Tower started out as an offshoot of Solomon’s father’s drugstore in Sacramento, Calif. He tells Hanks how he got his friends and relatives to help him get off the ground.
“Luckily, my cousin Ross was a builder — electrical, carpentry,” Solomon says in the documentary. “And so he volunteered, ‘Oh, I’ll go down and fix it up, put some lighting in there, put a new floor in, and paint it.’ And that was it. He went in and did it.”
Solomon’s California inner circle eventually became some of Tower’s top brass, and that family atmosphere spread as the company expanded. Jason Sumney started out as a clerk at Tower’s store at 4th and Broadway in New York before moving into its regional operations.
“Never in my life before, and probably never again, will I experience anything like that,” Sumney says. “Everybody got along, and it was such an amazing vibe. Every day was fun, you know? Even the downs were fun.”
Over the years, Tower grew and grew. It became a multinational empire, with stores and licensees from London to Buenos Aires to Tokyo. But in 2006, Tower declared bankruptcy.
Ed Christman has been reporting on music retailers for Billboard magazine for 26 years. “It took eight or nine years to unfold,” Christman says. “The things that proved to be a mistake, in hindsight, occurred in 1998.”
Christman says that Tower wasn’t alone in the hunger to expand that eventually proved to be its undoing.
“There was at least 10 or 15 large chains that were racing to be the dominant force in music, and Tower decided to take on $110 million in debt,” Christman says. “So they did a bond offering, and they were going to use that debt to drive global expansion. It was just the mood of the day — it was grow and go.”