Ep. 19 Dave Coker (Sac, LA, Seattle)
Manage episode 342998385 series 3349539
This week’s guest, Dave Coker, was shopping at the original Tower Records location in Sacramento when he was 10 years old. When he started working at the Tower Broadway store in 1968, the San Francisco Tower store had just opened and soon the world of music retail would open itself up to Coker Dave.
Going to College and doing Military service while working on and off for Tower in 1973, Dave was riding his bike down the street when Russ Solomon flagged him down and asked him if he wanted to go to a new store they were opening in Stockton, CA.
Dave talks about the origins of his nickname, running his first store in Stockton, being transferred to Westwood in Los Angeles and partying way too much on company time and off and giving career advice to one of his buyers and future recording artist, Dan Navarro.
Getting the offer to move to the lush, green state of Washington at just the time he wanted to get out of the craziness of LA, Dave mad his move, first to Tacoma and then to the U-District store where his video store employed members of the band Green River. Dave explains why top shelf record label people passed up jobs in Los Angeles to stay in Seattle and the camaraderie of the music professionals in the Northwest.
Dave also reminisces about the origins of the Tower Annual Conference (TAC) and how things changed when Tower went from a small, local operation to a world-wide concern.
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