Actor Colin Hanks — Tom’s son — loved Tower so much, he spent seven years making a documentary about the chain. It’s a love letter to Tower Records called All Things Must Pass.
“Tower sort of helped pave the way for your identity,” Hanks says. “For lack of a better phrase, music makes people, sometimes, where you sort of latch on to music as a way of identifying yourself or your tribe. I got that at Tower Records.”
In Hanks’ documentary, you see founder Russ Solomon and his innermost circle — many of whom were there when Tower was founded in California — having a ball building this thing together.
Everyone, from clerks to customers, could feel those good vibrations. During its flush years, Tower was a pilgrimage place for music fanatics — even for the world’s biggest stars. Elton John talked to Hanks about how he’d go into one of the Los Angeles stores every week to buy stacks of new releases.
“Tuesday mornings, I would be at Tower Records,” John says in the film. “And it was a ritual, and it was a ritual I loved. I mean, Tower Records had everything. Those people knew their stuff. They were really on their ball. I mean, they just weren’t employees that happened to work at a music store. They were devotees of music.”
Solomon let them decide what each store stocked, Hanks says.
“New Orleans had a huge heritage music section; Nashville had a gigantic country section,” he says. “Tower was, in essence, a bunch of mom and pop record stores, you know? Although they were all under the same banner, the same name, the same yellow-and-red signage, each one was run individually by the people in the stores: the clerks, the buyers for each individual store, the art department from each individual store. Each store represented its city or its neighborhood in the city. They all had their own style.”