The music clerks who can spin your world

Obscure. Snobbish. Frighteningly hip. Think “record store clerk,” and the stereotypes aren’t particularly kind.

Are they going to insult us because we’re looking for Billy Joel’s latest disc? Will we have to prove our indie-rock credentials just to buy a Belle & Sebastian CD? Don’t they listen to anything normal?

But as scary as the words “May I help you?” can seem, it’s the clerks who often shape how, and how seriously, we hear music. Sure, a smug one can shut us down. But a good one will excite enthusiasm and curiosity -- will take us down new musical avenues or help us find the right gift for a friend or relative: His or her deep knowledge of obscure recordings can lead us to sounds we didn’t even know existed. All we have to do is find the right person.

Given that Southern California is packed with record stores, it shouldn’t be that hard. And yet it can be: We’ve all gone into a chain store and spoken to a clerk whose musical knowledge was limited to songs used on TV commercials. Makes getting patronized seem like a favor in comparison.

It’s why some clerks evoke such fondness, even loyalty to the point that fans follow their favorites from place to place the way others might pursue a hairstylist or bartender.

Ric Menck, a veteran drummer for the bands Velvet Crush and the Tyde, goes to a record store almost every day, mostly the giant Amoeba Music in Hollywood and the smaller, vinyl-crammed Freakbeat in Sherman Oaks.

He started young: His earliest musical memories are as tied up with the opinionated, contentious clerks he met as they are with the records he bought.

Now, Amoeba draws him partly for Jimi Hey -- a vintage-clad, longhaired one-time member of the L.A. band Beachwood Sparks who is an aficionado of melodic rock from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and looks the part.

“One day he pulled out this psychedelic children’s record from the ‘60s,” Menck says. “He explained it to me, but it was so esoteric I couldn’t even grasp what it was. I pride myself in knowing a lot of obscure stuff, but he’s amazing. He’s created this aura around him.”

At Freakbeat, he seeks out Bob Say, who “loves vinyl records more than anything else,” Menck says. “He holds them in his arms, he gets giddy when he finds one he’s been looking for.”

The L.A. landscape

Of course, record store clerks have a lot to answer for. The most famous portrayal of them -- the intense losers in the film “High Fidelity” -- shows them as downright frightening.

“What did he ever do to you?” John Cusack’s shop owner asks a clerk played by Jack Black who has just chased a customer from the store.

“He offended me with his terrible taste!” Black barks back.

“You’re totally elitist,” another “High Fidelity” customer says to the clerks. “You feel like underappreciated scholars.”

Walk into the major independent record stores around Los Angeles -- Rhino Records, Aron’s Records, Fingerprints in Long Beach, Poo-Bah Record Shop in Pasadena or Amoeba Music, which has swallowed some of the best clerks from other stores the way the Yankees once poached rival teams -- and you can find enough underappreciated scholars to fill a decent English department.

Though chains typically employ young people for whom the job is transitional, Tower and Virgin each offer erudite staffers. Julie Remick at Virgin Sunset, for instance, is as passionate a jazz clerk as you’ll ever find. “Music is my savior,” she says. “It keeps my inner spirit alive.”

At larger record stores, the arrangement of clerks can resemble an old World War II movie in which the macho Texan, the Brooklyn Jew and the simple boy from the plains all pull together for the defense of the U.S. of A. In record stores, it’s the alt-country buyer with the Buddy Holly glasses, the skinny indie rocker who could belong to the Decemberists, the goth in her Joy Division T-shirt and the dreamy, abstract jazzhead -- all in service to the music.

“Obsessive-compulsive,” Cliff Davis, an R&B-loving; Amoeba clerk who has peddled records for a decade, says when asked about his peers and their mix of dedication and arrested development.

“Once you get in, it’s hard to get out,” says Davis, who wears a shaggy, grown-out Afro. “Records became like a monkey on my back. I worked other jobs, but I realized I was missing it. What I liked about record stores was the characters: It’s like a link to this whole underground culture. I get bored aboveground really easily.”

It’s the same story at smaller independents like Echo Park’s Sea Level Records, where Todd Clifford is a co-owner. As the store’s sole employee, he works seven days a week. He recently left for his first vacation since opening the spot three years ago.

