A quarter century ago, families gathered around their televisions for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Perhaps 25 years earlier, people young and old enjoyed Motown. Dedry Jones says, “Times were better then.”

Visit Jones on a bad day and find him wearing chunky boots and a navy-fleece sweater with matching pants. The Music Experience, his award-winning record shop on the Southeast Side, recovers from an apparent-indoor tornado. On this day, you uncover stray boxes piled beside a cabinet of old cassettes, a clutter he knows his way through. Posters of Yolanda Adams and Janet Jackson riddle a plaster-white wall. Lenny Kravitz plays, while a young man pops in asking for a specific Soulja Boy track.

Don’t expect him to call you Boy-D or any other foolish aliases, “Imma call you what your mother calls you.” And don’t even think of asking him to sing a tune, the many he recommends. “You don’t want to hear me sing,” he warns.

Guests return because he understands music. One customer knows visiting Best Buy in search of a hard-to-find classic means he’s on his own. Therefore, he passes it up on his way from the Northwest suburbs. This exchange between record-shop owner and customer takes a wrong turn with each generation. “Younger people grew up on computers, without going to stores and interacting with people about music. Even people in their late 20s, early 30s, missed out on a lot musically,” Jones says.

Jones remembers the first three records given to him: “Live at the Copa” by The Supremes; “The Four Tops’ Second Album”; and “Live at the Copa” by The Temptations. Grade school trips to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra inspired him. As an art student (and one of only 12 African-American students), Rockford College exposed him to Jimi Hendrix, Elton John and Joni Mitchell.

His musical passion eventually morphed into the opening of Track One Records. While briefly living in Houston, the name reincarnated to The Music Experience mirroring the name of his routine event, The Experience. The Experience involves Jones interviewing artists and allowing them a song before an intimate audience. In the words of Patti Labelle, “The Experience is an actor’s studio, only better.” Fans leave having learned something. Or, as in the case of Chaka Khan, the artists themselves learn. Playing a song for her she forgot recording, Jones recalls her saying, “Oh! I did that song? Imma put that in a concert!”

Conversational questions, absent of gossip, award Jones sensational interviews. Chaka Khan described her Experience as the best interview in her entire 35-year music career, and Lyfe Jennings offered returning after his.

A busy bee, Jones also manages hip-hop duo Bo & Logik; works with guitarist Felton Offard; awaits an Experience with Donna Summer; and will host an internet-radio show. Don’t misconstrue the internet swap a sign of his record shop failing, as he says, “Eighty-five percent of music sold is still physical product. Apart from what the media says, the CD is far from dead.”