View from theTower

View from a Tower

I took some time off from my little blog site to ponder what might be of interest to readers going forward on these pages of ether. During these past months several things have helped direct me to a new path here. Much of my life has been about the pursuit and consumption of pop culture in its many forms and the exploration of history. It has given me context, perspectives with both frustrations and comfort over the many challenging world environments I've witnessed in 7 decades.

 

 

One of the things that helped in the decision to move this blog into memoir/historical territory was that my sister recently sold her home. She lives in the mid-Atlantic region which is on the opposite side of the country from my home here in Nor Cal. She's lived in her little house with some acreage for over 25 years doing a variety of ventures but finally realized, as the years wore on, that the body was a little less forgiving now and small projects had become major ones. So, given the crazy real estate rise in prices throughout the country she decided this year was the time to sell. And, did so just in time. 

 

Moving is a big deal. I can tell you that because I've moved 20 times over my adult life. It has always been a pain in the ass leaving, deciding what stays with you, or what goes away, getting acclimated and then reliving the ordeal all over again. You begin to feel like Sisyphus rolling that stone over and over again. For my sister, one of the keepsakes that needed to go were boxes of old family photos. We talked on the phone and I asked her to send them to me. Some of the photos date back over 100 years but most were shot from the 1950s to 1990s and cover family from all over the country. I was shocked to find so many photos I'd never seen before (most of them to be honest) and I promised my sis that I would digitize the pictures and put them on a disc or stick and mail the shots back to her. As I type this, I've almost finished the project but it has taken over two months to do so, due to a lot of cleanup work necessary to get many of the old black & whites into decent looking shape. 

 

I did learn a little about the processing of photos from back in the day. The scratches or dots found in many old black or white pictures, which can look like little stars on a very dark background, can be caused in a variety of ways, but generally can be laid to processing problems in the dark rooms. Some occasions find small particles trapped in a camera or film mechanism within the camera to put a scratch across an entire roll, but that is a pretty rare instance.One of the things I had to remember, before blaming the photographers for their ill kept tools was that the home photo market was really quite new and exploding right after World War II with hundreds of labs and new "technicians" opening in a very short time.

 

This was a huge new business that Kodak came to dominate with labs and processing centers and that local small biz camera shops tried to compete in for a generation or two. New tech combined with the urgency for speed meant some scratches on many of the early prints. The factory processes to get the prices down and the product turned around more quickly has generally meant lower quality, which Americans have accepted along the way to get those lower prices. Polaroid developed the instant picture development process that arrived in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I still remember coating the finished pictures with a filmed goo that was brushed on lightly just after the picture developed after a minute or two.  For the camera enthusiasts, classes emerged all over the country to cultivate and nurture the craft and technology but very few I know today still practice the old art  and craft with the 35mm cameras and assortments of lenses to match.

 

Nearly all of my childhood, and most of my teen years, find the pictures in black & white. As I browsed through my family's pictorial history, I felt a little like an out-of-body mind-projection character from the silent film era. In my little cowboy outfits or other long gone fashion statements of yesteryear I could almost hear myself shout out, "Shane! Shane!" or some other plea to join a technicolor world with sound. It's a digital world we now live in but history is always with us. We should not forget the lessons we learned along the way. We should be able to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.

 

Another reason for repurposing the SilverThreads blog to a historical memoir theme rather than a periodic observation site about current events came about with a request to do an interview about my career at MTS Inc. (Tower Records/Video to the world). Bob Zimmerman, a friend and former coworker at Tower, emailed me about doing an interview on his Podcast (2500 Del Monte Street: The Oral History of Tower Records). I was reluctant to do so for a couple of reasons, but thought about it and happily opted to contribute to Bob's exceptional podcast project.

 

My reluctance stemmed from a couple of incidents since I left the company back in the late spring of 2003. Colin Hanks and Sean Stuart made All Things Must Pass, a beautiful and powerful documentary about Tower Records that came out in 2015 to critical acclaim. I spoke to both Colin and Sean on the phone and we had a few e-mails during the time (2007-2010) they were making the documentary, but they decided to bypass the video aspect of the Tower story altogether due to time and budget constraints. Video was too large a category to cover given the limited parameters the film makers felt could be conveyed, and was never mentioned in the documentary. It was their vision and their call, which I respected and still do. I did not want to talk about the experiences for a long time afterwards, and just went on with my life

 

It has been 19 years since I left the MTS campus in West Sacramento and 16 years since the company was shuttered up for good. In those years, the retail landscape in America has been obliterated and especially so for those who offered music, video and book products to the public at large. Many of the adventurous and brave companies and people creating the content and distribution of the magic that music, film and print brought to the world have also been swept away without a trace.

So here we are,deciding finally to talk about some of my experiences and a few accomplishments Tower Records video footprint achieved during my time at the helm of that division within the company which was known as Tower Records/Video.