Russ Solomon
BORN SEPTEMBER 22, 1925 - DIED MARCH 4, 2018, AGED 92
AT the age of 16 Russ Solomon began selling used jukebox records out of his father’s drug store. Less than 20 years later he was well on his way to building a music empire that sprawled across more than a dozen countries and nearly 200 stores.
Founded in 1960 Tower Records boasted more than $1billion in annual sales, employed a strategy of low prices and offered a wide choice of music. It stayed open until midnight, which may explain why Sir Elton John said he “spent more money in Tower than any human being”.
Foo Fighters star Dave Grohl said that before he found fame with Nirvana he worked at Tower “because that’s the only place I could get a job with my haircut”.
In the 1960s Solomon added books to Tower’s offerings, expanded to video in 1981 and in 1995 partnered with the Good Guys chain to launch Wow, a superstore for software and electronics.
Russell Malcolm Solomon was born in San Francisco. The family moved around California until his father opened a pharmacy in Sacramento, inside the Tower movie theatre, which gave Tower Records its name.
Solomon studied photography at art school before serving as an army radar technician during the Second World War.
In 1960 he borrowed $5,000 to set up his own music mecca, opening first in his hometown, then in San Francisco.
By the 1980s there were megastores in Manhattan, LA and London and outlets in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, South America, Israel and the Philippines.
But by the late 1990s, with loans totalling more than £200million, and record sales falling due to the rise in digital downloads, the chain started to feel the pinch and in 2006 it went into liquidation.
Solomon, who died of a suspected heart attack, is survived by his second wife Patti and two sons from his first marriage.