I saw All Things Must Pass, Tower Records movie

Then why continue to use it? The advantage of using any streaming service is supposed to be convenience, no?

 

Mmmm ..... Bay and Columbus San Francisco Tower! I went there once a week for years. Had to get my Pulse Magazine!
I think it opened around '68....

 

I purchased my blu-ray from Amazon, and if it is manufactured "on-demand", it is not a spartan/bare-bones package at all: case, graphics, disc all quality.

I used to time my trips to the Tower Records in Ann Arbor, MI when I knew the latest Pulse! would be available.

 

LA, SF and Berkeley have Amoeba which pretty much has all vinyl in print in addition to used. Whatever is available these days. New York needs one or something similar.

 

Not if we want all our own libraries from our own collections. iTunes is weaker than it used to be but I couldn't care less with tagging and perfectly detailed cataloging. For me it's just about playing a few playlists or all one artist when I'm not playing records. When u just want music plying around my house for hours .

 

Yeah 68. That's when I started buying there. First after Sacramento.

 

Everything else I've tried is worse.

 

You said it! I couldn't live without my iTunes and all of the playlists that I've created (and will in the future). Listen, I'm a 30 year radio announcer, now "on the beach", as they call it, when you're off the air, as I have been sadly for about three or so years and my entire music "work" life, has been to follow the rules and playlists, that a music director of a radio station told me to play. I could move this song from here to there, but eventually, those few "pieces of sh#$" songs that I hated had to be played. iTunes has, more or less, finally given me the freedom to be my own music director, with only the rules that I want to follow by. "Streaming" is completely out of the question for this music fan, as it just seems so lifeless to me and much like Apple's "Genius" playlist matching service, it never comes remotely close to what song that I want to hear next.

 

So now my review of this movie …

Jesus, where to start? Well, without Colin Hanks there would be no movie, so I'll start there and work my way out. How do you describe the feeling that you got, when they finally put faces to the musicians who played the music, on all of those great old Motown songs, as they did in the movie, "Standing In The Shadows Of Motown"? However that's done, that is the exact same wonderful feeling that this movie gave me, when I learned of all of the "characters", who played the roles in the history of Tower Records. Colin Hanks so perfectly found a way to tell their story, keeping it human and so very moving to any of us, who walked through one of their stores doors and wish that we still could today. You have to understand, that back in the mid '80's, just after starting my radio announcing career, I made a slight Bugs Bunny turn and found myself doing national radio commercials for new product, in a tiny studio at the headquarters of "Camelot Music", which was a Midwest record store chain in Ohio, that bloomed from the back of founder Paul David's trunk of his car, to being one of the largest record store retailers itself. So, I kind of witnessed the "Tower Records" story myself, only that Paul David was smart enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel and he sold the company for millions, just before the Napster/internet thing happened.

Naturally, Tower Records was much more global and larger than Camelot Music, but their stories are very parallel, in the end.

I can only imagine that the founder of Tower Records, Bob Solomon, who appears in this film, as the coolest guy who put all of the pieces together that was the foundation of Tower's success, was probably one of the most feared guys in the business at one time, just knowing the business as much as I've witnessed it from my own career and many other friends who worked for the record labels. In other words, I've heard just about every story in the book, so I can only imagine the hell that Bob Solomon may have provided, record labels and staff alike, but he sure seemed unusually human? For better or worse, we never saw that side of him, which was probably a good thing, so it kept this movie somewhat lighthearted. The introduction of every key player as Tower grew and grew was fascinating to me. You could feel the momentum that this company instilled and yet, realizing that this was a "business". I have to admit that my favorite part of the movie, was when Jim Urie, a former record company executive, had sadly lost his job and he felt, as I do myself these days, like an "outsider", with the phone not ringing and I'm worried about my family and out of the blue, a guy like Bob Solomon comes along and makes you feel human and welcomed again. Watching that scene with Jim Urie was almost as hard as watching the ending of this movie, especially since we all know how it ends. I want to work with a guy like Jim Urie, as I can clearly see that he is the "real" deal!

Well, I could on and start diving into some of the key players and the great footage that this movie provides, but instead, I'll just say that if you haven't seen this movie yet and you're anything like me, a person who lived by weekly visits to your local record store, in search of the new Tuesday releases, then see this film a.s.a.p.. I hope that it will make you remember the good times shopping, wherever you happened to shop and to know that maybe some day, in our lifetimes, that another Tower Records type brick and mortar store, will arise from the ashes and bring us the same happiness that we all once had.

 

Fantastic and very sad

 

Loved it, a fantastic movie and quite sad. I was surprised to hear that there are 85 Tower stores still operating in Japan, that alone is worth a study, why? and how is this possible in 2016?

 

Well said. That could make for an excellent follow-up documentary, entitled something like "Not All Things Must Pass."

 

I worked at the Tower in Ann Arbor from 1999-2001 when it closed. I was in grad school at UM. I had such a great time there and great friends. Sadly, I've lost touch with all those people.