“I’d like to stay home one of these days and clean my apartment,” says the easygoing, sleep-deprived Clifford, 30, standing behind a counter piled with unstocked vinyl and a plastic castle of dried-up Sea Monkeys. With his pallor, scruffy chin and bed-head, he looks as if he hasn’t been outside in a while.

But being in the store 360 days a year means he knows almost every single disc in his indie-centric store. He knows without checking that he just sold his last copy of Pavement’s “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain.” He has four of the new Elliott Smith. Two of the new Delgados’ record, one copy each of the band’s other albums, a box of four more on the way.

“One of our goals was to be indie and not be snobby about it,” Clifford says, opening a box to chomp a piece of pizza that will serve as the day’s main meal. “A lot of my friends still like that Justin Timberlake record that came out a couple years ago.” He confesses to a weakness for early Neil Diamond.

“But my job as a record store guy,” he admits, “is to occasionally make fun of things.”

‘A desire to serve’

“When I talk to a clerk now, I almost feel like I’m jousting,” says Steven Mirkin, a local rock critic who visits stores every weekend. “ ‘Oh, you think you’re hip? Well, how about this?’

“There’s such a sense of hipster entitlement. With the guys at the Aron’s buyback counter, you got the sense that they were judging you -- it was like a moral judgment,” Mirkin says. Some record stores, he suspects, go out of their way to find nasty clerks, as a badge of cool.

The better clerks, he says, make finding music a pleasure. “It’s almost like certain restaurants have professional waiters, like at Musso & Frank or Spago: When you sit down you feel comfortable being in their hands. It’s not just connoisseurship -- it’s a desire to serve.”

If a love of obscurity is what unites clerks of all kinds, whether Western-shirted or dreadlocked, Freakbeat’s Bob Say says that such passion comes in part from wanting to help his customers. “It makes people think, ‘I’ve got something no one else does.’ There are lots of great records that are popular. But the thrill of the chase is not there.”

Elvin Estela, a clerk at Fingerprints Records who looks like a younger Arthur Lee from the ‘60s band Love, tries to use his interest in rare music to connect with mainstream customers looking for something new.

“I ask them what their favorite records are,” says Estela, who -- under the name Nobody -- also DJs and records otherworldly electronica albums out of the vinyl that comes into the store. “Whatever they choose, I can always find an obscure alternative. If they like the Doors, I recommend Gandalf, a dark psych band with upfront keyboards. If they like the Beatles, I recommend the Aerovons, an American band that flew to England just to record their debut album at Abbey Road.

“The main thing I notice here is that the same 20 records sell,” Estela adds. “But there are like 200 or 300 more groups that are on that level: I think the Pretty Things should be mentioned in the same breath as the Who.”

Underneath all the debates about the relative worthiness of one band versus another, however, the appeal of obscurity is sometimes simpler yet: By seeking out esoteric work, new or old, easy listening or Tropicalia, even people with years of dedicated listening can find something that returns them to that excited feeling when they heard the Velvet Underground or Charlie Parker or Hank Williams for the first time.

“Every week I’m finding something I’ve never heard of,” Sea Level’s Todd Clifford says, “that I think is the best thing ever.”

The school of cool

Although some music freaks champion a small specialty store or two, those who shop for a variety of styles often favor Amoeba Music, partly for the staff. “Amoeba, hands down, is the best place in the whole universe,” says Anne Litt, a DJ for KCRW-FM (89.9). “They can find anything. It’s like they send their clerks to cool school.”

The dean of Amoeba’s cool school is Karen Pearson, 43, a philosophically minded Berkeley native who’s been working in record stores for a quarter of a century. She hires the staff at the Sunset Boulevard shop, where as many as 90 people toil at any one time.

She looks for creative people with an erudition about music. But knowledge, she says, isn’t enough. “There’s plenty of music nerds who can’t deal with people.” When she interviews someone, she wonders, “Can this person handle a really high level of human interaction? Can they stay calm?”

