What’s old is new again. Sacramento’s legendary Tower Records is reborn on the internet

Like an aging but defiant rock star, Tower Records refuses to fade away.

Sixty years after it was founded in Sacramento, and 14 years after it was liquidated in bankruptcy, the legendary music retailer has been reborn.

This time it’s strictly a website, operating out of Brooklyn, N.Y. — although its executives say they wouldn’t rule out building stores in major markets like Los Angeles. They’re familiar with Tower’s rich history in Sacramento and say a brick-and-mortar operation in the company’s birthplace isn’t out of the question, although that would certainly be a ways off.

For now, the TowerRecords.com website is as close to the Tower experience as anyone’s going to get outside of Japan and Ireland, home to the world’s last Tower stores. The website sports an eclectic selection of music and the company’s familiar yellow-and-red logo. The new Tower has even revived the retailer’s old Pulse! magazine, in blog form.

Making Tower a success again would seem to be an uphill climb. The original Tower collapsed in the face of ferocious competition from Amazon, iTunes and other digital venues — forces that have gotten only stronger since the 2006 liquidation of all Tower stores in the United States.

Nevertheless, new Tower president Danny Zeijdel said the website is off to a good start, thanks in large part to the resurgent popularity of vinyl records.

“Tremendous results and sales,” he said in a phone interview. He declined to release revenue figures.

The site launched several months ago without little fanfare, and received a publicity boost last month with coverage in Rolling Stone, Billboard and a few other national media outlets. Zeijdel said the site was starting to gain traction even without the national attention.

“There was a lot of demand from people wanting to buy vinyl, CD’s, even cassettes,” he said. Vinyl makes up 80% of its business.

The site also sells Tower-branded merchandise, including a T-shirt that honors the former store on Watt Avenue in Sacramento, the first standalone store in the company’s history.

Zeijdel said his team was planning last spring to visit Sacramento and speak with former Tower employees about what could be done about establishing a connection between the website and Tower’s hometown. That trip got shelved because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“That’s not off the table,” Zeijdel said. “As soon as it’s relatively safe to go there, that’s a priority.”

Stan Goman, who was Tower’s chief operating officer during its heyday, said he spoke with executives from the new company months ago. “I wish them well and I hope they do well,” Goman said. “I hope they don’t screw up the brand.”

Goman said he was disappointed that members of the old “Tower family” aren’t involved in the startup, “But, hey, it’s their company.”

Tower’s deep Sacramento roots

Tower was immortalized in the 2015 documentary, “All Things Must Pass,” directed by Colin Hanks, whose father, actor Tom Hanks, attended Sac State. But practically anyone of a certain age who grew up in Sacramento knew at least the vague outlines of the story already.

In 1941, Russ Solomon began selling used jukebox records from the back of his father’s Tower Drug store in the Tower Theatre building on Broadway.

After a stint in the Army and some false starts in the retail world, he incorporated the business in late 1960, marking what was recognized as the official beginnings of Tower. The store on Watt followed soon after, and the shop in his dad’s drug store moved into its own building across the street a few years later. Then came the expansion to San Francisco, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Under the brash leadership of Solomon, who died in 2018, Tower became the cool place to buy music, especially for those looking for offbeat and obscure records they couldn’t find in most other stores. At its peak the company operated more than 200 stores, from London to Bogata, and took in more than $1 billion in annual sales.

Tower was slow to recognize the power of the internet, and the business began fading in the late 1990s. Tower went bankrupt twice in the 2000s under the weight of hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.

The second bankruptcy proved fatal, as the U.S. stores were ordered liquidated. But a remnant of the company survived; as part of the bankruptcy, the Tower brand and trademark were sold to a Miami company called Caiman Holdings. Caiman kept the website going and continued to maintain franchise agreements that had been established with store owners in foreign cities such as Dublin, Ireland.

Caiman ran into financial problems of its own, and a decade ago the brand and trademark were taken over by a company called Cumberland Corporate Services, an affiliate of a major New York financial services company called Citco Group.

With the world gripped by recession at the time, the Tower assets basically gathered dust for years. More recently, though, as vinyl record sales have lit a spark in the music business, Citco executives felt it was time to do something with Tower.

COVID-19 pandemic scrambles Tower revival

The plan was to relaunch Tower earlier this year as a series of temporary popup stores around the country, starting with the popular South by Southwest musical festival in March in Austin, Texas, according to Zeijdel.

At the time, Tower felt it was important to re-establish a physical presence. Tower “is more of a gathering place, a community where people come and talk about music,” Zeijdel said. The company figured popup stores could pave the way eventually for permanent stores in big markets where Tower once thrived, like New York or London.

“We thought it was a good year to reintroduce the brand,” he said. “We thought, ‘OK, 2020, the 60th anniversary, that’s the perfect year to do that.’ ”

The plan fizzled because of public health concerns. The coronavirus pandemic prompted the cancellation of South by Southwest and postponed the idea of opening physical stores, popup or permanent. Tower instead decided last spring to reopen its website. It’s headquartered isin Brooklyn and its warehouse is in Texas.

Alan O’Sullivan, Tower’s marketing chief, said the COVID interruption doesn’t mean the dream of opening physical stores is over. But for the foreseeable future, Tower will be an internet-only business.

“We’re in our early stages of growth,” O’Sullivan said.

This story was originally published December 12, 2020 at 5:00 AM.