I was laying wide awake at 4 am this morning, and I was thinking how we consume music has so fundamentally changed over the past 40 years. Then I found myself remembering walking into Tower Records on Market Street in San Francisco as I’d done a countless number of times in the 90s. And once inside, I could easily recall the smell of the store. Next thing I knew I was grinning ear to ear.
Tower was a magic place for music lovers like myself. It had been since I first set foot in the original SF store at Columbus & Bay on a trip to the City before we eventually relocated there. It was a bit of a wonderland for me. I’d ordered Michael Stern’s Chronos soundtrack from them a month earlier, only to discover after it arrived that the disc was defective. I physically brought it with me on that trip so I could exchange it. While there I also found a record I’d been seeking for months: Michael Garrison’s Airborn that I dragged home on the plane with me. (Yeah, I was in the middle of my electronic new age period.)
A few years after we’d relocated to SF and Tower opened another store in the concrete monstrosity that had been constructed on Upper Market, somehow making up for the eyesore it occupied. I remembered many an afternoon pouring through the racks, either searching for something specific or just seeing if something piqued my interest enough to shell out $18 for a disc.
And then there were the times your favorite band/singer/group released something new and you prayed Tower had purchased enough copies that they’d still have one available when you got to the store.
It was also within walking distance of my apartment, so it was doubly dangerous.
Remember getting the disc home and trying to get it out of those horrible plastic blister packs without amputating a finger in the process? And then putting the disc in your CD player, sitting down, and pouring over the liner notes?
Ah, the ritual!
All that was lost with the advent of MP3s and streaming. I think that’s the reason there’s been a resurgence in the sales of physical media. It’s part nostalgia (at least in my case) to be sure, but it’s the physicality of the process. It’s the knowledge that you own the music you just bought; it won’t arbitrarily be pulled from your streaming service because of some corporate fight over licensing. And you can listen to it any time you want. No worries about network connectivity! And if you want to rip those discs to MP3 for your phone, you can!
The purpose of this post? I dunno…those memories that came flooding back (and the unexpected recollection of the smells) just kind of gobsmacked me in the dark silence this morning.
Addendum: I forgot to mention that sign in the store below Tower on Market: ‘CAR PHONES’!
I spent the Late 70’s and all the 80’s at the main store on Columbus and Bay. I would have to walk down that steep hill (from the direction of Polk St.) where the store was sort of wedged into the rock next to it. At the beginning of the above article, I asked myself, ‘Wait, there was a store on Market Street’? Which was because that store was newly opened not too long before I left the city. You could drive past it and miss it if you weren’t too observant. But if you were heading to The Castro on The ‘F’ Market Streetcar, it was always worth a stop to visit.
I used to live within blocks of the first Tower Records in Sacramento, which also spawned a Tower Books and a Tower Theater.