music from my old record store jobs

I had a lot of jobs in record stores back in Philly, in a lot of different kinds of places. Each store had its own personality, and its own boss from hell. But each also provided its own education.

"Move Right Now" was something I heard often when I worked at Sound Of Market St. A couple of the older ladies who worked the register would play gospel records when the doors were finally locked behind the Friday (payday) customers. I worked there about 1988 or so. This was one of the best selling gospel records of the time, and I always thought the bass player on this cut was Ungodly.



The most fun record store I ever worked was South St Record Exchange. Bob Dickie and Jacy Webster shaped my musical taste when I was a young punk rock type. They originally ran the record department at a used bookstore called Booktrader, and it was there they played me some of the stuff that changed my life once a week: Cecil Taylor, No New York, Beefheart, Raymond Scott, and more. All that stuff you hear about record stores being impromptu gathering places where you got your musical, political, and social education, where older music fanatics spread the disease to younger music fanatics. I learned about everything from Ornette Coleman to the Communist Manifesto, Fellini movies, comic books, and all the good stuff. Except girls. Girls back then were generally more interested in Duran Duran than in The Fall.

Bob and Jacy radicalized me. And they turned out to be great bosses.



I worked one day a week at SSRE. I worked four days a week at Third St Jazz and Rock, the best record store with the worst boss ever, who actually fired me for working four hours a week at SSRE.

Third St was as legendary a record store as there ever was. Everyone who worked there really knew his shit fifty-eight ways to Sunday. But the shaman of the joint was the guy who ran the stock room, Alan Edwards, who knew every aspect of pop music from the sixties onward. He was a really a finishing school for me, and it was he who turned me onto NRBQ, mostly by handing me a pile of live Q cassette bootlegs he'd made himself. These wee life-changing documents for me. They proved once and for all that I wasn't the only person who felt the way I did about music.



Those of you down with the Philly lore know that Sun Ra and his band lived in Philly, and that they pressed up and sold their own records. Third St was their most loyal retail outlet. Every so often, a couple guys from the band (I never saw Sun Ra himself in the store) would come in, sometimes in stage gear, with boxes of records and give the boss (a pig of a human for whom I have no love) a sales pitch you'd have to see to believe, including "You MUST stock this! This record is the TRUTH! But the vibrations it will unleash will have reprocussions! You must beware!"

Bosshole would Gentile them down to a ridiculously low price per copy, pay 'em cash, and send the Arkestra guys packing. I loved those guys. "Authentic" doesn't cover it.

Working in record stores was one of the best things about growing up in music in Philly. How else were you gonna hear Linton Kwesi Johnson and the LA Mass Choir in the same room on the same day?

There are so few record stores today, and few of those provided the community services of the places where I got a huge education and even made a little money.