 

I was a regular at the 4th and Broadway Tower in NYC. A friend and I also had a yearly ritual of meeting up on Christmas Eve after dinner and going to the Tower on Long Island. This was all during a time when I was seriously collecting music. However, as much as these are great memories they pale in comparison to earlier memories when, every other Saturday I would go with my parents and grandmother to the Green Acres shopping mall in Valley Stream where there was a Sam Goody. That's when and where I developed this crazy obsession! I spent the whole time in there going through every bin of every format. I was a little kid and could only afford to buy one 45rpm single per trip but for me those memories are more special than any memories of actually buying at Tower as an experienced collector. And on those less frequent occasions when I had a gift coming or earned some extra dough doing chores? Woo-hoo! My little kid brain would have mental orgasms buying full albums.

 

I was going to write a review as I loved this film. Loved it. But you have pretty much written it for me, as I agree with all your points, so I will just leave it at that. If you ever enjoyed going to a music retail store back in the day, just buy this.

 

It's having the memories that are important, not where you obtained them. However, for me both stores were in my market all the way through my record buying years. I can't really compare those two entities in any way. Tower, for me, beat Sam Goody in every way possible. Sam Goody was such a different environment for me personally that they might as well have been selling cat food instead of music.

 

ITunes has bexome such an incredible mess. Man I hate that Steve passed on. And as you cited, it isn't just iTunes....at least that isn't a productivity tool for most. My employees begged me to let them switch to a different photo editing app after Apple deleted iPhoto and made everyone switch to Photos last hear, which is borderline completely unuseable for us and the complaints about it being a useless bloated mess are all over the net. What is Apple thinking??iPhoto was fine....nothing needed to be changed. We now use Photoshop, which is overkill for our needs but it works. We used to use Final Cut for all our video editing. It worked perfect. I paid an awful lot of money for it and we invested hundreds of hours learning it. Then they came out with the new version a few years ago, which again made it unuseable for us, and we could no longer install the other one on any newer Mac. Most commercial users abandoned it as well amd went to Adobe, Avid, etc. I understand they are trying to make it better, but too late for us...onto another platform. I am sick of them perfecting things and then changing their software for the sake of change, and breaking what works in the process. I used to love Apple. Now at best I tolerate them. I can't even figure out how to do very basic functions with iTunes much of the time without digging through a bunch of menus. This was not the Apple Steve envisioned where you didn't need instructions to use their stuff. Don't get me started on the watch. I wonder if any of this feedback gets back to them?

 

Mine looks totally commercially manufactured. The art work looks perfect...mine is blu ray. I will say this...even if it is I don't care in the least. It's awesome and will be a treasured disc in my library.

 

The Sam Goody stores were a good time-killer while the rest of the family shopped in the mall, but what a joke. I'd always see budget CDs that were supposed to sell for $9.98 list ($7.98 on sale) priced at a whopping $17.98. I'm guessing the huge markup was needed to help pay for the exorbitant rent.

 

Heck, they even stocked fanzines! Tower Chicago had the Kate Bush ones Homeground and Breakthrough. And I loved them being open till midnight to sell the stuff that was officially on sale the next day. I bought Aerial there, and met a bunch of other Kate fans in line. Not to mention Kate doing a signing at Tower in New York, with a line stretching around the block, for Hounds of Love.

 

Thanks for the kind words and I'm happy that you enjoyed the film as much as I did! I have decided that I would truly enjoy sitting down with Colin Hanks and his parents, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson and just talk music and record stores. These are all L.A. people and they had to of shopped many of the great old (and now sadly gone) record stores, that L.A. had back in the 80's, which I shopped, when I first started to get out that way. Tom, of course, equally found a way to brilliantly tell a different story of the music scene, in his fun "That Thing You Do" movie. And, as for Rita, who has just released her first album of originals, was about to begin a U.S. tour, which my musician friend from New York, who was visiting me the other day and was so excited to tell me that he was going to go to her concert at The Troubadour, which he had never been in before and sadly, she has canceled the show!

 

That Thing You Do is one of my favorite all time films, I lived right near the downtown square in Orange CA where the fictional appliance store scenes were filmed. Do you have the newer dvd where you can choose to watch an unedited version of the entire film? Normally I feel there is good reason that cut scenes are cut, but this is the rare instance where the movie is much better uncut. Well worth buying again if you only have the original first issue dvd. It also extends some scenes so that some of the narrative makes more sense.

 

Excellent little documentary, though I don't like the Title, I think it should have be called" The Rise and Fall of Tower Records..IMO
More people will understand it or want to see it.knowing what it's about.

 

Rita's bit part in That Thing You Do as the world-weary waitress was wonderful. "Look at you. You're no good to me now."

 

Tower books was just as essential as Tower Records. I would not have discovered: Beatlology, The 910, Pond Scum, ICE, Pulse Magazine, Cinescape, LaserDisc Newsletter, Video Watchdog, and many others.
A few years ago, I found a book that put all the Musical Legends comics by Justin Green from PULSE into a single book, my favorite part of that publication.