Tomorrow night, I'm going to attend a wake for Tower, an event held by ex-Tower classical employees where we will commiserate, dissect, and reminisce about the good old days.
One of the things I loved about working at Tower was that I was surrounded by people who knew even more about music than I did and who loved it every bit as deeply. The New York classical departments, headed by Tower's national classical manager, Ray Edwards, were phenomenal places to work, and the people Ray hired to staff his departments were gems.
Folks like Paul Hertzman, Paul Tai, Jon and Eric Feidner, and Gregor Benko made Tower the place to find classical music you couldn't find anywhere else on the planet—and I think the real reason Tower went belly up is that every one of those folks—and the thousands of other dedicated music enthusiasts like them—were ultimately forced to leave the company to make their livings elsewhere.
Good help is hard to find, but Tower once had an awful lot of it and the company's decline, IMHO, was the result of forgetting that. Well, and reckless over-expansion—but that's another story.
This story is about the guy you'd want to find when you went to a record store—and he's the reason you'd go there and not to MegaLoMart for the extra 99¢ off of Britney's latest.
