Tower Records Founder Russ Solomon Dies
• Russ Solomon, the music-loving visionary who built Tower Records into a global retailing empire and the most famous company in Sacramento history, died Sunday night. He was 92. According to The Sacramento Bee, Solomon was watching the Academy Awards Sunday evening at his Sacramento-area home when he apparently had a heart attack, according to his son, Michael Solomon, who remarked, “Ironically, he was giving his opinion of what someone was wearing that he thought was ugly, then asked (his wife) Patti to to refill his whisky.” When she returned, Solomon was dead.
A pioneer who was admired by employees and competitors alike, Solomon made Tower a $1 billion-a-year business stretching from Boston to Bogota, Columbia. He operated on a philosophy that was obvious to him but extraordinary for its day: Build big stores and pack them with as much music as possible. Rival chains sprung up, borrowing heavily from Solomon’s notion that “big was beautiful,” said Glen Ward, former head of the Virgin record stores in North America. “He was probably the inventor of the mega-store,” Ward said.
But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Tower was overwhelmed by big-box discounters, Amazon.com and digital downloading. The company also over-expanded and was partly to blame for its downfall. “We borrowed too much money,” Solomon said years later. “It was unsustainable.” Tower went out of business in December 2006 after a second stint in bankruptcy.
As if to defy the digital forces that reshaped the music business, Solomon opened another music store just a few months later, on the very site of one of Tower’s flagship stores in Sacramento. But the encore fell flat, and he gave up after three years. Nonetheless, Solomon enjoyed a redemption of sorts three years ago as the star of All Things Must Pass, a poignant documentary on Tower’s storied history produced by actor and former Sacramento resident Colin Hanks.
Late in life, Solomon was honored in other ways he was inducted into the California Hall of Fame and two local entrepreneurs made plans to open a Jewish deli in his name on the site of an old Tower store in downtown Sacramento.
