Rose Goes, More Power to Tower
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The 54-year-old Rose had traditionally run the Wabash store as a stand-alone business. The rest of the chain was overseen by his cousin, Jack Rose. That chain responded to the growth of giants like Musicland and Tower with growth of its own, reaching a peak of some 50 stores two years ago. Unfortunately, the ground was shifting beneath the industry: the new challenge was coming from discount marts like Best Buy, Circuit City, and Target, which–with questionable legality–were selling records below wholesale prices as loss leaders. This made for good business despite a Kmart atmosphere and a staff that knew next to nothing about music. The Rose chain called it quits last summer. A few remnants–the Hyde Park, west Loop, and Ashland outlets–went to Jim Rose. Now he’s calling it quits as well.
The “new” Arts & Show section in the daily Sun-Times includes the loss of a full page of copy, much of it comics. The paper that in recent years dropped Berke Breathed and Nicole Hollander unerringly jettisoned a pair of its best remaining strips, the caustic pirate tale Overboard and the absurdist soap Apt. 3G, while steadfastly keeping moronic fare like Marvin, Crock, Momma, and Nancy. (One bright spot: the eighty-sixing of the Republican Party organ Mallard Fillmore.) The paper has repeatedly blamed the cuts on rising newsprint costs. But as a Columbia Journalism Review study recently demonstrated, this is only half the story. The cost of newsprint has only recently risen back to 1991 levels after a steep several-year plunge. The paper did find room this week for two full pages of coverage of Michael Jackson’s yawn-filled cyberchat Tuesday evening. . . . Speaking of Jackson, a story in the new Vanity Fair fact checks Diane Sawyer’s hour-long TV interview with Jackson. I thought Sawyer’s questioning was fairly tough; Jackson watcher Maureen Orth, however, devastatingly details the lies promulgated by the broadcast. . . . And speaking of devastating, Melinda Newman’s well-reported August 19 Billboard story on Woodstock ’94 a year after the fact portrays the event as the flop it always seemed: the concert lost money, the record stiffed, a PolyGram subsidiary formed to exploit the show has been disbanded, and a planned documentary–now ominously described by filmmaker Barbara Kopple as “about Generation X . . . the story of [a] generation”–will thankfully probably never be released . . . Veruca Salt plays a free in-store performance at Tower Records 6 pm Wednesday.
