Another free music documentary on YouTube. I haven’t watched it yet, but the subject is good enough for me to recommend it.
Tower’s flagship store in Boston was at the Mass Ave. end of Newbury Street, the namesake of Newbury Comics, a longtime music retailer that’s still in business. The Tower Records store in Burlington, MA was a relatively convenient stop on the way home, where I used to live, but most of my purchases were made at Newbury Comics, at the other end of the same shopping center.
Before all of that, THE place to buy records in Boston was actually in Cambridge. The Harvard Coop, in Harvard Square, as in Harvard University. My first visit there was almost 50 years ago, spending some of the fifty bucks I earned one night, helping to close down the annual town fair.
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I’ve watched the documentary, and definitely recommend it. The amazing thing about the rise of Tower Records is that most of the core team members were — let’s be honest — uneducated drunks, who were following the grand vision of a smart man who was as drunk and uneducated as they were. Their success is proof of the power in doing what you love for a living.
Tower’s over-expansion on borrowed money was technically what led to the chain’s bankruptcy. But even if they hadn’t taken on debt, that would only have softened the crash landing. Tower’s demise was inevitable, and the end was predicted not long after its beginning.
Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with “essentially perfect fidelity.” So much for record stores (in present form). — “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” by Stewart Brand, Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972.