‘This is fascinating’

Mr. Weber doesn’t have an answer. No one in his family was big on collecting things. He didn’t grow up in a particularly musical household and he never played an instrument, although he says, “I can play some kazoo.”

“But ever since I was a kid,” he says, “I always had this voracious appetite for listening to music. I used to beg my mom to stay up late and watch ‘[Your] Hit Parade.’ It was on at 10 o’clock on Saturday, I think. ‘Mom, please, please.’ ‘OK, whatever.’ I was born with it, both a blessing and a curse.”

When he was growing up in the ’60s, the only place he knew of to buy records was the National Record Mart.

“Dylan would come out with a new album and me and my buddy would run up to the record store and buy it,” he says. “We’d go home and listen to it five times trying to figure out what the hell was he talking about. ‘Highway 61’ and all that. And we learned about all those great civil rights people we never would have learned about, unless he wrote a six-minute song about it.”

After a stint in the Army, stationed in Augusta, Ga., from 1969 to 1971, he came home and became a mail carrier. A few years later, he came upon the Doo Dah Shop on South Bouquet Street in Oakland, opened by Dan Charny, which stocked science fiction and horror books and was just getting into records.

“And I went in there and said, ‘This is fascinating,’” Mr. Weber says. “He said, ‘Look what I got here. Last week I had 10 records. Now I have 300.’ He said, ‘I don’t pay much for them.’ I said, ‘I’m going to do that.’ My buddy had a storeroom for $75 above his bar. I said, ‘If I give you $75, I can have it?’ He said, ‘It ain’t doing me no good.’”

That was the beginning of the Record Graveyard, a partnership with Jim Petruzzi, a friend from the post office, in 1976.

They acquired records from promo men who sold them extra copies, libraries that were unloading collections and people trading in their classic rock albums either because they had gotten into punk or, after 1985, because they were transferring to CDs.

“Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Beatles, Stones. I kept buying these records and I was selling CDs, so I would give them a credit card for CDs. They would say ‘I can’t listen to these records anymore, Jerry. They’re too dull sounding.’ That’s what record people like is that warm, dull sound, not that flashy CD sound!”

Mr. Weber went solo in the early ’80s with Garbage Records, which became Jerry’s Records on Forbes Avenue in Oakland in the late ’80s, and then moved to Squirrel Hill in 1994. Over the years, it has become a mecca for record collectors.

Among the people to walk through its cluttered hallway is Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin.

“I didn’t even recognize him,” Mr. Weber says with a laugh. “There was a woman in here with her kids, and I had some of his albums here and signed them for them. He was a very nice guy, patted the kids on the head, asked them if they like rock ‘n’ roll.”

Ben Folds, who is fond of the old 78s, has been a regular. Mike Ness of Social Distortion has talked about shopping there.

“I always have a ton of out-of-town bands and friends crashing with us,” says Mike Rock, of the band BARONS, “and it is definitely a must on the list if I am showing them around town. Everyone is always blown away by the sheer volume at first, then they end up spending hours getting lost in browsing before they find some unbelievable score.”

“I went into Jerry’s when he was in Oakland,” says Michael Klein, who owns the Shadyside electronics store Let’s Make Music. “I asked Jerry if he knew the name of the new Jules Shear record. He said that he thought Jules Shear might be in a band and the new record might be under a different name. So someone says to me, ‘The name of the band is Reckless Sleepers.’ It was Jules Shear! I said … ‘No, it’s not you.’ He showed me his American Express! He was visiting his father who was recovering from knee surgery. So we looked and there it was. Jules played Rosebud that night and told that story.”

“One time,” Mr. Weber says, “there was a guy here and he bought some jazz records and one of them was Paul Winter. He hands me the records and I say, ‘He’s appearing in town this weekend, for free.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I know. I’m Paul Winter.’ ”

Massive collections

As anyone who has ever opened a pack of baseball cards can imagine, part of the thrill of the game is never knowing what you’re going to get.

In 2012, Mr. Weber came across a 78 rpm copy of Robert Johnson’s “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom” (on Vocalion) in a box of waterdamaged records. This amazing find was in good condition, one of only two he had ever seen. A year later, Mr. Weber and his son Willie came across a rare Bogus Ben Covington 78 that they managed to trade to the legendary illustrator Robert Crumb for a pen-and-ink drawing of “Juice Jar Jerry” and “Whistlin’ Willie.”

Recently, he showed a reporter two copies of the “Velvet Underground & Nico” album with the peelable Warhol banana cover.

The most valuable record he ever sold was a rare 10inch copy of The Midnighters “Their Greatest Hits,” which went to a collector in Canada for $4,000 and would have gone for more if “Debbie” hadn’t written her name on the cover.

Along the way, he has acquired massive collections, none like the one that postponed his retirement five years ago. It belonged to a friend of his, named Paul, who died of a heart attack.

“He had the most eclectic collection anywhere,” he says. “I knew his wife. I went to his house. He was one of my best customers, one of [Jim’s Records’] best customers. He had people in all these stores ordering him imports from all over the world. I couldn’t believe how many records he had in this little house in Morningside. I estimated 50,000 records. I said, ‘Nancy, this is overwhelming.’ I was thinking about retiring. I just put in a lockbox $50,000 in $20 bills for my retirement. I said, ‘These are worth a lot more than that, but that’s what I got. If you want to sell them to me, I’ll go get that lockbox and hand it to you.’”

She decided it was worth doing, and it took a crew of five helpers 2½ days to relocate them into his warehouse.

“That was hands-down the best record collection,” he says. “It’s still in my warehouse, a lot of it.”

The stuff he sets aside for his own listening pleasure are the blues, roots, folk and