When Tower Lost Power

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.

Comics Books, The Inflation Canary

This is adapted from a letter I wrote to my buddy Denro that, upon review, seemed suitable for a blog post:

If you look up the causes of accelerated inflation in the 70’s, conservative economists always point to Nixon ending the gold standard for currency exchange. They completely ignore our generation coming of age, which I’m certain was, along with the OPEC oil crisis, a main driver of prices. We saw the trend in our comic books!

Comics had stayed 10-cents for over 20 years, and were 12-cents for most of the Sixties. But then in ’69 they went to 15-cents, and only two years later there was the jump to 48-pages for a quarter, before the rapid reversal to 32-pages for 20-cents. The cover date of that first big jump? August, 1971, so the issues were on sale in May-June, exactly 50 years ago. As fans we saw the immediate effect of inflation in one of the smallest segments of the American economy. When did Nixon end the gold standard for exchange rates? August, 1971. Stupidly, I had failed to see that connection while writing my senior paper for Economics on Nixon’s wage and price controls!

I see another factor behind 70’s inflation, with the high sustained wages earned by unionized factory workers at the same time the peak baby boomers were flooding the job market. As I like to point out, the Polka and Portuguese music shows at the radio station on Sundays were paid for by guys who worked union jobs at the Spalding plant in Chicopee. With me having the FCC-mandated license to operate the transmitter, they sat at the mic and played records while their families and friends sat in the talk show studio. The Polish people headed out while the Portuguese people came in, then followed by the stock car racing guys.

The car show was all talk, so I was in the control room at the Gates console, engineering and handling the calls. The guy who ran the car show owned a garage with a custom shop. (You should imagine John Milner instead of Curt Henderson being at Wolfman Jack’s station in American Graffiti.) Half of the ads during the car show were self-promotion for the guy’s business, so I have to assume he wasn’t running a chop shop. 😉

During the Polka and Portuguese shows I was checking the AP wire and reading Billboard, or in the production studio working on commercials, while keeping an ear on the over-the-air monitor, listening for trouble. The guys solicited their own advertisers, and if that money didn’t cover the station’s fee they had to pay the difference out of their own pockets. Sometimes I’d see a new RV in the parking lot, and I’d hear about their vacation houses on Lake Winnipesaukee. I’m sure they were earning more than my $3/hour. Those tennis balls and basketballs aren’t made by union labor in Chicopee anymore, and those lakefront properties now have million-dollar vacation homes owned by executive class buyers.

Twirlin’ Girls

While Marvel Comics fans wait in the hope that Southern Methodist University in Texas will post more Stan Lee video, let’s see what else my new favorite YouTube channel has to offer. Here’s one that’s a sociology lesson all by itself, showing how much American culture has changed over the past 50 years.

If you don’t know what that first tune is, it’s this.

Yesterday and Today

In 1972 we stopped putting men on the Moon, but our Earthbound future was just beginning. That year, Stewart Brand explained it in his article “Spacewar” for Rolling Stone.

The world of tomorrow, that we have today, was also described in 1972, in perfect detail, in a couple of films. The promise of interactive television, as narrated by DJ Casey Kasem…

… didn’t happen with analog cable systems, but it was of course eventually realized by digital networking.

“Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing” was produced in 1972 at WGBH-TV in Boston. That same year, WGBH also produced a much more entertaining movie, the cult favorite Between Time and Timbuktu. It opens with none other than my childhood idol DJ from WABC in New York, Cousin Brucie.

https://youtu.be/Sdp5-YdS9aE

Post-Pandemic Punk

A teen band in Los Angeles, The Linda Lindas, have a viral video.

The girls have been signed to a small record label. They got the idea for their band from Linda Linda Linda, a 2005 Japanese movie.

Schoolgirls are the subjects of countless Japanese movies, anime, and manga. From sweet, innocent and charming, to super-powered, to graphically pornographic, girls in school uniforms are everywhere in Japanese media. I rented Linda Linda Linda back when I had a 3-disc Netflix subscription. The movie is safely at the sweet and charming end of the spectrum. The DVD is out of print, and whoever owns the rights would be smart to make the movie available online as soon as possible.

Are there cybernetic assassin schoolgirls? Of course.

A song in English by a Scottish band really is the theme to the anime series. Here’s the complete recording. It’s one of the most remarkable productions I have ever heard.