2500 DelMonte Street: The Oral History of Tower Records

Send us Fan Mail

Jerry Pompei got turned onto music partially because he had two older brothers that worked for Tower Records; Tom and Mike Pompei. Promo albums came home regularly and Jerry took the time to listen to what his brothers were leaving behind. Shortly after he turned 18, Jerry started working at the Tower Broadway location in Sacramento. 

Jerry jokes with us that he holds the record for having had the most bosses and it’s true he worked in a lot of different stores and departments; Broadway Records, CVRR, Watt Ave. Books and various Tower Video stores in the Sacramento area. 

It was when Jerry became part of Store Development, specifically the A-Team group who would assist and train with new store openings and remodels that Jerry Pompei became well known and regarded throughout the company. 

In this week’s episode, Jerry shares many stories of wild openings and events while helping Tower expand its presence throughout the country and throughout the world. He also shares the change in the position and the tone of his work as part of the A Team’s duties involved shuttering stores. Jerry also shares a very difficult time with the passing of an A Team member and the difficult circumstances around that event. 

Send us Fan Mail

In 1971 Carla Henson went to interview for a Summer job at the Tower Records headquarters in Sacramento. She got the job and she stayed with it for the better part of 30 years. Her original workplace was at a desk in between  Walter “Bud” Martin and Russ Solomon. 

Later, Carla worked for John Schier, Stan Goman and Chris Hopson. When she started with the company, there were only 5 people working at the Main Office. Carla Henson  had a hell of a ride and a front row seat to the genesis of Tower Records. 

Born in Oakland and struck by lightning when she heard the record “Tallahassee Lassie” by Freddie Cannon while in second grade, Carla’s was a life of music both behind the scenes and on the scene. Hanging backstage with Russ Solomon, Roger McGuinn and Bob Dylan in Houston, TX, digging deep into the local music scene in both Austin, TX and New Orleans, LA  and flying to Tahiti to meet up with Russ were all a part of a day’s work for Carla. 

“I got up every day for 30 years and loved…my…job! Not a lot of people can say that,” Carla tells us. Join us for a very special conversation this week with Carla Henson. 

Send us Fan Mail

Jon Burk grew up in South New Jersey, just outside of Philadelphia. In the mid 70’s he was a teenage Beatles fanatic and all he wanted to do as a young man was work in a record store.  

Jon never worked at Tower Records, but he did put in his time, working several years for the Listening Booth record chain where he specialized in doing displays, i.e. visual merchandising. He made his move to the distribution side after banning the local CEMA Distribution merchandiser for producing lousy displays. He talked his way into the position and a career in record distribution was Jon’s. 

Meeting the Tower brass before opening and then calling on Tower Records’ first Philadelphia store was a treat for Jon, until he had to regularly track down buyers for orders. After Philadelphia, Jon headed up and staffed CEMA’s Boston office, where working on Marketing ideas with Tower Newbury’s Robert Stapleton was “kismet”. His appreciation for the store’s Art Department was significant as well. 

Jon’s declared his biggest win in Music Distribution to be building the Blue Note Lounge in the lobby of Tower Newbury’s Jazz department. 

Enjoy this week’s episode where in addition to Tower Records we discuss one hit wonders, being a Beatles fanatic in the 70’s, the upside and dark side of making your bones in the music business in Philadelphia, Philly radio’s role in the music business overall and bringing it all back home at the World Premiere screening of “All Things Must Pass” in Los Angeles and catching up with all the Tower people he partnered  and did battle with in this heady years of record stores. 

Send us Fan Mail

“It was better than going to college. I wouldn’t have traded it for anything,” is how this week’s guest, Tom Rule, describes his 20-year tenure with Tower Records. 

Tom started his career at a small indie record store in California called Condor Records. As it happened, his first day on the job was the day Elvis Presley died and for a while he didn’t understand why everyone was calling the store with questions about Elvis Presley records. 

Twenty years with Tower included stints in El Toro, Watt Avenue, Mountain View and TRIP part time covering the Bay Area. He transferred to Broadway in Sacramento, a two year stint full time at TRIP, back to Mountain View where he became that store’s first CD Buyer and eventually the store’s Assistant Manger. Off to Nashville for 3.5 as Assistant Manager for 3.5 years, opened and was General Manager for the Ann Arbor MI store then to Chicago to help Schaumberg and finished in 1999 at the Bloomingdale, IL store. 

