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The Many Faces of a People-Pleaser 😂😂😭😭

Tower Records (final visit); 2006.

Close to the end of the year, and also when the semester ended, I looked forward in selling my books after finals so that I would get money back. Then I got a friend together to go with me to Tower Records in Huntington. In a matter of one hour, that money would be gone. Right now I’d be very excited about what I would find in those bins. But for years it hasn’t been the case and the euphoria of being in a store, any store at midnight, has been long gone. The entire chain went under and currently co-opting it is a third-rate clothing store.

Autumn of 2006, people were standing on the sidewalks of Route 110 holding picket signs like it was the end of the world. First advertised on those signs were ten to thirty percent off all merchandise at Tower. When passers-by and sidewalk shoppers took a closer look, they ended up in shock as they realized that it was an end of an era of some sort. Time passed by and the stakes went up. Forty to sixty percent discounts finally garnered Tower’s final audience and rush of shoppers. The final swan song came when all merchandise was down to a whopping seventy to ninety percent off. That was when they had their biggest ever turnout because no one wanted to pay full price for music. Not then, not now.

Music collectors and fans were reluctant to buy any new release or any title that was full price. They all jumped at the opportunity to clean out Tower’s shelves with a steal. Buyers hovered and tracked entire sections looking for that one shining crown jewel that made their lifetime.

As a music fan for years, I couldn’t begin to tell you how much Tower shaped my taste in music and style. Unlike FYE and Sam Goody, Tower was the one commercial music chain that had a lot of artists and titles that no other commercial store had. Think of what was the Port Jefferson Music Den (closed down in 2002) where they were the one underground record store that had everything other stores didn’t even come close to carry. I remember Nineties summertimes visiting the Massapequa location picking up rare CD singles and imports as well as other rare hard-to-find and ahead-of-release-date CD’s and artists I picked up such as Autechre’s LP5 (1999) and EC8OR’s World Beaters (1998).

And being a fan of print media and graphic design, I also bought stacks of magazines every week. The magazine selection in Huntington was unrivaled, measuring at least several rows  of sixty to seventy feet of anything and everything you could think of: industrial (Industrial Nation), punk (Punk Planet), experimental (Wire), graffiti (Disruptiv), style (Mass Appeal, Mean, Vice, YRB), and art design magazines (LoDown, especially LoDown because it satisfied my requirement for underground German pop-kultur) as well as hardcore zines (Short Fast Loud!, Maximum Rock And Roll, Under The Volcano) and other cult magazines I happened to be lucky to pick up (Lisa Carver’s Rollerderby, anyone?). Every month went at least sixty to seventy dollars total on magazines alone.

Yet towards the end of Tower’s presence I didn’t pick up on music as much because just like other buyers, I had to stand back at the higher-than-usual prices for releases. Compared to discount chains like Best Buy and other record stores, it wasn’t unusual to find a new release with no-frills to be priced at $19.99 or even $21.99. DVDs I noticed were priced at times to be five dollars higher than their competitors. Maybe some shoppers felt the same sentiment as I did.

Not only that, the forces of internet piracy and MP3 downloading of recent years proved to be too dominant and powerful to be stopped, and is currently co-existing with other existing record stores this day and age. Consumers then re-routed the system right to their own bedrooms with no price to pay for their music. These factors, plus incurring debt that led the chain to bankruptcy in 2004, proved to be too much for Tower.

Without Tower Records, it was less convenient for me to pick up whatever artist or movie title I wanted right away right after work. When Tower closed down it took a bite of some of the physical record collecting I had. Yet, only they could have given me these experiences: no more magazines letting me know what the latest art direction was or who was in the spotlight. No more frantically walking around with a huge stack of everything and more in my hands still looking for one more CD. No more back room full of posters, sheet music, jazz, classical, hip-hop, techno, and soul. No more silly Hollywood memorabilia and comic-book fantasy merchandise. No more video games, no more characters hanging out in the store wearing goth, back-pack indie, or hardcore.

No more attitudes from the employees who treated customers like nothing because they felt like it. That was really the only problem I had with Tower Records, mostly in Huntington. The cashiers pointed people out with a huff and puff because they were given more than enough change or money, or how they rang up a transaction without even making an emotion or saying a word. Some stuck female cashiers had that flat out know-it-all act for no apparent reason. Sometimes I even renounced the shop because of its sometimes poor service, but that was not the case in the end as the attitude did improve, thank you.

And no more of what would be where I had my first date with my Peruvian then-girlfriend Jenny. I would never forget wandering in that Huntington store looking for the next purchase when she walked in, greeting each other with open arms. We left when a thunderstorm knocked the power out, but we returned after dinner and had a fun time, the first of many for months to come. This was also where I met a pretty and pale Irish redhead who I later met again into at community college the following year.

What is now left of the record store scene on Long Island? A few of them which existed when Tower crumbled are still around and even new ones popped up. The majority of shops in total are still around because internet opinion made their case about the lack of quality, esthetics, art, and ritual of having the physical thing, making the case of cherishing these shops. On the online circuit, some titles are now being released in very limited quantity, mainly in the low thousands or even in the mere hundreds. It’s a huge drop-off from what the millions in print runs used to be. Naming your own price for digital downloads, sharing streams to the public, or even buying from the label or artist directly is the way to go nowadays.

Doing my Ω show, I do most of my music testing at home.  My habits have been ruined by MP3s and streams as acquiring music is of very low cost and extremely ubiquitous. After all that, it hasn’t stopped me from going to a music warehouse in Shirley or celebrating Record Store Day annually in April to find breaks, samples, or dollar music to win it all. Yes, I still very much prefer to go out of town to buy music with my money which I support the artists and shops I like. Even to this day, I’ll be very happy spending two-hundred to two-fifty a visit, if I have it, on music just to have the artwork, colours, lyrics, pictures, ink, liner notes, credits, barcode, and the entire CD itself, because later on I will turn a profit in style points as time goes by, just like when people are hoarding and sharing their vinyl and cassette collections now.

November of 2006 was my last visit to Tower Records ever. Acquired would be some titles that made my pre-Ω shows and would be part of some personal mixtapes. Prices were forty percent off on music and that was when I decided to go and treat myself. There comes a time when you just can’t wait and risk a good sale on music before they no longer have stock. The total spent on my last ever visit to Tower Records was two-hundred on music and the Andy Warhol book at seventy-five, originally one-twenty-five. (Have you ever carried a book so massive and so heavy?) I took my bags worth of music and magazines with me to the trunk of my car, never to return to the Tower Records experience again.

On another note, I am in contact with M-Ro, a former manager of Tower Records, same location. He later on became a manager of a lifestyle store more out west and is now a ticket broker in an independent movie house. He once had a show on WUSB and was a major figurehead and darling of the Long Island underground and punk scene. You may also know his brother J-Ro, who still has a slot with us at WUSB.

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