Eventually, he rented 19 booths at the flea market, while operating a more traditional store, starting at a spot on McKinney and Routh, before moving to Lower Greenville Avenue. He sold things like marble-top washstands, but the items that really interested him were the records and the bits of pop ephemera, like Beatles lunchboxes.

That interest became Bill’s Records in 1981, in the Northwood Hills Shopping Center, near the corner of Spring Valley and Coit roads. Over time, almost every nook and cranny of more than 8,000 square feet of retail space was filled with import CDs from England, 12-inch dance singles from Chicago and New York, and concert t-shirts and posters from all over cemented together, from the looks of it, with old cardboard. From the outside, it had the persistent look of having been recently, and thoroughly, ransacked. But there was an order to it, a pattern that revealed itself upon further inspection.