WOW!

During our conversation Tom recalls a standard record industry lunch with CBS Records where he peppered Jerry Pitti repeatedly with questions as to why they wouldn’t allow Tower to carry what were deemed “parallel imports” and a hilarious back and forth with Stan Goman when he was called out for a promotion he had done for years. Tom also recalls working at the Nashville store and his involvement with Fan Fest, planning out his partying at Tower’s Annual Conference so that he could get more from the daily meetings and his impressions of Tower Records founder Russ Solomon. 

Tom’s story has come full circle and has a happy, on-going ending in that he has his own indie record store, Moldy Toe’s Records (https://www.facebook.com/moldytoesrecords) in San Clemente, CA where he tells us about the current state of music retail and the demographics of customers currently buying music in his shop.  

Join us for this fun conversation with the always interesting, irrepressible Tom Rule. 

Send us Fan Mail

Born in Mexico City, raised in Chicago and moved to California at age 12, Monica Ricardez started her career with Tower Records as a clerk in West Covina. She got a call two days after  submitting her application and filling out Bob Fetter’s famous 2 page music quiz. Rotating between the record floor and the Classical Department, Monica also worked in the unique position known as Label Auditor doing inventories for specific record distributors before Tower had computerized inventory tools. 

Leaving Tower and moving to Mexico City to open a business with a friend, Monica became friends with one of the investors of Tower Records Mexico who lured her back to Tower and she never looked back. Training a crew of people who knew nothing about how Tower Records operated, Monica proved invaluable during her time in Mexico City. 

A couple years later she came back to the US working with Rick Dorsey in West Covina and immediately set about working the Latin Music section. “It’s not a great section” she told him. In true Tower fashion, Dorsey gave Monica free reign to overhaul the section which she did immediately causing significant growth in that department. Recognizing these increases, Monica was promoted to the position of Southwest Latin Music coordinator and ultimately, after interviewing with Stan Goman and George Scarlett she was promoted to National Latin Music coordinator and worked out a deal where she didn’t have to move to Miami as originally envisioned. 

Monica discusses her triumphs, her inability to get some Tower Managers fully on board and other hurdles she faced and overcame during her time at Tower Records. Her interactions with Russ Solomon are what kept her with the company to the end. 

Send us Fan Mail

This week’s guest, Mark Ryan, is Canadian. 
Don’t let that stop you from listening. 

Mark was on site the very first day of building the Tower Records store in Toronto, ON and he was the last person to lock the doors six years later. 

“To this day, it’s still the best job I ever had. It was a dream job”. On this episode of the “2500 DelMonte Street: The Oral History of Tower Records” podcast, Mark fills in all the spaces in between. 

Mark talks to us about meeting at an Amanda Marshall (look her up) record release party  in Toronto, interviewing for Tower’s first store in Canada and landing the gig. In a short time, Mark soaked up all that was Tower and moved from one position to another until trained to take over the store as General Manager at Yonge & Queen Street 2.5 years after starting. 

We also talk about the outstanding in-stores at Tower Toronto, talking on the phone on 9/11 moments after the second plane hit the towers and how Mark attended his first Tower Annual Conference as a cardboard cut out manufactured by Renee Tyler. 

Our conversation ends with Mark learning about Tower Canada’s closure through a newspaper interview and the difficulty in closing down a store, something all Tower Managers would experience a mere five years later. 

Send us Fan Mail

This week’s guest, Dave Coker, was shopping at the original Tower Records location in Sacramento when he was 10 years old. When he started working at the Tower Broadway store in 1968, the San Francisco Tower store had just opened and soon the world of music retail would open itself up to Coker Dave. 

Going to College and doing Military service while working on and off for Tower in 1973,  Dave was riding his bike down the street when Russ Solomon flagged him down and asked him if he wanted to go to a new store they were opening in Stockton, CA. 

Dave talks about the origins of his nickname, running his first store in Stockton, being transferred to Westwood in Los Angeles and partying way too much on company time and off and giving career advice to one of his buyers and future recording artist, Dan Navarro. 

Getting the offer to move to the lush, green state of Washington at just the time he wanted to get out of the craziness of LA, Dave mad his move, first to Tacoma and then to the U-District store where his video store employed members of the band Green River. Dave explains why top shelf record label people passed up jobs in Los Angeles to stay in Seattle and the camaraderie of the music professionals in the Northwest.  

