All Things Must Pass - The Story of Tower Records
 
 
Director:  Danny Garcia
Year:  2012
Rating: 5.0
For those of you who feel nostalgic for the days when you could spend time browsing through a record store discovering new music or simply enjoy the experience of being surrounded by the records themselves, the documentary All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records is an enjoyable journey into the past. Funny that it doesn’t seem that long ago when I use to go to the Tower Records in NYC at 4th and Broadway, but it closed way back in 2006. I recall coming back from a trip and going by and thinking that I must be on the wrong corner and was getting confused because there was a clothing store there. But nope it was gone as were all the Tower Record stores around the country. Now as far as I know NYC has no record stores. Sam Goodies is gone. Virgin gone. Tower gone. Eleven million people can’t support one record store. Quite amazing really.



This was directed by Colin Hanks – son of Tom – who is an actor in his own right – and for the most part it consists mainly of the people who built it up only to see it fall talk about it from its beginnings. It actually began in 1942 in Sacramento California in a small drugstore in the Tower Building run by Clayton Solomon who decided one day to buy and sell used singles. It went well so he and his son Russell began to buy new records and sell them. Again it went well. So Russell decided to go into the record business and in 1960 built his first Tower Records store in Sacramento. Then 7 years later he expanded into San Francisco and so on and on even internationally to Japan and other countries.



It all went well until it didn’t in the early 2000’s when over expansion, mounting debts, budget retailers and the Internet started to do them in. They first sold the stores in Japan (though they are still open and very successful there under different ownership) and then the bankers came in and cut the business to pieces as bankers tend to do. As the reminiscing slowly turns from the joyous to the sad, it begins to carry some emotional weight because losing Tower Records was on some level more than just a record store going out of business, but a sign of the changing of America to something less personal, less neighborly with the buying of music and videos and someday books to being only a click of your mouse on the computer and the death of things we once held dear.