3/11/2023 0 Comments Tower recordsSolomon had created that welcoming world decades earlier, first starting the store in his home town of Sacramento in the early 1960s. While it was the epicenter of cool, the employees wanted to share that cool, not hoard it. Long after I stopped working there, I could walk into any Tower Records, chat up an employee and discover a local or unusual artist I would immediately love. ![]() Katia Hetter at her high school graduation. Each major section of the store had its own buyer, who knew the local music scene and what people wanted – and even better, what they might want if a trusted employee recommended it. Unlike most corporate record chains, he gave local stores the power to order their own records and cassette tapes, and later CDs. Tower came crumbling down in 2006, burdened by debt and the growth of the online music industry.īut Solomon’s impact on the world of music was profound. I just remember that it was a lot easier to join his team than the grocery store down the street from my house. I don’t know if it was just this one store that had this chill hiring system or if this was Solomon’s policy. That’s how easy Tower Records founder Russ Solomon, who died Sunday night at age 92, made it for me to enter his empire. I was hired for the summer and whatever weekend shifts I wanted during the school year. I got the coolest job ever by counting well and having a serendipitous lunch. “She’s smart,” he told the store manager, who turned out to be hiring. Over lunch with inventory workers like me at the bar next door, the store’s classical music buyer chatted me up and learned I knew the difference between Bach and Beethoven. What I didn’t know is that my lunch break from counting records that day would turn into a job interview. I had no resume besides babysitting the neighborhood kids, but Tower’s manager invited anyone who wanted a job to come into the store on inventory days and count. ![]() I was making all the mixtapes that tortured teenagers made in the 1980s before CDs and the Internet, and Tower Records was the coolest place to work on the planet. I was a musician in those days, training on clarinet and sax to possibly go professional (newspapers later intervened.) I was just 16 when I walked into Tower Records in San Diego in 1986 and showed them I could count.
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