Bald now like many of us, Murri still works, running the sheet music section of a Midtown record store, where his encyclopedic memory is a bottomless well of information for customers, musicians, buffs, trivialists and researchers. He is not African-American and, born in Manhattan, has lived his whole life in the Astoria neighborhood to which he returns at five o clock. No hanging around, for his feet hurt after eight hours, though wearing a different brand new sneakers seems to help.

He doesnt play or read music but always wanted to be in the industry, even before a first job in the music library of radio station WMGM. A confessed ham, he will schmooze about any topic and occasionally gives talks at broadcasting schools, emphasizing that his generation learned by doing, not by attending high-priced theory courses.

The early fifties, with Johnny Ray and recent ex-soldier Eddie Fisher all the rage, was the beginning of the end of radios Golden Era. Murri ran the stations music department and worked with Bill Silbert on a live, orchestra-backed show, a radio pre-American Bandstand, and with former vaudevillians Blossom Sealy and husband Benny Fields. Radio was then switching over to largely deejay airtime, and Murri became good friends with one of the new disc jockeys at WINS, who had come from sister station WJW Cleveland and continued to use his nom de radio, Moondog, until Manhattans similarly named blind street musician sued him for infringement. The young deejay went back to his real name, Alan Freed, and was later to work with Murri when the latter managed the Elegants a decade afterwards.

Peter Tripp was another new MGM hiree, the first to play a daily Top Forty and famous for his promo stunt, studied seriously by NASA, of staying awake for a week at the Times Square Army recruiting booth. Those were the days, Murri reminisces, as the station also signed Jerry Marshall and Ted Brown, whose morning show he helped produce.

But MGM More G**dam Morons, he laughs, was sold in 1962 and went from rock to a middle-of-the-road Sound of Beautiful Music. Murri was fired, along with others, and wound up producing the Herb Oscar Anderson Show on WABC for the rest of the decade and then, ironically, again on WMGM (renamed WHN) and finally on WOR.

At the same time, and almost accidentally, as a second job, he began independently producing music for motion pictures. Many of those low-budgeters he did are forgotten, but the list does include the Coens Blood Simple as well as two others that were record-grossing in their first monthsDont Go in the House, a horror effort whose ad featured a guy with a blowtorch, and The Exterminator, the prototype of revenge films and the first stereo movie mixed in New York, for which he was a studio guinea pig.

All that ended in 1986, when Washington did away with the five-to-one tax write-off for investing in films. Whenever the government decides to soak the rich, he says, they really screw the middle class. Smaller backers could no longer be found, modest budget films disappeared, work dried up. And so to the record shop, thirteen years and three months now. The jobs terrific, he says, although like many in the business he, too, has an almost-rich-never-have-to-work-another-day story. Guaranteed a million dollars up front for the contractual signature of a major R&B artist (whose name he does not want used), Murri actually got the fellowsweet, really nice, from down Southinto a fancy conference room. But the singer freaked out, wouldnt believe that the expensively dressed white men would actually help a black, and, despite his wifes assurances, bolted and refused to sign.

Ah, well! Murri has no complaints, still stays in contact with friends from the past like Billy Vera, who had a couple unremembered hits along with At This Moment, which rode the charts after TVs Family Ties used it several times; Gino Vannille, whose career was at A&M and Arista Records; and Herb Oscar Anderson, with whom he recently spent a weeks vacation.

Like all these men of music, Murri is content. There are other rewards, and many memories. He remembers, for instance, listening to Henry Jeromes band at the Edison Hotel; Jerome went on to become president at Coral Records, and his horn player, a young Alan Greenspan, is Chairman of the Federal Reserve.