Ten years of talking about it. Doors are open.

I met Diego six years ago at the Mesa record show. He was DJing it. We got talking, hit it off, and within an hour he was driving me to a Mexican food truck in a part of town I would never have found on my own.

That is Diego. A soul from the streets of Phoenix, and the reason I leave that city with records I did not know existed.

Every time I have come down since, he has talked about opening a shop. Every single time.

A few weeks back we ran into each other in Detroit, right before I flew to Phoenix, and he was lit up in a way I had not seen.

He is doing it full time now. Turning people onto music for a living.

VINYLxTHERAPY. Small white building on a strip you would drive straight past. Twelves, forty fives, tapes, CDs, books, tees.

Read the name again. He is not being cute. He started DJing in high school around 1995, after his aunt brought her equipment down from New York.

By sophomore year he was hauling his gear onto campus and playing the quad at lunch, and he kept at it until he graduated. He will tell you plainly that DJing saved his life.

He has been kicking the shop around for ten years. What pushed him was watching what happened to record prices.

His view is that a song is a memory, that anybody can drop a needle and land back at a first kiss, a first dance, a first break battle, and that those memories should not be sold back at a markup.

So he keeps it cheap on purpose. He says he is not trying to get rich, and that music will be here long after he is gone, so he would rather be useful while he is here.

You feel it walking in.

The turntables are not behind the counter. They sit in the middle of the floor on a table thrown with a serape, Mexican flag on the deck, calaveras across the back wall. Live from the shop every Tuesday at noon with Johnny Castro.

Ten years of talking about it. Doors are open. I could not be prouder of him.