The sad fate of Jazz Record Mart has provoked plenty of tributes and memorials in the press and on social media, all of them richly deserved. The venerable store closed on Monday, and its remaining inventory and fixtures (as well as the business’s name) were purchased by online retailer Wolfgang’s Vault in Reno, Nevada. Countless record shops, each with their own quirks and personalities, have vanished over the past decade, but few could match the status of JRM, which billed itself as the largest jazz and blues store in the world. I worked there for four or five years in the late 80s and early 90s—in fact, I was there until I started working for the Reader in 1993. The store’s longevity—a total of 57 years at its various locations, though it didn’t take the JRM name till ’65—was due to the peculiar vision, stubbornness, and devotion of Bob Koester, who also owns Delmark Records.

As much as I learned at the store, the stories I end up telling over and over tend to be about JRM’s insane idiosyncrasies. I used to like to joke that the whole operation depended on Scotch tape. We used several pieces of tape to seal every purchase—we were taught a very specific way of folding the corners of each paper bag—and another to attach the sales receipt to one of the items. The inventory system consisted of colored index cards bearing catalog number, distributor, and sales history. There was a specific way to layer strips of tape across the top and bottom of each new index card so that it could be safely affixed to the corresponding record with two additional pieces of tape (the initial tape allowed the additional tape to be removed without tearing anything). Apparently JRM was an early adherent of recycling, because at the register we would save the pieces of tape that affixed those index cards to each record, then reuse them to seal up the packages. The store owned several ancient tape dispensers that seemed to weight about ten pounds each. I heard a great piece of JRM lore—almost certainly apocryphal—about Musselwhite getting frustrated with Koester and beating him on the head with one of those dispensers.

Rather than lament what might have been, though, I prefer to remember Jazz Record Mart as the cultural landmark it was—an old-school meeting place for kindred spirits. Among the musicians who came in while I was there, I remember trumpeter Ted Curson—a superb sideman on many of the best Charles Mingus records—and Robert Plant, who was a regular visitor. Says Dawson, “I also had the chance to meet and talk with so many legendary people. The most memorable was Jay McShann [the Kansas City pianist and bandleader who introduced Charlie Parker to the world]; a quiet, unassuming older gentleman just killing time looking at records. I somehow got into a pretty heavy philosophical discussion with him about age and the point of it all—racism, music making. Crazy, right? How could that have happened? He was like a gentle spiritual leader of some sort; a teacher. He was completely positive and filled with gratitude. Thank you, Jay McShann. And thank you, Jazz Record Mart and Bob Koester, for creating a place where that could have happened.”