phone conversations; postcards from her world travels; fucking; breakfast at west side diners long since closed.
I moved to Washington Heights and she quit her job at Tower Records (only to get a job at the Trump Tower location months later). I last saw her a few months after landing a job at Sports Illustrated. “My name’s on the magazine masthead,” I told her. She seemed unhappy about this. Eyeballs quivering again, not in anger as on that October night, but in confusion and maybe envy. She changed the subject, proceeded to “look busy” in that minimum wage kind of way, and I never saw her again.
She had warned me to stay away from her. Maybe I should have listened. She said she was trouble. Our backgrounds differed considerably, she from a Los Angeles ghetto, I from suburban Tampa. But while she described herself as damaged, just above a common street criminal, I only sensed directionlessness, a mental chaos stretching out sadness inchoate. I never sensed any genuine level of depravity or trashiness (words she used to describe herself).
For many years I would enter that Tower Records expecting to see people I knew still working there. Working at Tower seemed to be a rite of passage for conservatory graduates moving to New York. I worked there for longer than I might have wanted, but others I knew from Oberlin and Juilliard worked there far longer.
I quit working at Tower after a manager accused me of stealing. “I’m sending you home,” she announced. The exact amount of $15.14 was discovered missing from one of the cash registers. I left the premises, and within minutes it was found that someone else had accidentally (and innocently) rung up a purchase on the cash register in question. I quit the next day, disbelieving the profuse apologies offered by the accusing manager.
I did not “go home,” as directed. I went across the street to see a movie at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. It was a strange African movie, filmed in the Sahara.
I went to Tower Records today. “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS” signs all over the place, mostly emptied shelves sparsely stocked with still over-priced CDs and DVDs. For old time’s sake I bought Sorabji and Alkan CDs, knowing that even at these liquidation markdowns I could get them much cheaper from virtually any online retailer.
My ritual when entering a large record store has not changed since college. I look for CDs of music by K.S. Sorabji and Charles Alkan. Alkan was always my first stop, sometimes followed by Godowsky, but even before LPs or CDs of Sorabji became available I added Sorabji to the drill (discovering the existence of the alphabetically adjacent Fernando Sor in the process). A quality record store, I felt, would at least have cards in the bin for Sorabji and Alkan, and most Tower Records had these cards.
I believe that the Sorabji cards in the bin at Tower Records symbolize what a great store it was. I also believe that we will never see a “Sorabji” header in any retail CD outlet ever again. Sorabji is an obscure composer, and if CDs of his music are found at all in retail outlets they are likely to be in the “Miscellaneous S” bin. Tower’s greatness was measured not so much by the fact that they carried Sorabji CDs but by the fact that they actually had a card made for it so that this composer’s CDs could be easily found.
The end of the Sorabji header in the CD bin may seem like a little thing, but I find it significant. Significant enough that I asked the manager on duty if he’d let me keep the Sorabji card. “It’s yours,” he said, his eyes showing both a sense of humor and the resigned burnout of a career spent in a business whose relevance has faded.
We may never see a Sorabji card like this in any American CD store ever again. Classical retail CD sales will filter down to pops and greatest hits, but Sorabji, Alkan, and even Godowsky remain obscure special-order items to most. Tower Records was a place where you could at least look at and discover CDs of obscure classical music. You would go home and buy them online, of course, usually at a substantial discount.
Heck, I remember spotting a new Sorabji CD at Tower Records once a couple of years ago. Using my Treo I actually bought that CD online from Amazon.com, right there at the Tower store, for $8 less than Tower’s price. It just seemed foolish to burn money.
I have enough memories from Tower Records to fill a thousand of these screens. I consider the time spent working there as something like the freshman year of my life.
Most of my memories of that location do not fit the current space at 1961 Broadway. It was renovated and the physical space looks nothing like it did when I worked there. For about a year Tower Records was located in the lower level of the Ansonia building several blocks up the street on Broadway. Mahler, Caruso, and many others are said to have lived at the Ansonia, but I know the Ansonia for a night spent playing 4-hand piano arrangements of Mahler symphonies with a pianist I met at Tower Records.
I met a lot of celebrities at Tower. One of the actors from “The Cosby Show” and I spent a fair amount of time together, mostly in the interest of him and his friends trying to convert me to Jesus and make me join their church for actors and creative artists.
I could not keep up with those guys. I gave up on them after a long and challenging debate on the meaning of faith and God in modern life. I gave up because they did not perceive this conversation as a debate, but as a direct insult. I thought we would resume the conversation the next time we met, but that was neutralized when one of them asked “So, Mark, have you come around? Have you reconsidered?” The conversation had ended right where I thought it began.
I actually liked the job at Tower, but there was simply no way to make a living at it. I was told I might make it as a manager, but I had a brusque way of dealing with the upper management (I was an asshole with authority issues typical of a post-adolescent 20-nothing) and they wanted no part of me.
The gossip among the $5 an hour crowd was that the owner of the company felt justified in paying his employees as little as possible because he was certain we robbed him blind of inventory and cash. This gossip was not baseless, as Russ Solomon, the owner of the company, apparently made these comments in Crain’s.
Regardless of the indignities of working there, the oft-repeated corporate lore held that the classical department of the Lincoln Center Tower Records accounted for roughly 50% of all classical CD sales in America. I believe this, because in most cities I’ve been to the classical section of a CD store typically comprises one or two bins of Pavarotti cut-outs and the soundtrack to “The Piano,” whereas this Tower classical section itself is bigger than most entire stores.
Its proximity to Lincoln Center guaranteed a nightly flood of customers looking for CDs of whatever music they had just heard performed at a nearby opera house or concert hall.
Yesterday I had a conversation with the cashier who sold me the Sorabji and Alkan CDs. I asked how long he’d worked there. He said “Since May, so it’s not hitting me as hard as the others.” I was surprised he said it that way, as I would have assumed little if any company loyalty or interest among the employees. That was certainly the case when I worked there and employment was assumed to be transient.
I told him I had worked there 15 years ago, and was again surprised to see that he knew the whole history of that location. He quickly named the only person I would still know there, a lifer who had already been there for many years before I started.
I went to the basement, where the classical department used to be. The basement is now laid very differently, and I could not determine where my cassette racks used to be or where the once-vaunted Laserdiscs might have been. I wanted to find the room where Julia and I once made out, but that room is gone, its space now occupied by a $146, 6-CD box set of Flatt & Scruggs music.
Sure enough, though, the shelves were cassette-less. Rumors of their obsolescence proved accurate after all.
Physical spaces in New York get re-used with impunity. I look forward to seeing what takes over the giant Tower Records space on Broadway and 66th Street. Whatever it is, I suspect I will never enter that space again.
Tower Records was a great CD and record store. I will not miss its physical presence.
Tower Records Lincoln Center