Good thing, too, given that customers can be difficult in their own right. One of Pearson’s star students is Jason Moore -- an intricately side-burned Oklahoma native and resident metal-head -- who says the main challenge of his job is avoiding confrontation. Moore works the buyback counter, where people sell their old CDs and records for cash or credit.

“One guy said, ‘Man, if we were in a field right now I’d fight you,’ ” says Moore, who with his rugged build and horseshoe tattoo looks as if he’d probably win. “People break things all the time -- they’ll break their CD or a record. People go off on you.” One customer started yelling when he passed on her CDs. “She said we were piping marijuana through the air-conditioning.”

The quirky, obsessive quality of an indie store’s staff, Pearson says, is the biggest difference between indies and the chains, so she reads as many as 50 new applications a day. She met about 500 people before the store opened three years ago, on her way to stocking the place with 220 full- and part-time staffers.

The personality of that staff -- their favorite records and films, their thoughts on politics, their quotes from Thoreau -- are collected in a zine-like booklet called “Music We Like” that’s offered free at the store.

Pearson looks for “an affability, a warmth, an enthusiasm,” someone who can open people’s ears to new music. But Pearson, who considers record store people “a tribe” who guard the culture’s memories, isn’t looking for normal folks, exactly.

“The record store joke is that we’re total geeks,” she says, “but we’re not the comic book store. We can still function.

“But there’s a particular type of character, the ones who don’t stay in the lines, who I think is disappearing from indie stores in general, whether record stores or bookstores, because retail is becoming so homogenized as the big boxes take over. A lot of my job is to guard against that.”

The lifer

With his tattered sweaters, wispy beard and hangdog charm, Michael Davis of Poo-Bah could be a late-night jazz DJ drawn by R. Crumb. There are, by all estimates, dozens of eccentric, serious-minded record clerks in Southern California; Davis, who has been peddling records for 30 years, is one of the longest-lasting.

If any type is disappearing from American culture, it’s career dilettantes like him. At 54, he says, “I’m one of the older crazies left in this industry.” He combines a teenager’s enthusiasm with an old-school hipster’s lack of affect.

Davis has worked at Poo-Bah since 1979, and though in February the store moved to a Colorado Boulevard location that brings in more mainstream traffic, it’s still known as the San Gabriel Valley’s alternative store.

When Davis was a kid in San Bernardino in the mid-’60s, legendary British DJ John Peel was spinning for local radio station KMEN. One day he played the Who song “Substitute,” then unavailable in the United States.

“That was my first experience of hearing a song on the radio that I couldn’t buy at the record store,” Davis recalls. “And it was devastating, a little bit traumatic. Like, ‘Why?’ ”

That moment sent Davis searching for music’s unknown pleasures, and he got into all kinds of odd corners, with a special fondness for the blues-damaged art music of Captain Beefheart and the genre collisions of Frank Zappa, whom he interviewed for alternative papers.

“Then, like a lot of people at the end of the ‘60s, I got into jazz, while rock ‘n’ roll, with a few exceptions, began to repeat itself. James Taylor wasn’t my trip; Miles Davis was.”

These days, his customers are as discerning as he is; they’re the kind of serious music fans who walk in “looking for a really specific album by Peter Brotzmann” -- the European free jazz pioneer -- “but it’s on a label that just left our distributor. Or it’s, ‘Have you seen this?’ ‘Yeah, it’s been out of print for 20 years -- I saw a copy 10 years ago.’ ”

Davis’ long tenure behind the counter allows him to track changes of taste like a sociologist, as when the British Invasion band the Zombies recently became popular with indie kids and began to influence younger groups like the Shins.

“They’re an example of a band that somehow, over the years, ends up interesting people again,” Davis says, explaining that it’s hard to predict this kind of revival. “I mean, who cares about the Swinging Blue Jeans anymore?”

Many of the best new bands, he says, are what he calls “the new generation of Gang of Fours,” referring to the political punk band from Leeds whose tight rhythm section has inspired Interpol, the Rapture, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

But unlike older music fans who can’t listen to Pavement because they sound like the Fall, Davis doesn’t dismiss new bands that build on old models.

