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Thursday, May 17, 2012
Feature: March 2007
Tower Bights the Dust
The 10 biggest breakthroughs, bombshells and busts of 2006
Story by Rich Ehisen
If a name could be given to 2006, it should be The Year of Big Moves.
Huge decisions were made last year by business leaders, legislators and even California voters that will move our state and our region in new — and hopefully prosperous — directions.
That’s not to say that all the big deals and decisions took us forward. Some were a step — or three — backward in ways that will have an impact on Sacramento’s landscape for years to come.
The impact of many of this year’s big decisions may not be seen or felt for several years, but that should be taken as good news: It’s much better for a region to make forward-thinking decisions than to react to a crisis at the last minute.
As we breathe cleaner air, drive better roads, live safely behind better levees, enjoy new ways to get from A to B, and benefit from a healthy and diverse economy, we can look back to 2006 as the year that made it all possible.
It was the little company that Russ built and turned into an empire — and an icon — in the retail music business. At its height, Tower Records, including book and video outlets, could boast 89 stores in the U.S. and 144 stores in nine countries around the world, and it was the place to go for everything from the mainstream to the eccentric, both in music offerings and salesclerks.
By December 2006, however, after a march toward oblivion that everyone but Tower’s employees saw coming, it was all over. The company Russ Solomon started at 16th Street and Broadway in 1960, selling records from his father’s drugstore, was gone.
It’s hard to point at any one thing that caused the demise of Tower and its parent company, MTS Inc. It may have been mismanagement, it may have been failure to adapt to changing customer desires, or it may have just been a bum-rush by the likes of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Napster and iTunes.
All we really know is that after filing for Chapter 11 twice in just three years, the entire company was put on the auction block. It was sold on Oct. 6 to the Los Angeles-based Great American Group, which has made a name for itself by selling the assets of music retailers, for $134 million. MTS employees were informed that the going-out-of-business sale would start the next day, and within a week, GAG had already put the leases for more than a million square feet of Tower’s real estate up for sale.
That’s been good news to some retailers foaming at the mouth to get into Tower’s prime locations at bargain-basement rates, but for many, it’s meant the loss of a Sacramento landmark.
“Tower was a record store put together for music lovers, and most Sacramentans are really disappointed to see it go,” says Bob Keller, who came to Sacramento in 1981 to spin records at KZAP and now hosts Café Rock at KSEG. “The Broadway store was two blocks from my house; it was a cultural hub for my neighborhood. It gave the community a hip personality, maybe coming off a little colorful or crazy at times, but that’s what made it interesting.”
