canadian goose jacket Tower Records founder who created Canada Goose Parka a mecca for music lovers
Canada Goose Parka He was 92.
buy canada goose jacket cheap He was watching the Academy Awards and had just asked his wife “if she would canada goose coats go pour him a whiskey” when he apparently suffered a heart attack, said his son Michael Solomon.
A https://www.goosefrshop.com high school dropout who made his first Canada Goose Outlet album sale at 16, dealing used jukebox records out of his father’s California drugstore, Mr. Solomon built a music empire that canadian goose jacket sprawled across more than a dozen countries and nearly 200 stores.
Canada Goose Outlet Founded in 1960, Tower Records boasted more canada goose uk shop than $1 billion in annual sales, employing a strategy of low prices and a dizzying buy canada goose jacket cheap selection that kept audiophiles busy for hours. Under the direction of Canada Goose Jackets Mr. Solomon, known to some music industry observers cheap Canada Goose as “King Solomon,” its stores modeled themselves after supermarkets, piling items on the floor and keeping their doors open until midnight in the era before the Internet made any song available at any time.
canada goose clearance sale “Taking your date to Tower Records has become an institution,” CBS Records canada goose coats on sale chief Walter Yetnikoff told the canada goose uk outlet New York Times in 1987, “and it’s cheap if you don’t buy too many records.”
canada goose black friday sale Tower Records went out of business in 2006. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
canada goose deals Mr. Solomon added books to Tower’s offerings in the early 1960s, expanded to video in 1981 and in 1995 partnered with the Good Guys chain to launch Wow, a Canada Goose online superstore for electronics and software as well as books, music and videos.
Yet his stores remained a mecca for music lovers the performer Elton John once boasted canada goose store that he “spent more money in Tower than any human being” even as vinyl was succeeded by cassette tapes and supplanted by CDs.
Canada Goose sale At more than twice the size of rival neighborhood music shops, Tower stores stocked albums that ranged far canada goose femme pas cher beyond Top 40 hits to include international acts in rock, pop, classical and jazz. Mr. Solomon, who served as Tower’s chief executive until Michael Solomon took over in 1998, empowered his employees to stock their stores with nearly anything they wished.
“New Orleans had a huge heritage music section; Nashville had a gigantic country section,” Colin Hanks, director of the Tower documentary “All Things Must Pass,” told NPR in 2015. “Tower was, in essence, a bunch of mom and pop record stores… Each store represented its city or its neighborhood canada goose clearance sale in the city. They all had their own style.”
Employees Canada Goose Coats On Sale such as Dave Grohl, who went on to become the drummer for Nirvana and frontman for the Foo Fighters, venerated Mr. Solomon, who wore jeans to work and invited visiting executives to “donate” their neckties to a collage of cravats he kept outside his office.
But while Mr. Solomon’s ambition helped grow the business into a juggernaut his competitor Barry Bergman once quipped that Mr. Solomon had “the guts of a riverboat gambler” it also contributed to his undoing.
canada goose coats His company took on canada goose factory sale $110 million in debt to finance its global expansion, and by the turn of the millennium it faced competition from big box stores such as Best Buy and digital file sharing services including Napster.
canada goose “As for the whole concept of beaming something into one’s home, that may come along someday, that’s for sure,” Mr. Solomon Canada Goose sale said in a 1994 promotional video. “But it will come along over a long period of time, and we’ll be able to deal with it and change our focus and change the way we do business. As far as your CD collection and our CD inventory, for that matter it’s going to Canada Goose Online be around for a long, long time, believe me.”
canada goose coats on sale Ten years later, Tower Records’ parent company, MTS Inc., filed for bankruptcy protection, after closing many of its stores and struggling to find a buyer. It seemed to recover before filing for bankruptcy a second time in 2006 and going out of business later that year.
cheap Canada Goose “The fat lady has sung,” Mr. Solomon wrote in an email to employees. “She was off key. Thank You, Thank You, Thank You.”
Russell Malcolm Solomon was canada goose uk black friday born in San Francisco on Sept. 22, 1925. His mother worked as a bookkeeper for his father, and the family moved around California until his father started a pharmacy in Sacramento, inside the city’s Tower movie theater. The building gave Mr. Solomon’s company its name.
Canada Goose Jackets He studied photography in art school before serving as a radar technician in the Army during World War II, canada goose black friday sale and later worked as a “rack jobber,” buy canada goose jacket stocking store shelves with vinyl uk canada goose records, until going broke in 1960.
Canada Goose online With a $5,000 loan from his father, he responded by opening his first Tower Records location in Sacramento. Eight years later, he expanded to San Francisco, then the epicenter of American rock music, with a 6,000 square foot store that was reportedly the nation’s largest. A Los Angeles outpost on the Sunset Strip followed in 1970, and a decade later, canada goose clearance Tower had megastores in Manhattan and in London’s Piccadilly Circus shopping district.
His marriage to Doris Epstein ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of eight cheap canada goose uk years, Patti Drosins, and two sons from his first marriage, Michael Solomon and David Solomon, all canada goose of Sacramento; four uk canada goose outlet grandchildren; and two great grandchildren.
canada goose clearance Mr. Solomon largely devoted himself to photography after Tower’s demise, exhibiting portraits of Sacramento artists whose work he had collected over the decades. But he also remained attached to music and for several years ran a Sacramento record store.
canada goose store His taste in music, Michael Solomon said, was as wide ranging as that of his employees at Tower. “His own contemporaries would think the Beatles were madness,” he said, “but he loved it.”.