Joseph Zitt

After many months of working afternoon and evening shifts, heading outside to go to work in the morning can be quite disorienting. All the shadows are on the wrong sides of things.

I was mysteriously scheduled to work at 11 AM today, so I was up at 8:30 (after getting to sleep at a little after 4 AM–I got off work after midnight, and the BART train that I was on got delayed by debris on the tracks, a fist fight in the next car, and a belligerent panhandler on our car who was corralled by the BART police after threatening anyone whose name began with “D”).

I actually had breakfast at the same time as my housemates for once, though that involved complex three-person maneuvering in a kitchen built for one. Attempts at conversation failed, though; I’m not particularly verbal pre-coffee. I cooked myself something moderately elaborate, since I have the patterns of cooking it internalized and can do so easily. Cutting it back to do something simpler with similar ingredients would have taken a lot more effort–I would have had to rethink the patterns (much as, now that I’ve internalized one of the things that we’re supposed to do in ringing up customers, I’ve become consistently our most successful employee in doing it, since not doing so requires active effort).

I took a different path to the BART than usual, since my usual path would have taken me past the church where I have my other job at just the point that people would be arriving for services, and I would have gotten embroiled in talking to friendly folks there. I somehow ended up getting to the BART just after the train that I wanted left, anyway, and got in to work about five minutes late.

Fortunately, things were quiet there, and I was working mostly with someone into even farther-out music than I am. As opposed to our usual overhead music, we ended up spinning some more unusual stuff: Steve Reich, Dave Douglas, Johann Johannsson, Sigur Ros, Bobby McFerrin, the latest Wire Tapper compilation, and the like. And, as usually happens when we play this music, we sold copies of several of the CDs.

My supervisor handed me an interesting challenge: we had to design one endcap for jazz and one for classical music. (What’s an endcap? It’s the vertical plane at the end of each aisle of fixture, perpendicular to and facing out into the main walkway. I didn’t know there was a word for that, either, until I learned to speak retailese.) These usually feature items of which we have multiple copies. In classical and jazz, however, while we have a lot of different items, we tend to have only one of each; almost everything for which we had multiple copies is already on display somewhere.

I had the inspiration, for the classical endcap, of putting up several different recordings of a few works. That way, if anyone buys anything from the display (and things on displays do sell better than things in the racks), we can replace it with yet another version of the same work. I ended up with four of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” (sixteen seasons in all?), six of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” and six of Orff’s “Carmina Burana.” My supervisor created a sign saying “What a Difference a Performance Makes.”

For jazz, I made a selection of some of the more challenging and interesting artists that we carry (as opposed to the usual deluge of smooth jazz and singers whose main appeal is on the CD cover rather than the CD itself). Labeled “Expand Your Jazz Horizons”, it had discs from about 20 artists, including Anthony Braxton, Uri Caine, Andrew Hill, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Evan Parker, and Marc Ribot. (Oy, I just realized that my coworker will probably gently lambaste me tomorrow for forgetting to put up anything by his current obsession, Steve Lacy.) Here, again, if someone buys one, we can put up another by the same artist or an equally interesting one.

We hope that the endcap will signal to aficionados that, while we have the usual corporate emphasis on the questionable stuff that tops the jazz charts, we have at least some interest in digging deeper, and that people looking for the less popular jazz will have a possibility of dealing with someone who knows what they are talking about.

It’s apparently getting increasingly hard to find Record Store Guys, outside the extreme niche stores or magnificent anomalies such as Amoeba Music, who have any interest in jazz. When I mentioned to the representative from one label a few months ago that we were eager to play this music overhead, he told us that he had a whole box of promos in his car that he couldn’t interest anyone in, ran down, and brought them up to us. When we realized this, we told other representatives, and ended up with a bounty of recordings on Blue Note, Impulse, and other labels that are owned by the huge conglomerates. (Getting at the stuff on the smaller labels not connected to the massive distributors is difficult, and this is where we’re starting to get repeatedly whacked by the long tail. And as record companies continue to consolidate, they’re cutting back on representatives and giving them huge territories to cover, which means that most record stores’ personal contact with labels is approaching nil.)

I’m back to working the closing shift for the next two days, so I should regain some sleep tonight. Assuming, of course, that I push myself away from the computer at some point…