by Chris Ching

Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name, and growing up, I visited the Tower Records in my hometown of Mt. View so many times a few of the employees actually did. Seeing how many thousands of dollars I pumped into their store, they were probably glad I came too.

Cheers references aside, Tower is definitely the store I've visited most in my life. It's really true. I can even remember the first item I - or rather my mother - bought for me - a Batman read along cassette. I wasn't much of a music fan at the time. Christ, I was only 7, and the oversized Scorpions album hanging in the music section scared the s**t out of me (must have been the forks sticking into the eyes of the guy on the cover). That soon changed in the late eighties when I gained an actual musical taste, and Tower became the place to hang out. After school, on weekends, Christmas Day - the doors were always open.

The appeal is obvious; Tower is a fanboy's wet dream. Just take a look at the categories for this website. Most of them are sections in any Tower location.

Recently, I sat down with Bret Mitchell (Operations Manager) and Joe Degrossillier (Employee Development Manager) at the Stockton Tower to discuss their successful weekly series of local artist performances, the decision to buy and sell new merchandise, their take on the company's financial woes earlier this year, and why Tower Records is the music fan's shop of choice in San Joaquin.

The Stockton Tower has been hosting weekly local band concerts. What was the motivation behind the series and how's it going?

Bret: We have wanted for a long time to do some things to raise our profile where local music is concerned. I think it's one of the few things that really sets us apart from other retailers.

What's behind this whole thing was a class going on over at UOP, and they came to us. It was a music industry marketing class, and they were going to produce their own album. They were doing the whole thing from signing acts, recording and producing the cd, and getting it out there. And they wanted to basically go through us to have their release party, and they were going to have a few bands play. I said it sounded like a good idea.

Joe came to me when this was coming up and said this is something I really want to see happen all the time. He got to talking to some of the bands and also other musicians who were playing, and they were all jazzed about the idea. He came back to me and said, "I really want to do this. I want to have a regular show" and I said run with it. And he's run with it!

It's gotten bigger and bigger.

Joe: The first couple of shows were slow, but the thing was more and more bands were coming by interested in doing an instore show. As that month finished, and I got into the next one, I realized I had so many bands to choose from. There were a lot of bands in the area who wanted to play. So what ended up happening was Tuesday continued as a more mature night, and Wednesday is more geared to a younger crowd with the punk and the metal. I had so many interested bands I decided to make it a two day a week thing.

So you envision Tower as a resource for these up and coming bands who may not have the opportunity or venue to play?

Joe: That's totally what it is, and we're willing to take their cd as a consignment, help promote it, and put it in the listening station the day of the show. We put in on sale for them. We'll do whatever it takes . It all depends on how ambitious the band is. I'm always willing to listen to anybody.

Bret: When it first started out we were bringing in bands from the Bay Area - just anyone who wanted to play. Now we are able to be more selective. The exciting thing is that it's the bands from Stockton and San Joaquin county that are drawing, filling the place up. Sometimes you'll have someone from the Bay Area come over and they're on the radio, and you'll get three people. Then you get somebody here who have an album they made themselves, and they get 50 or 60 people.

Is there a dominant musical style for the bands?

Joe: I would say the number one would be punk. We had the little band Scattered Fall play here and that was one of the biggest. 150 kids were here. Kids are getting really excited and saying, "Oh my God you do this?!" and I was like "Keep coming by."

It's interesting though that the local artist section its primarily rap music.

Joe: The few rap people I've been in contact with don't want to do a performance. They just want to do a signing. I may do one of those. I'd rather hear music. I've got a blues band; they bring in quite a few people. I've got a jazz band coming up again, and another one in August. I'd rather have a performance here than just a regular old signing, because anyone can do that.

The Stockton Tower has begun to sell used cds. Why are you so late in jumping into that game?

Bret: When I was at the Tower in Campbell we were the first Tower store to start selling used which would have been approximately 5 years ago. I had been campaigning to get into the used business for three years prior to that, but the powers that be and the corporate office at the time didn't think it could happen. I hate to say it, but as you know the company went through some trouble recently, and I think a lot of it came from the company losing track of what its vision was from the previous decade.

In the early to mid 90s, Tower was a small chain of huge stores. There were no other huge stores. There were big chains of little stores like Wherehouse and Musicaland. Ever once in a while in big cities there might be a single free standing large store. There were weren't other places like Tower; they didn't exist. At that time when Rasputin's' and Amoeba were starting to spring up, I think Tower at the corporate level was more concerned with Virgin and HMV coming to America which were big Tower type shops from the UK. There was a big push to upgrade the image. Believe me, we needed to be more professional, alot of those things were good, but the bottom line was consumers were speaking with their pocket books. They wanted outlets for used products.

Didn't a Rasputin's open up a couple doors down from the Campbell Tower?

