When I was a kid, Presidents Day brought heartfelt patriotic acknowledgements of the contributions of Washington and Lincoln. But in my 20s, it meant the biggest CD sale of the year at Tower Records!
During its heyday, Tower Records’ Classical Annex, at 6th and South Streets, was a beacon for classical music lovers in Philadelphia. Sure, there was the subterranean crevasse at Nathan Muchnick’s, near 18th and Walnut, where on an average day, the CDs were cheaper. And if Barnes & Noble, at Broad and Chestnut, had a sale, you could certainly pick up a bargain. But Tower was the only record store in Center City that was open until midnight, 365 days a year – which meant you could drop by after Philadelphia Orchestra concerts – and it could be counted on to carry all the new releases and much else beside.
Furthermore, it introduced a tantalizing cut-out bin that spanned the entire back of the store, in which overstocked items would be marked down to $6.99. In the days when full-priced CDs at Tower averaged around $16.99, this innovation had the effect of sending me into a delirium. How many Czech operas did I mine from that rack? How my pulse would quicken as I flipped through the superfluous blister packs. (Parenthetically, the New York branch at 4th and Broadway, with an entire store devoted to cut-outs, brought me one plane closer to Nirvana!)
When Tower Records had a sale on a major label (that is to say, Angel/EMI, Deutsche Grammophon, RCA/BMG, or Sony), the prices would drop to $11.99. But Presidents Day was something else entirely. That’s when the store would prop its doors – invariably, it was unseasonably mild, and the sun beating against the glass display windows only lent to the kinetic intensity of the roiling shoppers – and the perspiring crowds would flow in to partake of for-one-day-only, deeply-discounted merchandise, on arcane, seldom-marked-down-ever labels like BIS, Chandos, CPO, Lyrita, and Unicorn-Kanchana. And the majors would be marked-down even further.
I would scarf a slice of pizza beforehand to keep my blood sugar up and then essentially stage-dive into the crowd. Representatives from all the CD distributors were there, with name tags and ties, and hosts from WFLN, Philadelphia’s now-defunct classical music station, would broadcast live from a platform about three-quarters of the way toward the back of the sales floor.
On a counter in the front of the store was a kind of ballot box, in which you would stuff slips of paper bearing your personal information, and periodically these would be drawn for giveaways of free stuff. This is how I came to own Christopher Hogwood’s superlative recording of Haydn’s “The Creation,” among other treasures. It was very easy to win. All you had to do, as I explained to my friends, is wait until you saw WFLN’s Henry Varlack pushing toward the front of the store, and then cram in all your slips. Henry never went very deep into the box, and whoever was closest to the top usually walked away with a bounty. One of my friends, who wasn’t even a classical music guy, took home some stereo components.
Of course, I was still living something of a bohemian existence back then. It was a lot for me to be able to scrape together a hundred or maybe a hundred-twenty dollars to blow on Presidents Day. This was also before secondhand record shops acquired a large influx of used classical CDs. Nowadays, a store like Princeton Record Exchange deals in volume, so to keep up the turnover, most discs are priced only a buck or two.
Viewed from the perspective of 2022, the Tower Records of decades ago might strike one as rather thin brew by comparison. But in those now-distant times, it was like an invitation to drift through Elysium for a day, and to return home elated with all your purchases and free stuff. There were always abundant catalogues and wish books and plenty of swag.
Nevermind the white sales. I never changed my sheets, anyway. For me, Presidents Day will always bring with it memories of Tower Records!
