a review of

I remember going to the San Francisco Tower Records when I was a kid and didn't really pick up on what happened to the company after I heard it was gone. The arc is familiar, based on a whim the company starts with one store in Sacramento, then adds more and more, ends up transforming the music industry, but then ends up off balance thirty years later and dies a lingering death in the U.S. I didn't know there is still a healthy spinoff operating in Japan under the same name. How this all happened is told by the company's founder, other insiders, and a few music celebrities to talk about how the store affected their work. It's a great documentary, which wisely focuses on the people and not the big business aspect of the tale.