Tower Records

In nineteen forty-one, a teenager named Russ Solomon started selling records out of a display rack in his father's drugstore at Sixteenth and Broadway in Sacramento. The drugstore was called Tower Drug. The record rack was a small thing in the corner.

He opened a standalone record shop in nineteen sixty, naming it Tower Records after the movie theater across the street. By the late nineteen-sixties, the store had expanded to San Francisco. Then to other cities. Then nationally. Then internationally, to the United Kingdom, Japan, and eventually twenty-one countries. At its peak, Tower Records operated more than two hundred stores and was the dominant independent record retailer in the world, the place where a generation of music buyers went first, where deep catalog was maintained as a point of pride, where the listening stations and the midnight-release lines became rituals of music culture.

Tower went bankrupt in two thousand and six. The causes were the same ones that killed every major record retailer in that era: big-box competition and the catastrophic effect of digital downloading on physical music sales. The end came fast, the way those ends always do when an industry model collapses.

Sacramento still claims it, and reasonably so. There is no corporate headquarters here anymore, no records on the shelves at Sixteenth and Broadway. The Tower Theatre across the street is still there. The corner is still there. A record rack in a drugstore in Sacramento eventually became something two hundred million people around the world had an opinion about. That is a Gold Rush story of a different kind.