I’m from Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, the not cool part of L.A.; well I shouldn’t say that, but  as opposed to Hollywood. In a sense, the San Fernando Valley and Southern California are very similar to San Jose where they’re both sorta big, flat, spread out, and then you have this sorta mecca, this other place where you go to have fun. Like in L.A. it’s Hollywood or that kind of thing, and around the Bay Area it’s obviously San Francisco. I went to school in Northridge, a California state school, and I was interested in this advertising and writing program. I had gone through some majors and I had decided that’s what I wanted to do. San Diego had an advertising major, and I had some cousins that had been going to San Diego, so just to be contrary I thought “Oh I’ll go to San Jose”.

So I came down one day and liked it. The downtown was really interesting to me, that  was something I had never really seen. The light rail was new, there were alot of used bookstores, and I think the music scene was at a certain peek in downtown; this is like ‘95, ‘96. It just really interested me. After I spent like a couple years going back and forth between San Jose and home, I ended up staying here because I cultivated a lot of relationships with people and started playing music.

Records I’ve always had even from back in L.A. I mean I didn’t start Dj-ing until I moved to San Jose, so I’ve been Dj-ing for about 10 years. But I’ve always had records. Always liked collecting jazz records and rock and just kind of whatever, you know, like most people I like a little bit of everything. Well I’ve been Dj-ing and playing in bands, but I’ve had other jobs.

I went through working at coffee shops after I graduated, trying to get a job in advertising, but after doing an internship and little things here and there, nothin g bigger seemed to pan out. I kind of got a feeling that it wasn’t really right for me after all. The dot com thing was really blowing up and it had been going on all around me. I wasn’t in on it till a little towards the end, but I got in at a good enough point where things were still very optimistic. It was when people were jumping around jobs, it was kinda crazy. You’d work six months because a place wanted to look good in the investor’s eyes, so they’d hire a bunch of people but then they couldn’t sustain it. Six or eight months later they would let all these people go, but you’d get a severance package too and you’d have a notch on your belt and then somebody else would pick you up and you’d go to this other web site that was trying to look good and you’d do the whole thing over again, it was crazy. I worked at a couple places and then the third place was a software company. Now the bubble had burst as they say, but I had gotten in on this contracting job, which ended up turning into almost five years. The company was called Rational software, and they got bought by IBM two or so years after I had been working there.

It was cool, you know,  sorta typical story you hear: there’s a comfortable job, the money was good, but it was unsatisfying. So going into this fifth year there were a lot of changes in my w ork group and what I was doing, I just knew it was one of those forks in the road where I really had to make a choice, like if this is what I wanted to do for the long haul, or if I wanted to try something else. And I thought, because I didn’t have alot of major responsibilities, no house, no children, I was going to do what I wanted to do.

I never thought about opening a record store. In fact, after my contract ended, I left on good terms, and actually had some interviews at a couple of other places for similar work, but I just realized it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. I got a suggestion from someone, “just think about what you’d want to do if the money wasn’t an issue.” For some reason I saw this spot in Campbell, not the spot I’m in now, but I had seen a spot and thought, “Gosh a record store in a neighborhood would be just so great”. I mean you see stuff like that in San Francisco a lot, or New York, any metropolitan area. I think that’s the attraction of San Jose to some people that it’s still kind of like, there’s a lot of possibilities, so if you try something that’s a little left field you could be the only game in town. That could be good or bad, but if you can get people to catch on, it’s going to be like a wild fire, or so you hope.

After a little over a year, finally securing a spot, working out a plan, getting help from friends, I opened my place. Now I’ve been here two and a half years and it’s so cliché, but you totally learn on the job. There are things you think are going to happen and stuff comes up that you don’t think about and you have to kind of bend with it. A good business will do that, they’ll adjust their plan to what they see happening because they need to survive.

Contributed by Tim Shannon