hollybrooke | the day (week?) the music died?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061013/ap_on_en_mu/tower_records_closing

NEW YORK - The news that Tower Records is going the way of, well, records struck a dissonant note with customers as the news sunk in this week that the 46-year-old music retailer has been sold to a liquidator that will close all the stores.

"I feel very sad about it," Ladd Fraternale, shopping in the country section at Tower's East Village store in Manhattan, said Wednesday. "I think they have a great selection here and the service is good."

On Oct. 6, a federal bankruptcy judge in Wilmington, Del., approved the sale of Tower to Los Angeles-based liquidator Great American Group for $134.3 million. While no firm date has been set for the stores to close, "Going Out of Business" signs went up this week at Tower's 89 stores in 20 states and the chain's 3,000 employees have been told they will be laid off.

The company owes creditors about $200 million and filed for Chapter 11 reorganization in August. In its filing, Tower said it has been hurt by an industrywide decline in music sales, downloading of online music and competition from big-box stores such as Wal-Mart.

CDs were 10 percent off this week, still not a bargain. At 10 percent off the list price of $18.99, Beyonce's "B'day" was selling for $17.09, compared with $9.99 on Amazon. Great American President Andy Gumaer said the discount will increase over the six to eight weeks it takes to close the stores. At the New York store, Larry Kirwan, lead singer of the Irish band Black 47, was scouring the rock bins and mourning Tower's imminent loss.

"It's a bad day for music," Kirwan said. "It's a bad day for independent bands. ... Right from the beginning, even before we were signed with labels they carried us. They've been good to musicians."

Kirwan said taking music off the Internet is not the same as buying a vinyl LP or even a CD. An LP or CD is "something real that's not virtual," he said. "It's like music itself. I'm not sure music is virtual. It's real and it's powerful, and I don't think you quite get the same thing from downloading."

Russ Solomon founded Tower in Sacramento, Calif., in 1960 and opened the company's landmark store on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard in 1969. As part of the bankruptcy auction, the Sunset property will be sold for $12 million. Outside the Sunset Boulevard store, a marquee with a message and REM lyrics said it all: "It's the end of the world as we know it. Thanks for your loyalty." A mock gravestone and Halloween decoration had a single word scratched into it: "Tower."

Norman Labby, who for 20 years drove across town to go to Tower for jazz and classical albums, said he was "frustrated, angry and depressed" that Tower was closing. "I don't own a computer, I don't know how to work one and don't plan to buy one," he said, holding a bag full of CD's and tapes. "I'm disenfranchised for the umpteenth time."

News of Tower's sale to Great American plunged workers into "immediate sadness," said Ramsey Jones, manning the third-floor cash register at the New York store. "Business hasn't been great," Jones said. "Downloading, competition from Virgin and your Best Buys and your Wal-Marts. But the thing that people will miss is the deep catalog that Tower has. They can come here and find anything they want."

Jones, a 15-year Tower employee who also plays the drums and has worked with musicians including Vernon Reid of Living Colour, said he has made connections at Tower and met famous customers like Carlos Santana and jazz great Ornette Coleman. "Customers are going to miss walking into a store and speaking to someone that is knowledgeable," he said. "It's like losing a family member, working here for so long."

Rock critic Robert Christgau said Thursday that Tower often attracted workers who knew about music because they were musicians themselves. "It doesn't make me happy to see places like Best Buy and Circuit City selling records," he said in a telephone interview. "I'd much rather records were sold at a music store."

On a related tangent:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061014/music_nm/leisure_cbgb_dc_3

By Christine Kearney
Fri Oct 13, 10:20 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The upcoming closure of New York's famed punk-rock club CBGB is lamented by locals as the loss of a legendary venue; for others it symbolizes another Manhattan neighborhood becoming corporate and bland. Standing underneath the club's red awning on Thursday evening, several young musicians smoked cigarettes and bemoaned the loss of the dank, grimy club that began in 1973 and will have its last show on Sunday, featuring Patti Smith.

The venue -- its full name is CBGB & OMFUG, or Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers -- spawned the Ramones, Talking Heads and Blondie, whose lead singer Deborah Harry will play there on Saturday.

"To not be able to stand on the shoulders of giants makes it harder to be seen," said musician Ben Meyerson, 20. His friend, Peter Kalaitzidis, 21, said simply, "Where else are we going to hang out and get drunk?"

They said the Bowery is the latest Manhattan neighborhood to succumb to commercial interests after such chains as Starbucks overran the bordering East Village area several years ago. "They're selling it out," said Kalaitzidis. "They're gearing it to more corporate people."

The Bowery was known for its tenements and winos, or "Bowery bums" -- a term immortalized in the Tom Waits song "Better Off Without a Wife." These days Bowery Street is lined with multimillion dollar, glass and steel apartment buildings, leaving many locals longing for the days of when clubs such as CBGB were emblematic of a cutting-edge creative movement.

"The Bowery had the reputation of skid row and now it's all steel and glass," said poet and historian Michael "Big Mike" Logan before a recent gig at The Bowery Poetry Club opposite the punk-rock venue. "We figured this would be the last place in Manhattan to be gentrified and become bourgeois." Logan recalled not so long ago the strip was once filled with drunks passing out, empty parking lots and "flophouses" offering cheap lodgings instead of the swank bars and celebrity lounges that now dot the urban landscape. Many, including CBGB, were forced out by rising rents.

Club owner Hilly Kristal said he started CBGB 33 years ago because the rent was cheap. He wanted a place for country, bluegrass and blues music, but, opening in New York in the early 1970s, punk soon took over when acts such as Television and Patti Smith broke through there.

"Back then they didn't care about the drudgery of the street and this is what attracted a lot of these artists," said Kristal. He said the neighborhood changes occurred "very gradually and then in the last two years very abruptly," noting many other small delis and stores have been forced out. Others say CBGB's closure is a natural result of the changing artistic movement where some have left Manhattan's village areas to parts of Brooklyn. "It goes from crack to middle class housing, that's the way it is in New York," said Bowery resident Laura Feldstein.

Logan noted not everyone is unhappy. "I'm sure if you talk to Donald Trump, it's great," he said, joking that the area could change again. "All this steel and glass will be the squatters' tenement of the future." But for Kristal and CBGB, it might soon all be irrelevant.

Kristal hopes to resurrect CBGB in Las Vegas, taking as many of the club's fixtures with him, including the urinals.