Heart on a Stick
Very Close to, if not actually in, the CD player:
seen/heard ° stream album ° buy
seen/heard ° stream album ° buy
seen/heard ° stream album ° buy
seen/heard ° listen ° preorder
seen/heard ° listen ° preorder
Everything Must Go
posted 10/30/2006
There was a time it would have been impossible to think about a New York without Tower Records; now it’s going to be hard to miss.
Yes, it’s just a chain store, and yes, it was a West Coast institution long before it got to the Village. But the store down on 4th and Broadway served as a landmark. It was a tourist destination! Keith Richards lived upstairs! Adventure, Romance, Intrigue. I spent a lot of time behind those revolving doors... as I enjoyed the pleasure and privilege of working there for the better part of a year.
This would have been during my sophomore year of college... 1991? Back then, the video store was in the building across Lafayette, right below Tower Books. What’s now Tower Video was then the Tower Annex, selling cut-outs and vinyl. The basement of the main record store was mostly cassette tapes. There was no computerized inventory, no scanning – price codes were entered by hand.
(We walked five miles to school! Through the snow! And then the horseless carriage came! I had to parallel park myself!(*))
There was also no serious competition.
That’s only mild sarcasm, back there, about pleasure and privilege. For some reason, being a Tower Record Clerk seemed a choice gig; Tower certainly seemed to think so. Applications were accepted in huge, semi-annual cattle calls; on the January morning I went in, hung-over teens lolled throughout the basement working at the store’s multi-page test. Starting pay was something like five bucks an hour – little more than minimum wage, then, less than minimum wage, now, and pretty harsh for city living – and there was the sort of atmosphere that encouraged you to waste most of your wee paycheck at work (many – most? – employees negotiated a fairer scale for themselves by simply pocketing product).
But for retail duty, it was a fairly rewarding place to work. I must have been one of the very few to get any of the classical questions on the application correct, because I was called in immediately and put to work up there – instead of mock-cool, I got mock-prestige. The Classical department used to take up that entire glassed-in room on the second floor and was renowned for having, if not everything, then lots. Shelves overflowed with imports and scratchy early-20th-century recordings and ten billion versions of Mozart’s 21st Piano Concerto.
It was a great place to learn about music.
I was easily the least knowledgeable person there, when I started, but the full-timers were encyclopedias and the part-timers tended to be PhD-candidates and slumming conservatory grads. You were also encouraged to sample as much music as you could handle; the store – these the days before CD-burners – gave employees full refunds for returned open product (which, because they came in longboxes, weren’t put back on the shelves for sale... they were sent to distributors as defective). The idea being it was good to have a staff that could do more than randomly recommend the “best” version of Beethoven’s Seventh (duh).
And I worked with great people, some of whom remained friends long after I left the store. If you came up late on Friday nights – the joys of working retail until 1am – you probably noticed all of us huddled back in the customer service area getting drunk. I have fond memories. And four copies of each Mahler symphony.
*
Tower’s been an also-ran for some time. HMV, then Virgin, overwhelmed it; OM and Kim’s and others took the cool kids out from underneath; the Internet happened. Though its prices were often a dollar lower than Virgin’s, it still suffered at the teat of an industry that raises prices in the face of falling demand. $18.99 for a CD? Goodbye, good riddance.
The Classical section starved, shrunk. The racks are comparatively empty, concessions were made for Soundtracks (and possibly other stuff – the section’s depressing, now, and I really don’t feel like going there). Instead of a staff – the room used to have multiple cashiers, floor staff with various areas of expertise, etc. – there’s a single person. Even with the clearance sale on (at 25% off when I was there, last week, not really a bargain), there weren’t many customers.
It makes me think a little of this old, scratchy recording:
Debussy – Prélude à l’aprés-midi d’un faune/Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, as performed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra, led by Arturo Toscanini (mp3)(from this CD, which seems to be out of print; this collection seems to have the same performance, plus other works, at a decent price)
Not so much because it’s a lovely piece – and it is, and I really like how the assertiveness of the woodwinds helps stave off some of the strings’ sentimentality – but because Bruno Bozzetto used it so well in his half-brilliant Fantasia parody/tribute Allegro non Troppo. Starting as a direct commentary re: the Disney film’s Bacchanalian take on Beethoven’s Sixth, the Italian animator imagines a Viagric, balding, pot-bellied satyr chasing after nubile, Technicolor nymphettes; they’re repulsed. Rejected, dejected, the old goat wanders off and declares Chapter Eleven.
*
I do wonder what happened to Bill. Bill was an Opera guy, and he could out-musicgeek the best of yous in his area of expertise. It was hard to imagine him doing anything else; I liked to think that, before there was a Tower Classical, he was waiting on that spot for one to be built around him. His knowledge seemed to start and end at classical music; his pop-cultural ignorance, when combined with a procedural stubbornness, led to the odd amusing situation. To wit: He wouldn’t accept a personal check from Mr. Richards, our upstairs neighbor, because he didn’t have photo ID. The Rolling Who?
(I wasn’t there for the incident above, or the one below, but they were oft-told tales. My experience with celebs in the store was limited. Thurston Moore is very tall. And Richard Gere was allowed to wander around one night after the store had closed. That’s all I got.)
So: Sinéad O’Connor has a handful of CDs. Bill rings her up and starts to bag the product. She objects. “Thanks, but I don’t need a bag.”
Bill insists. “I’m sorry, miss, but you’ll have to take the bag.”
“I’m very environmentally conscious,” the story goes, “And do not want the bag. I’m sure you understand.”
“For security reasons, you have to take the bag. You will not be allowed to leave the store unless your purchases have been secured inside a bag.” Or something to that effect.
“Fine!” She harrumphed, grabbed the discs back, then paid for them over in Jazz, where they let her take them without a bag.
“Bill,” someone asked, “Do you know who that was?”
“Yeah. Some bald chick who really didn’t want a bag.”
(*) I’m going out this Halloween as that self-parking Lexus. That shit’s gonna kill someone.
YES? YOU THERE IN THE BACK? (4)
1. Toddle left...
10/30/2006 5:06 pm
Funny I liked the entire thing (especially since I've worked for Tower for
12 years), and got complaint after complaint about the shrinking classical
section, but I LOVE your costume idea and agree with you completely.
2. DVC left...
10/30/2006 9:51 pm
Ahhh, this brings back memories. The only time I remember meeting you at
work there was when we were discussing Jeremy Irons' acceptance speech at
the Oscars and his thanking Cronenberg. Did you miss the telecast?
Because you were working at Tower? Can't remember.
3. quixotic left...
10/30/2006 10:18 pm :: http://forkingpaths.blog-city.com/
haha .. Viagric: I've never heard of Viagra used as an adjective ...
4. J____ left...
10/31/2006 9:35 am :: http://heartonastick.blog-city.com/
For some reason I remember AnT as playing at the Angelika; a midnight show,
or a remastered print or something. It's on DVD, now -- perfect for
skipping through the horrid live-action segments.