Bret: Yes. In fact when I found out they were coming, I said we've got to get into used now. I felt if we were in the used business before they got there it might nip that in the bud. No one believed in it; they drug their feet. Finally, after like two and half years, they said OK give it a try. And we did OK, but the problem was there was already Rasputin's and Streetlight on that Blvd. We became the third option for people to sell product. I think in a lot of ways it was a missed opportunity.

And when I got here... as soon as I found Replay Records was going to be leaving, I said this is an opportunity we need to step in and get involved.

I always wondered what the dynamic was between you and Replay, having two record stores next to each other? Was it positive or negative?

I don't think it was really that negative. First of all, Willy who runs it is a really good guy. And if we couldn't solve a customer's problem, sometime we would send them over there. I think the proximity helped him. I know he sent a lot of people to us. That kind of competition is not loathsome to me all. Couple of record stores in close proximity means that when people are thinking about getting records theyre going to come to this area. So I don't think that necessarily has to hurt. I think we've been far more hurt by certain other big box retailers who have gone out and sold products...

AKA... (laughter)

Bret: I'm not naming any names, but I'm sure you can figure out the akas. They've gone out there on release dates and sold product for below cost . It's great for a consumer to be able to buy that product at the cheapest possible price, but it's establishing in the mind of the public that it's a reasonable price. If we're paying $12 for a piece of product, and they're selling it for two, the customer is coming in here thinking we're a rip off eventhough we're selling it for $12.99 and losing money. So that is a very difficult thing to compete with, because we don't have refrigerators and plasma tvs. You sell a $4000 plasma tv and even if you have a 25% markup, you've made a thousand bucks that going to go a long way to paying the rent.

What makes the Stockton a better destination for music fans than the AKAS?

They have a limited number of titles that they're going to carry. I don't know for a fact, but I've heard it's about 3500 titles. They're are 2 and a quarter million titles in print. We can atleast try to give people a variety. If you're a local act you're not going to get your record in a big box retailer unless you can break nationally, and how does anyone break nationally if all they know is national and retail is national?

I guess if you're ready to be a band whose here today and gone today (laughter). Do you have the scoop on the alleged Best Buy "gather around the circle motivational cheer" rumor?

Bret: I don't know anything about it.

How was employee morale during the "Tower is Bankrupt" odyssey earlier this year?

Joe: I wouldn't say morale was low just everybody was worried.

Bret: Morale was low before the Chapter 11, because we all knew the company was in "trouble" and we didn't know what the future would bring. But at the point they actually filed, the communication between the corporate office and the stores was actually pretty good, and I think people understood that all the creditors were being paid, all the payroll was being paid.

I tried to explain it to the staff this way. If you buy a house and you can't pay the mortgage - what do they do? They repossess the house. If you buy a car and can't pay for it, the Repo Man comes and takes your car. Well, Tower borrowed money form a group of people called bond holders, and when they couldn't pay it back they repossess the company. It just meant that there were new owners. Getting rid of the debt was the thing that put us up on a footing to become competitive again, and I think the staff basically understood that it was a postive thing.

The things that were happening within our company moving into that time were extremely positive. I've been with the company for thirty years, and I would tell you that the last three years has been the biggest change in terms of raising the standards, giving the people in the field more tools to do their job, and letting us know what the expectations are. These kinds of things had never been clearly... the company was run by the seat of its pants, and now we were starting to be told this is what we expect and we can help you do it. Those things are really positive. That's probably the only reason a lot of the people hung on during this time. Yeah, there was a lot of uncertainty, and there is still uncertainty, not so much about Tower, but the record industry in general. It's a weird time for reasons that go way beyond Tower.

You mean downloading?

Bret: It's got to do with downloading. It's got to do with what's going on with radio. If you put the ownership of the media in the hands of a few small companies suddenly you get a huge homogenization of what's available for people to hear. There would be those who would tell you that's really great; we're all going to have the same values because we're all going to hear the same things. But how do you get any new ideas? How does a new artist break? How does somebody with something fresh and interesting and exciting break through that bureaucracy? I think all these things contribute to an environment where music is almost an afterthought in the record business.

That's part of what were trying to do with the local music performances. We have Levi Huffman who comes in here to play, and you can tell by watching him he does this because this is what he loves to do. The odds of him having a huge market success are slim, but he's doing the thing he loves and that comes across, and if we can bring some of that passion back within the store it can't be a bad thing.

Years ago Tower published their own magazine Pulse. One of the sections was Desert Island Discs where readers would send in lists of their favorite albums and movies. So if you were stranded on a desert island and had a really long extension chord what would your picks be?

Bret: I'm a classical fanatic. I own well over 4,00 classical cds. I have another 500 rock, a little bit of country, a little bit of this and that . If I chose Desert Island Discs they'd all be classical. Individually, the Bizet Symphony. Movies... Bread and Chocolate with Nino Manfredi - probably my favorite movie of all time.

Joe: Everything But The Girl for music. Stan Gilberto. As far as movies, almost any 80s movie. Light hearted stuff that didn't say anything politically but was just entertainment - the way everything should be.

Bret: We're totally opposite (laughter).