Oh, admit it.  You gave up on Tower Records long ago.  Your lamenting its loss is akin to finding out your mother threw out your baby toys.  They reminded you of a time gone by, but you hadn’t played with them in eons.  Hell, given the option of staying an infant or growing up EVERYONE chooses the latter.  If for no other reasons than the freedom and the choice, the POWER to decide your own direction, your own fate.  That’s what computer music gives you.  You don’t have to get in your car to acquire it and you’re not limited to what a retailer can stock, either by physical space or financial demands.

I remember reading in "Creem" that they opened Tower Sunset early so Elton John could shop.  And he’d buy hundreds of albums at a clip.  I yearned for the same power.  Not only to be able to own whatever I wanted, but to do it in a forum that oozed music, a veritable museum to the art.

And when I arrived in Los Angeles and endured the Strip gridlock to finally see that garish yellow store with the giant album covers hanging on its sides, I felt I’d finally gotten to Mecca.

Tower was like the great acts of yesteryear.  No production, no artifice, just meat and potatoes.  No barn board, no rugs, just fluorescent lights and paint.  The attraction was the albums.  Stacked impossibly high just as you entered the door.

But getting to that door was not easy.  For you could never get a parking place.  Talk about marketing…  Doesn’t everybody want to go to a place they can’t get in?

And after waiting your turn, after enduring the beeping horns, after finally sliding into a space in the lot or giving up and parking at a meter blocks away, you walked in.  And were confronted with not only the product, but the zombies.  I remember just after I moved here, in the fall of ’74, close to midnight on a Friday, encountering Morris Micklewhite and his exotic wife in the aisles.  Michael Caine was not posing, was not looking to be ogled, rather he was combing the bins, looking for gems.

That’s the way it was.  You’d see stars.  Not doing in-stores, signing product that you had to buy, rather shopping for albums themselves!

And that’s what they were, albums.  Not cassettes, and certainly not CDs.  Oh, in time there was a small section on the far wall of those tiny little plastic boxes with ferric oxide inside.  But most of the store was filled with rack after rack of vinyl records.  Bearing titles that you hadn’t seen in a retail joint in many a year.

Yes, Tower had the act’s complete catalog.  You might already own it, but you wanted to visit a place so cool, a place dedicated to your addiction.

And the new albums, they were as cheap as anywhere in town.  And they were never sold out, there was always a copy to be had.  After all, they had fifty copies on the floor of an album only YOU thought you knew about.

There was a fervor, a sensation, that made you buy like in a supermarket.  Having come all this way, and you had to drive, almost nobody lived nearby, and hyped up by the excitement, you purchased multiple records.  Tower Records was a dope dealer, and we were addicts.  And I’ve never heard of a hospital that can cure music addiction, there’s no rehab for this affliction.

Amoeba isn’t the same.  It’s a treasure trove of the past.

Indie stores have some of the cred, but without the garishness.  Tower was sans atmosphere.  There was no smoke and mirrors, rather the records radiated an enrapturing aroma that was ENOUGH!

Tower, like its customers, got old.  It was about rock and classical.  In an era that was suddenly about beats and boy bands.

Boy bands were purchased at the big box.  When parents were shopping for other items.  Rap was bought either there or at the hipster store, akin to a nightclub.

Boy bands died out.  But hip-hop survived.  Oftentimes brittle in sound, totally unlike the rich aural tapestries emanating from the vinyl Tower Records purveyed.

And then rap was no longer about social consciousness and the plight of the black man and more about getting ahead.  Lifestyle triumphed over the music.  And here we are today.

Tower Records is an anachronism.  Like the horse and buggy.  Like the Smith Corona typewriter.  It outlived its usefulness.  And is now disappearing.

Music is struggling to reinvent itself.  It’s just that those who used to shop at Tower, who are grieving its loss, are in charge of the business today.  And want nothing to change, while they continue to make their nut.

It’s survival of if not the fittest, those conniving enough to find a chair as the others get pulled away.  But now chairs are disappearing at a rapid clip.  Which is why those still in power are so vociferous in their complaints.  For soon, they’ll be gone too.

The idea of spending $100,000 to make a record, if not a multiple of that, GONE!  Plying your wares to a vast network of far-flung radio stations of every format imaginable, GONE!  Making mini-movies to serve as marketing on MTV, GONE!  It was a shell game.  Making you buy the album to get the one hit song you wanted.  Even though that was the only good song on the CD.

The Net killed the old business model.  Suddenly, you could get ONLY the track.  And it was about tonnage as opposed to the individual purchase.  Suddenly EVERYBODY was Elton John, shopping at a Tower store of seemingly infinite size, open 24/7.  With communication amongst customers never seen in a brick and mortar establishment.  Sure, the arrogant sales clerks at Tower were part of its charm, its magic, but once you could communicate with your team, the other buyers/fans, you felt power, and had no need for the old dictators.

Big box retailers are going to jettison music as quickly as DVD replaced VHS.  They’re into what’s selling, not nostalgia.  And that’s what the CD is, nostalgia.  The last artifact of a dying age.  The digital creation that killed the golden goose.  Perfectly digitized, perfectly rippable, ad infinitum.

I loved the old days.  I still play the music I acquired at Tower Records.  But rarely the vinyl or CDs.  Mostly the MP3s of those tracks I’ve acquired P2P.

Not that I haunt the P2P services as much as I used to.  Because over the years I’ve stocked up on my greatest hits, I’ve got what I NEED!  Now I’ve got to find new music that I desire.  Via new avenues.  Ones that presently are not endorsed by the powers-that-be.

It’s a topsy-turvy world.  First goes Tower, then goes the major labels.  It’s the end of an era.  An era that rotted from the inside out long ago.

If you think the death of Tower Records means anything, then I’m surprised you’re reading this, I’m stunned you know how to use a computer.

Evolution is not the rule of the day.  It’s revolution.  This is anathema to the old guard.  But just like Google triumphed over not only AOL and Yahoo, but put a serious dent in Microsoft, the old record companies, the old employees, are no match for those savvy in the new ways of doing business.  If you abhor these new ways, if you believe something’s been lost, if you can’t lend a hand, get out of the new road for the times they are not only a-changin’, they’ve changed.