On my eighth birthday, my dad took me to PJ’s Records and Used CDs, a one-room store above a bakery and a Subway restaurant. When I walked in, my eyes were flooded with the LPs and CDs coating the walls. I walked across the room to the Rock section and pulled down the “Disraeli Gears” album by Cream and a Jimi Hendrix live album.

Upon seeing my selection, the man at the counter, Jeff Taras, immediately began telling me stories about the first time he heard “Disraeli Gears,” and how Hendrix would flip over a right handed guitar in order to play comfortably, because he couldn’t afford a lefty guitar.

I quickly learned that one does not walk into PJ’s intending to just stay for a minute. Whatever music you may be looking at in the store, Marc and Jeff Taras, brothers and co-founders of PJ’s, will always have something to say, some remarkable story to tell about it.

The whole experience of buying and listening to music once again becomes personal. There are no iTunes buttons to click on, no single song files to download, no low-quality MP3s, but full albums and real people (and excellent people at that) to converse with.

Nearly nine years later, I am still a loyal PJ’s customer. It is truly an astounding store; there is always something new to be found, always something golden sitting on one of those shelves. Their collection is noted by musicians, DJs, and the like from around the country, many of whom stop by the store when in town to play a gig.

“Kenny Washington was doing a two night stand [playing drums] for Johnny Griffin,” said Marc Taras, “and I had seen him the first night — in fact I saw both nights — and after the first night, I was working in the store, and he came in the door. […] And he bought a stack of old school — just classic — big band jazz records from the 30s and 40s.

“He said to me that he had seen stores like this all over the world, and while he had seen bigger stores, he said, ‘I have never seen a better jazz section anywhere, and I’m talking album for album, inch for inch, for the space you’ve got, that the quality of the music here is extraordinary.’”

In these digital times, record stores are often disregarded, viewed by many essentially as obsolete.

“You know, ‘How’s business?’ is one of the questions our customers ask most frequently,” said Taras. “And the fact is, if everyone who asked that question was here every Friday with ten bucks for six weeks, no one would have to ask that question. We’re just trying to keep the doors open and have a job, and are thankful to be doing something that we love, in an environment that we care about.”

PJ’s opened in September 1981, after Marc Taras, who had had some previous record store experience and P.J. Ryder, the store’s namesake, found the downstairs room where the bakery is now located. Upon deciding that it was a great room for a used record store, they just went and started one with Marc’s brother Jeff.

“It’s a bit typical for businesses of our sort, I suppose,” said Taras, “but we were a slow, steady uphill climb, like a classic small-business success story, where we were doing a little more sales every year, every year, every year, until the year Napster hit. Within 18 months of what they so euphemistically called file sharing, this blatant copyright infringement, our payroll was off 35 percent.

“And it’s just been harder and harder since then to make a buck. I mean, we haven’t seen a nickel-an-hour raise since 1995, and in that time, we’ve lost all the benefits: paid sick leave, the week of paid vacation, the quarterly tax relief payouts; we have to pay our own taxes since we’re self employed, and the store used to cover part of our taxes, and now it’s kind of devolved into a minimum wage job with health care, for which I am truly thankful. It’s a great blessing to have a job in today’s economy, it’s a blessing to be able to work in a record store at all.”

And it is a blessing indeed to still have a record store in town, even more so to have four (PJ’s, Encore, Wazoo, and Underground Sounds). It is great to still have people who make a profession of turning people of all ages on to new sounds. Hopefully, we can keep their doors open for yet many more years.