Six and a half months after the South by Southwest 2015 debut and several weeks after that ridiculous stonewalling episode sparked by Gravitas Ventures’ spokesperson AJ Feuerman, I finally saw Colin Hanks‘ All Things Must Pass (Gravitas, 10.16) late yesterday afternoon. And I have to say it’s much better than I expected. I was hoping for something reasonably well done or “good enough” or attaboyish, but this rise and fall of Tower Records history is extra-level — tight, comprehensive, exacting, epic-scaled. Hanks has clearly invested rivers of feeling and loads of hard work.
This thing is emotional. Especially that. If you lived through and savored the Tower Records heyday (mid ’60s to early aughts but more essentially the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s) it’ll open the floodgates big-time. The doc is full of characters and personalities and the usual eccentricities and foibles. It’s not just a recitation of occurrences or statistics. It’s about the heartbreak of time, about the cost of loss and how it all falls away sooner or later. It’s about “what happened to the fun?”
Because ATMP is not only a chronicle of a mythical record-store mecca but a farewell valentine to the now-concluded era of the record (or video) store as a family meeting place — an organic, tactile clubhouse where you went to hang and converse and debate as well as occasionally buy stuff. Streaming has made everything bountiful in terms of access but the face-to-face community aspect is toast. Social media is a chillier, lonelier way of communicating. Which is why I still go to Amoeba once or twice a week. Half the time I’ll decide to rent a streaming version of a Bluray I’ll see in the racks or pay less money by buying online, but I go for the visitation vibes, the personalities, the energy, the people-gazing.
Because (and I realize this is probably the most common observation of 21st Century life out there right now) there’s obviously an isolating element to social media absorption. I “talk” to more people these days than I ever did before Twitter and texting, and in much more intimate and particular terms in a sense, but the conversational quality isn’t the same.