2500 DelMonte Street: The Oral History of Tower Records

Send us Fan Mail MTS Not the company, the man.  Michael T Solomon sits down with “2500 DelMonte Street” to discuss it all;  his time with Russ & Doris, Tower Records, Bud Martin, Sunday school with Stan Goman, chauffeuring The Rolling Stones around town before their show in Sacramento, starting out at the Tower Drug Store, working at Watt Ave, Columbus & Bay and Berkeley, working as Tower...

Send us Fan Mail Darrin Roberts grew up in Southern California with a “Kevin Arnold-Wonder Years” type upbringing. After a neighbor suggested his mother take her 3 year old to a recently released “war movie”, he became obsessed with all things cinema.  After getting his degree at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts he began working on a series of music film projects as both a camera operator and a film...

Send us Fan Mail “I knew quite a bit about [Tower]. I knew Sunset was the mecca. So I just popped in one day and that’s how it all started” says this week’s guest Marty Bender Sobolweski. From his earliest memory of his grandmother pulling out a record player to his mother coming home from her temp job at Capitol Records in Cleveland with a box of free records, Marty has been a life long music fan...

Send us Fan Mail Our guest this week, Cathi Ronnenburg, remembers being on the phone with the Manager of a neighboring location when men in black suits swarmed her store. No, it wasn’t a Tower Records she was running at the time, but being busted by the FBI for the bootleg albums she and her company were selling is a pretty exciting start to record retail and Cathi’s professional story in general....

Send us Fan Mail Not many people are “One Degree of Separation” from Kevin Bacon, but this week’s guest, Jason Sumney is. Growing up in Pittsburgh, PA, the son of a rabid record collector, Jason started his retail music career while in HIgh School at National Record Mart, a locally based, national chain that at its peak had 175 stores in 30 states. Knowing all of the latest releases and the camara...

Send us Fan Mail Rob Chapman likes The Rolling Stones. Wait…check that. Rob Chapman loooooves The Rolling Stones. Not only that, but he regularly corresponds with a couple of the guys in the band. Several years ago Rob wrote a book about a very interesting period in the band’s history, Ron Wood and Keith Richards’ side project The New Barbarians. Rob went deep on this project and the result is the...

Send us Fan Mail Bob worked for Tower Records 18.5 years. Washington DC, Seattle, Toronto, Boston, Philadelphia and Lincoln Center NYC. He loved working for Tower so much, he made a podcast about it. After multiple requests, he’s being interviewed for his story today.  Our guest host/interviewer needs no introduction; that’s why we’re not going to tell you who it is unless you listen.  In keeping...

Send us Fan Mail “The goal was to work at a record store and then everybody eventually wanted to work for a label. I envied the label guys and then I went and married one.” If the name Betsy Altomare sounds a bit familiar, there’s a reason for that. Back on episode number 33 we interviewed her husband Keith Altomare, who told us how he and Betsy met while she was the Night Manager at Tower Records...

Send us Fan Mail Mike Pompei grew up in a big Italian family just outside of Buffalo NY. His family was very musical and it seemed to rub off on Mike, who currently plays wineries and breweries throughout Sacramento. At the age of 12, just as his generation of pop music was becoming a priority, the Pompei family moved to the sunny enviorns of Sacramento, California. Following in his older brother’...

Send us Fan Mail Christina Sharpe grew up in New York City, mostly on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Growing up in a household where music was always being played and appreciated, Christina took her love of jazz and soul music and added twists of Duran Duran, Level 42 and early 80’s East Coast Hip Hop to her repertoire. Christina started her Tower career at the 85th & 3rd Avenue location wi...

Send us Fan Mail When The Beatles hit America, it came at about the perfect time for Joe Medwick. Just months earlier, when he was 7 years old, his father had passed away, a crushing moment in young Joe’s life. But it wasn’t as though The Beatles were his introduction to music. Joe had older brothers and sisters with album collections he borrowed and pored over. Joe says he felt like music being a...

Send us Fan Mail In the middle of a very long shift, working to get the brand new Dallas, TX store open, Rob Tolleson had no idea why Kevin Cassidy wanted to go out for coffee with him. “I thought I was in trouble” was his first thought. When Cassidy asked if Rob had ever considered working in management, Tolleson told him that he had not for the simple fact that he hadn’t been on the sales floor...

