Russ Solomon, Founder of Tower Records, Dies at 92<br />He was in one of our stores every week, literally, wherever he was — in L. A., in Atlanta when he lived in Atlanta, and in New York.”<br />In an interview for this obituary last September, Mr. Solomon recalled<br />that he opened the first Tower Records store in what had been his father’s drugstore with $5,000 in borrowed capital.<br />A high school dropout who sold used jukebox records at 16 in his father’s drugstore in Sacramento, Mr. Solomon was the driving force behind a sprawling enterprise<br />that began with one store in that city in 1960 and grew into a dominant competitor in music retailing with nearly 200 stores in 15 countries.<br />Yet many patrons said there was a clublike intimacy about the stores, where,<br />as Bruce Springsteen once put it, “everyone is your friend for 20 minutes.”<br />Open all year from 9 a.m. to midnight, staffed by hip salespeople who could answer almost any question about recordings, the stores became the haunts<br />of music aficionados scouring endless racks for rock, heavy metal, jazz, blues, standards, classicals, country-westerns and myriad other offerings.<br />“We wanted people in the store to run the store — they’re your strength,” Mr. Solomon said.