“Hey, the Stones started out ripping off R&B; people,” he says. “Sometimes when a band’s starting out it takes a while for them to develop their own sound. Like the Rapture: They combine pieces of other bands well. Will they develop into something that sounds uniquely theirs?”

He’s willing to wait to find out. “I see myself as totally jaded,” says Davis, who says his fondness for music sometimes feels increasingly masochistic. “But my level of jadedness hasn’t destroyed my love of music.”

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Favorite discs of the counter culture

Any dedicated clerk has something that makes him or her stand out. And every clerk worth his or her salt has a list of records they’d take to the proverbial desert island.

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Jason Moore, Amoeba

On working at the buyback counter: “You’re like a bartender sometimes -- you’re hearing people’s problems. ‘I don’t want to sell these records, but my wife left me and I’m living out of my car.’ People are getting rid of their past.”

Desert island disc: Slayer, “Reign in Blood” -- “It’s the best metal record of all time. It’s fast, but not so fast that it’s incomprehensible, and satanic. They’re the Beatles of metal -- they’re the best.”

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Michael Davis, Poo-Bah

On maintaining his passion for music over the decades: “Widening out is one way to do it. If you only like one kind of music, you’ll eventually have heard everything.”

Desert island disc: Sun Ra, “Astro-Black” (out of print) -- “It’s one of those records that’s dropped between the chairs, but it’s a great example of electronics put together with the big-band thing.”

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Elvin Estela, Fingerprints

On customers with a big, open question about what they want: “I like the challenge. I like it when they push me. It’s good to fine-tune your recommendations to someone’s taste so you’re not just pushing your taste on anybody.”

Desert island disc: The Byrds, “Notorious Byrd Brothers” -- “It’s just perfect West Coast music, uplifting and with amazing production.”

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Cliff Davis, Amoeba

On his helping customers: “I tell them the truth; I don’t ever lie to sell a record. People will say, ‘Thank you for being honest.’ And people rarely come back and say, ‘That [stank].’ ”

Desert island disc: Johnny Thunders, “So Alone” -- “As a kid, for me, he represented the quintessential rebel, like a gangster who played guitar.”

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Todd Clifford,

Sea Level Records

On life outside the store: “When I’m at a show, people will yell, ‘Sea Level guy!’ Which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on my mood.”

Desert island disc: The Replacements, “Let It Be” -- “Apparently another band has a record called ‘Let It Be,’ but I’ll take the Replacements’ version, mostly for the song ‘Unsatisfied.’ ”

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Bob Say, Freakbeat

On his search for rare vinyl: “I go to most of the record shows around the country, thrift stores, swap meets, garage sales.”

Desert island disc: “The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society” -- “Amazing songs, a great ‘60s pop sound, with a bit of the English music hall vibe to it. I like the guitars and the melodies.”

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Rachael McGovern, Amoeba

On leaving a Wall Street job for her current gig: “Everybody I knew in the corporate world, almost without exception, was miserable.”

Desert island disc: Portishead, “Dummy”: “The emotion is so raw, there’s pain behind it, and beauty. It’s haunting.”

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Julie Remick,

Virgin Sunset

On her selling style: “I usually interview the customer as quickly as possible to get a sense of what they’re looking for. I try to find which instrument they like to hear.”

Desert island disc: John Coltrane, “The Heavyweight Champion” (boxed set) -- “Coltrane fits all my spiritual needs -- whether I’m in a depressive mood, a vegetative mood, or a romantic mood.”

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Where to find them

Most local record shops have at least one or two employees with vast knowledge. The following stores consistently employ music-obsessed clerks.

Amoeba Music, 6400 W. Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 245-6400

Aron’s Records, 1150 N. Highland Ave., L.A., (323) 469-4700

Fingerprints Records, 4612 E. 2nd St., Long Beach, (562) 433-4996

Freakbeat Records, 13616 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, (818) 995-7603

Poo-Bah Record Shop, 2636 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 449-3359

Rhino Records, 2028 Westwood Blvd., L.A., (310) 474-8685

Sea Level Records, 1716 Sunset Blvd., Echo Park, (213) 989-0146

Tower Sunset, 8801 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 657-7300

Virgin Sunset, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 650-8666