Send us Fan Mail Charles R. Cross isn’t our typical guest on 2500 DelMonte Street. He never ran a Tower store…never worked in a Tower store. But he had a lot of business and personal relationships with Tower Records, as well as being a steady customer. In the parking lot of the Tower Records at 5th & Mercer in Seattle, weeks before the release date, Charley first heard Nirvana’s “Nevermind” gi...

Send us Fan Mail Jim Barber had a 19-year career with Tower Records. Starting in 1987, Jim worked in the Classical Department in Washington DC with Rob Bruce as the store’s General Manager. After only a year on the job, Tower decided to open a location in Tyson’s Corner VA and Jim was one of three employees to transfer to help get the new suburban location and its first-time General Manager, Georg...

Send us Fan Mail Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago and a fan of female pop vocalists, Miguel Ortuno made his way to the then-new Tower Records store in Bloomingdale, IL to purchase his very first CD, “The Bodyguard” soundtrack featuring his favorite female singer, Whitney Houston. It wasn’t long after that Miguel applied for a job, was hired, and worked at the Bloomingdale location.  Running th...

Send us Fan Mail Geoff Mayfield has had a long and illustrious career in the music business. Starting as an Editor for a Columbus, OH music magazine called “Focus”, it wasn’t long before Geoff found himself behind the microphone at WBBY jazz radio.  Geoff’s background in both music journalism and radio stood out to an executive at Camelot Music, the mall-based music retailer based out of Canton, O...

Send us Fan Mail With a father who was primarily a jazz drummer, but would play all kinds of local pickup gigs (and still plays today at 87 years young) music came naturally to a blooming Mike Redmond. So it’s no surprise an early career in music retail came naturally to young Mike. Starting in Sherman Oaks under the tutelage of Dave Montes, Redmond found himself early on working for Craig Martin...

Send us Fan Mail “My interactions with the ‘higher ups’ after I moved to Annapolis largely consisted of [them saying] ‘When are you going to stop doing this?’ and me saying ‘You hired me to do the job, either fire me or shut the hell up ’ ”  Scott Edward Phelps had an interesting journey at Tower Records. Moving to Nashville with his bandmates to strike out for a career in music, Scott concentrate...

Send us Fan Mail If you worked in a Tower Records store or at the corporate offices in Sacramento and had issues with a computer, chances are you probably talked to our guest this week, John Correa. Leaving his life as a member of a local Break Dance crew, John started working for Tower at the TVID warehouse in 1988. John’s first professional endeavor working a tech job was when he started doing d...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s episode takes us away from the coasts and back into the heartland. Jen Gies is originally from Chicago and it was at Tower Records on Clark Street where she began her career with the company, hired in as a Holiday temp employee. As luck would have it, her first day working at Tower happened to be the same her favorite band was doing an in-store launch for their second...

Send us Fan Mail Don Erwin started with Tower in 1972 and was a Manager for Tower Posters from 1973-1978. He worked for Dick Harris whose MTS Inc’s employee number was 1. Dick, Don and MTS eventually got smart and spun off Tower Posters' success by becoming California Posters, later CP Rock, one of the country’s premier distributors of counterculture posters. At one point California Posters s...

Send us Fan Mail Travis Michael Anderson grew up in Yakima, WA more than 2 hours from Seattle. A classical brass player, Travis moved to the Bellevue WA area and applied to Tower Records Bellevue. He was turned down because he didn’t have enough retail experience. For the same reason he was turned down at Barnes & Noble and ended up working for Wherehouse Records. After dealing with Wherehouse...

Send us Fan Mail When Tim Wessman started working at Tower, it was never previously on his radar. Tim was immediately impressed by the level of devotion his co-workers had for music. He felt an immediate fit when he started working for Tower.  With no portfolio he interviewed for the Artist position at the Berkley Video store and he was hired by Sue Peterson on the strength of his interview.  At t...

Send us Fan Mail “College Boy” Greg Harrington started working at Tower Records Burlington MA and did so well on his first day of register, they threw him back in receiving to do pricing. Not the usual path to working in the receiving department, but our guest this week didn’t have a conventional career at Tower Records. Burlington MA, the big store on Boston’s Newbury Street and the Cambridge sto...

Send us Fan Mail Pam Hopson first began working for Tower Records/MTS Inc. in 1976. But unlike many, Pam had to pay to get the job. One of the employment agencies Russ Solomon used back in the early days charged the employee and not just a little bit. Pam paid $400 in 1976 ($2,137 in 2023 dollars) to get a job doing what she did best at the time; running business machines, particularly a 10-key. S...