2500 DelMonte Street: The Oral History of Tower Records

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Erik Flannigan is a writer, music archivist and Manager currently based out of Los Angeles. He started shopping at Tower Records in Tacoma, WA thanks to a yearly Gift Certificate a relative would send him each Christmas. 

He worked at Tower Records Tacoma for one year with Jeff Prey as GM and Tony Siegel as Assistant Manager. He would go on to be Editor of Backstreets Magazine and a staff member of Seattle's legendary music paper, The Rocket. Flannigan left Seattle for LA in 1992 and was on the forefront of web based music journalism. He spent a considerable amount of time as a Vice President at MTV Networks and is now the Manager for music artists Raphael Saadiq and The National. 

Flannigan talks about his father's obsessive music collection of 78 recordings, Erik's 3 favorite concerts of all time,  how shopping and working at Tower Records shaped his sensibilities as a music collector. Erik also believes that before Starbucks, Tower Records was the original "third place". 

We also talk about the film/cassette project from a couple years ago celebrating legendary concert taper Mike Millard with the "Juicy Sonic Magic" recordings of The National. 

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Joel Abramson had a unique & varied career with Tower Records. A native New Yorker, he found his calling in the City of the Angels, helped open up Tower Internationally by laying claim to Israel and finished his career at the Corporate Office in Sacramento as Director of Purchasing. 

Joel talks to us about the cocky (his words) first interview with Bob Delanoy, working in the Sunset store when some mornings there were more rock stars than staff on the sales floor, the trials and tribulations of Tower Israel and why in the last couple years the Tower Product team ordered so many CDs, directed the stores to return them and turned right back around and then ordered the same CDs for the store again.

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Diane Rea started out as a teenager with Tower Records in Oregon, but that wasn’t her first experience working in professional entertainment. Diane talks to us about her time at the Beaverton, OR store and what the phrase “Manager’s Meeting” meant, her move to San Francisco’s Columbus & Bay store after a disastrous interview with Ken Sockolov, and why ending her career at the Market & Noe store was a perfect ending to her Tower Records career. 

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In this second interview with former Tower Records COO Stan Goman, he tells us about his transition from the field to the Main Office, his relationship with Russ Solomon, why Tower Records never opened stores in Florida, did Apple Computers approach Tower Records to sell the new iMacs in 1998,  how fancy restaurants chosen by the record labels didn’t impress him and how he dealt with his departure from Tower Records when he was let go at the end. All this and more in this episode of “2500 DelMonte Street: The Oral History of Tower Records”.

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Former Tower Records Chief Operating Officer Stan Goman talks about the early days working at Tower Drugstore up to his time running stores in Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Francisco. 

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In this episode your host, Bob Zimmerman, details the reasons behind launching a weekly podcast exploring the ins & outs of the World's greatest Record Store chain, Tower Records.