Russ Solomon — founded legendary Tower Records
Russ Solomon, a high school dropout who opened a music section inside his father’s Sacramento drugstore and built it into the worldwide chain Tower Records, died at his home in Sacramento while watching the Academy Awards on Sunday night. He was 92.
Solomon had asked his wife, Patti, to fetch him a glass of singlemalt scotch, and when she returned he was slumped over and never regained consciousness. The cause of death was a heart attack, confirmed his son, Michael Solomon.
Starting in 1941 at Tower Cut-Rate Drugs, within the historic Tower Theater, Solomon built the chain into 170 stores with sales of $1 billion. The biggest of them all was the third store, opened in 1968 in San Francisco’s North Beach. It was 10,000 square feet and open until midnight “368 days a year,” as the slogan went.
“That store at Columbus and Bay exploded into the single most important cultural institution in the Bay Area,” said author and former Chronicle pop music critic Joel Selvin. “People used to go there on Friday nights just to hang out. That’s how important it was.”
At its peak, there were two Tower Records stores on Broadway in Manhattan — one each on the Upper West Side and the Lower East Side. The store on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood was central to the Los Angeles music scene. In the Bay Area alone there were stores in San Francisco, Berkeley, Emeryville, Larkspur, Santa Clara, Mountain View, Campbell and San Mateo.
Tower sold concert tickets, posters and books, and people used to line up at Tower stores everywhere for tickets that would go on sale at midnight.
“The Tower Records chain was the single most important retail distribution network in the music business,” said Selvin.
Solomon resisted the urge to go public and cash in when he had a chance, and paid for that. Undercut by the Internet and music streaming, the Tower chain folded all at once in 2006 and declared bankruptcy.
Solomon remained good-humored throughout. During a Chronicle interview in 2013, he was asked how it felt to have his North Beach store converted to a Walgreens.
“It started in a drugstore, and the damned thing ends up in a drugstore,” he said. “There’s something poetic about that.”
Something cinematic, too. In 2015, Solomon was the subject of the documentary “All Things Must Pass: the Rise and Fall of Tower Records,” produced and directed by actor Colin Hanks, son of Bay Area-bred actor Tom Hanks.
“It was a place I wished I could work,” Colin Hanks told The Chronicle in a 2015 interview about Tower Records. “I could spend as much time as I wanted. I could spend as much or as little money as I wanted. It was a way to discover who I was, my interests and my taste.”
It was a sentiment shared by Elton John, who had said back in 1976, “If it all ends tomorrow, you have to understand that the job I would most want would be to work at a record shop, work at Tower Records.”
At one point in Tower Records’ run, there were 8,000 people with the job John and Hanks wanted. The yellow plastic bags with block lettering slanted backward became as well known as the Shell service station logo they were patterned after.
Russell Malcolm Solomon was born Sept. 22, 1925, in San Francisco. His father, Clayton Solomon, was a pharmacist who moved the family around before settling in the Land Park neighborhood of Sacramento in 1938.
Solomon attended Sacramento’s C.K. McClatchy High School, but dropped out as a sophomore to work in his dad’s store. He was never a musician.
“The only thing I could play was a phonograph,” he told The Chronicle, “and I was really good at that.”
His record section started with big-band 78s that sold for a nickel. He once shook hands with big-band musician Glenn Miller, though he said his biggest thrills were meeting Count Basie and Benny Goodman. Solomon said he also taught Dave Clark of the Dave Clark Five how to water ski during his stint as concert promoter.
Booking shows in Sacramento, Davis and Berkeley, Solomon brought in the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Beach Boys, among others. He was a pioneer in cross marketing; to promote a show he would have posters on billboards and albums in tall stacks at the front of the store, a signature display style of Tower Records.
Solomon was always angling for more space for his inventory, and in 1965, the record department moved across the street to a building that was far larger than his father’s entire drugstore.
“I think during that period of time, from 1960 to 2006, we became a part of an awful lot of people’s lives,” he said. “If you were into music, and most people were, Tower was the place to go because we had the biggest selection, and we were part of the scene.”
He had enormous power in the rock music industry, but he never abused it — and he claimed to have never abused the drugs that went along with it.
In the 1990s, when sales of records and CDs peaked, he had the chance to go public, but “was talked out of it by my financial guy, and it was a terrible mistake,” he admitted. “If we’d gone public, we would have had time to change and evolve into something better.”
Nutty and irreverent from the start, Solomon took delight in collecting the ties off the necks of the industry executives and record promoters and even musicians he dealt with.
He did not cut the ties off, as his been rumored, but instead asked for a business card and, “Oh, by the way, your necktie ... ” when industry executives visited his office in Sacramento. Solomon ended up with 400 ties, including those straight from the necks of Bill Graham and Richard Branson. He donated them, along with 200 boxes of pictures, posters and ephemera, to create the Tower Records Project within the Center for Sacramento History.
“I’m just glad it didn’t all get thrown away,” he said.
Solomon was married in 1946 to Doris Epstein, and they had two sons, Michael and David Solomon. They later divorced. He is survived by his second wife, Patti Drosins Solomon; and his sons, four grandchildren and two greatgrandchildren.
There will be no services. Donations may be made to the Russ Solomon Scholarship and Endowment Fund at the Sacramento City College Foundation, 3835 Freeport Blvd., Sacramento, CA 95822.