Dave also reminisces about the origins of the Tower Annual Conference (TAC) and how things changed when Tower went from a small, local operation to a world-wide concern. 

Send us Fan Mail

This week’s guest has an extensive music retail resume. Prior to working at Tower Records Sharon Vitro worked for Record Town, a New England music retailer for six years. She ran stores in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts before quitting over a ridiculous corporate policy. The next day Sharon was working at Tower Records on 360 Newbury Street where she  worked for 5 years, briefly with Greg Wallis and then with Robert Stapleton. 

Leaving Boston, she worked for Tower throughout the country with a who’s who of some of Tower’s best; The Southwest Regional Office where she was Kevin Cassidy’s assistant , General Manager of Nanuet LI where Steve Harman was the regional and San Diego, Brea and the last General Manager of the fabled Sunset Store where she worked with Bob Feterl. 

Regarding Sunset, Sharon remember one particular morning when there were 3 staff members on the sales floor and the customers included Elton John, Elvis Costello, Diana Krall and 50Cent. These kind of shopping “drop ins” were so frequent, staff members and records reps first words were often “Who did I miss?” Sharon eventually put a sign up on the back room refrigerator listing what musicians and actors had shopped there that day and staff members would write what they were wearing, what they bought and other snarky comments. 

The biggest event Sharon oversaw was an “unsanctioned” Prince in store in March of 2006 for “3121” when they were asked qt 4:30pm if Prince could play at the store at Midnight. Realizing that it wasn’t a joke and not having had the event approved with by city of West Hollywood, Sharon and the Sunset crew had an insane day they’d long remember. 

Send us Fan Mail

If you had to bet which employee of Tower Records had visited the Playboy Mansion the most, who would you bet on? Russ Solomon? Robert Stapleton? Stan Goman? Robert Stapleton? Bob Feterl? If I could place an actual wager on this bet in Vegas, I’d take my life savings and bet it was Robert Stapleton. But I’d be very wrong and very poor. 

Clint Johns visited the Playboy Mansion more than any other Tower Records employee, visiting 2-3 times a year and he even once lost track of one of his friends in the grotto, but I digress…

In this episode, Clint Johns tells us all about his career with Tower and everything we’d want to know about Tower Magazines. Privately, at Magazine industry functions, Tower’s competition would acknowledge Tower’s superior Magazine departments; the depth and breadth of the departments and particularly the dedication to zines and small press. 

Never at a loss for words, Clint takes us through his time working in the stores, as a Book/Magazine Regional working with Kevin Cassidy and his descent into Mag Hell, working with the enigma Doug Biggert. 

Clint also walks us through the three types of Magazine Section Leaders he witnessed during his time in Magazines. 

Finally, Clint tells us about the day he worked up the nerve to pop his head in Russ Solomon’s office and came out impressed 3 hours later. 

Join us for a deep dive into one of the most unsung, profitable and respected departments of the company with our guest Clint Johns. 

Send us Fan Mail

“He was the most important factor in any type of music education I had” says this week’s guest Kevin Cassidy in reference to his father. Kevin grew up on the streets of Philadelphia and pretty quickly grew into a jazz-loving, doo-wop appreciating, Beatles album buying, James Brown revering pre-teen and teenager. As a teenager Kevin quickly found a double date to a Blind Faith/Frank Zappa concert wasn’t the best way to score with the ladies (“You’ll never take me out again”), but it laid the groundwork to Mr. Cassidy’s exploration of a variety of musical styles. 

Going to college at the University of Georgia on a basketball scholarship, started working at  Underground Records which eventually turned into School Kids records. When basketball didn’t figure into his future, Kevin headed to Colorado to, again, work in a record store for close to six years. After years of the record store life, Kevin Cassidy headed out to the Bay Area where his family had relocated. Working for a family that owned three local restaurants, one of his customers, Robert Olsen suggested he leave the service industry and become the Tower Records Berkeley jazz buyer. 

From there, Kevin blazed a path through Tower Records. He learned some smart business lessons from his Regional Manager Wayne Ennes. Running stores and then becoming a Regional Manager full of single store markets, the nightmare of opening the WOW store in Las Vegas, Kevin eventually was bumped up to running Retail Operations during Tower’s toughest time.

We finish with Kevin reminiscing about two important Tower folks who had a great impact on him; Tower Records founder Russ Solomon and his good friend Robert Olsen.