If You Build It, They Will Come: Q&A with Tower Records founder Russell Solomon Words Jonathan Carabba
R
ussell Solomon, what a guy. As the founder of Tower Records, he’s been called the godfather of music retail, a visionary, a living legend. Even at nearly 90 years old, Solomon is still razor sharp, and he absolutely loves to talk about all things music, especially Tower, as evidenced by Submerge’s hour-and-a-half-long interview conducted recently in his Sacramento home, an excerpt of which can be read here. With a drink in hand (“It’s almost 5 p.m.!” he exclaimed as we sat down), a very humble and down-to-earth Solomon spoke with us about the new documentary All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records, how the company was like one big family, how he feels about Tower still going strong in Japan and a little bit about his life-long passion for photography. When you were first starting a record shop, did you ever in a million years think that someone would want to make a documentary about you? No, that’s the last thing I thought about, believe me. I thought about making a living, that was what I thought about. I thought they [filmmakers Colin Hanks and Sean Stuart] were nuts in the first place. It took them seven years and they got it together and figured out that they wanted to make a story out of it, and they managed to do it, I thought. From my viewpoint, you’re trying to cram literally 60-something years of experiences into 90 minutes. A lot gets left out, right? So much great stuff probably hit the cutting room floor, as they say. At the end of the day, they are making a movie. It’s got to have a beginning, a middle and an end. That’s right. More of a movie than a documentary, too, if you think about it. One of the things they didn’t have, which I didn’t really think about it until after it was all over, was they didn’t have a narrator. You know how most documentaries have a voice over? Yup. But even without narration, this film gets moving! It’s got a heartbeat to it and it really gets pounding! That’s a tribute to their editing.
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More of a “can we have your blessing to use this” sort of thing? She blessed it, yeah. I’m curious, did watching the film for the first time make you emotional at all? Patti [Russ’ wife] gets emotional. I just say, “Ah, I’ve been there.” There is some pretty deep, personal stuff in some of those interviews, and the whole camaraderie of the Tower family comes through even though it’s a story of the rise and fall of the company. That was the truth, that’s the way it was. As a consequence, they captured that. I told them up front, “Look, this company wasn’t me. This company was made up of all the people that worked for us.” It wasn’t even just continued on page 22 >> that little group
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It’s not your run-of-the-mill, slow-paced documentary about WWII or something, it really moves. You know one of the things they told me, not sure if they told you or not, was they wanted to use the title “All Things Must Pass,” so they sent it to George Harrison’s wife, and she actually looked at it twice, they told me, and she loved it! She then gave permission to use it, although they didn’t really need permission to use the title.
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