Bill Wisener died sometime Friday night or Saturday morning, behind the counter of his iconic namesake record store in the Cedars.

A customer had gone to the store Saturday, around 11 a.m., and found the doors locked. Through the windows, she could see Wisener, eyes closed, in his usual spot — sitting in that worn-out rolling chair, surrounded by the clutter of records and posters and cassettes and tchotchkes accrued over the last 40 years as a buyer and seller of music. This, alone, was not unusual — Wisener has been sleeping in the store, on and off, for a very long time.

“It was hard for him to leave his place,” said Jack Matthews, the Cedars developer who owns the building along South Lamar Street to which Wisener moved in 2007, after 26 years spent in Far North Dallas.

Except the 75-year-old Wisener was not moving Saturday morning. The customer called police, who contacted someone who works for Matthews. The worker opened the door, and discovered that Wisener was not asleep after all. The man who had spent all day, every day behind that counter at Bill’s Records was no longer breathing.

“He died right where he lived,” said our mutual friend Alison Draper, who met Wisener when she was publisher of the Dallas Observer and helped him find his new home in the Cedars 13 years ago.

This photo captured Bill Wisener, where he lived and died, among his music, papers and tchotchkes. (Ryan Michalesko / Staff Photographer)

Wisener, famously a chain-smoker, had been sick for years — in and out of the hospital with cancer and other ailments. It’s tempting to say this is what Bill would have wanted. Except nobody wants to die alone.

And Wisener, too, was in fine spirits of late — as though he had escaped whatever dark cloud had been been hanging over him in recent months.

“I just talked to him yesterday,” his younger brother Randy said Saturday. “And he was so happy.”

“I just hope he went peacefully,” Draper said. “I can tell you one thing: That man had an intimate relationship with God; he knows his maker. Now he’s with his mama, and he’s happy and healthy. Now we have to find a way to say goodbye to the music man.”

Through tears, she added this: “I just hate that he was by himself. But that’s how he spent his life. He was so connected with humans, and yet so few people really knew him. But everybody had some kind of a relationship with him.”

From the famous and the anonymous, from the kids who treated his record store like a clubhouse to the city-shapers who treated him as an equal.

A still from Chuck Przybyl's 2017 short film about Bill Wisener

Wisener sold records; that is the easiest, simplest way to describe how he made his living, though it wasn’t much of one. He once told me if he made $1,000, he would spend $3,000 — no way to run a business. For most of his life, he was proprietor of what musician and Kessler Theater booking agent Jeff Liles called “The Last Record Store” in an ongoing series of YouTube documentary shorts that first began appearing 13 years ago.

“I always wanted to do what would make someone walk out happy,” Wisener once told me.

He officially got into the record-selling business in 1978, his goods spread across several booths at a Garland flea market called Vikon Village. (Rock and Roll Alternative host George Gimarc, founder of KDGE-FM, remembers buying records from Wisener in 1972, out of his mother’s booth at Vikon Village.) A year later he moved to Greenville Avenue. The Dallas Morning News’ profile of Wisener, this paper’s first among dozens that would follow, ran beneath the headline “The shop with no name contains unusual curios.”

In 1981, he moved into an old movie theater’s space at the Northwood Hills Shopping Center at Spring Valley and Coit roads, a property owned by former Dallas Mayor Robert Folsom. From there, Wisener influenced generations of North Dallas kids who gravitated to his unruly storefront, where the records weren’t priced or, sometimes, even sleeved. There, he famously counted among his customers and friends musician Ben Harper (“They were so close,” Randy said) and members of Radiohead and a young Elliott Smith.

“Bill’s was such a part of my teenage years — it was the center of gravity for DJs, for alternative culture,” Liles said Saturday afternoon. He told me Wisener bought him a bass when he was a teenager, after hearing Liles talk about needing one for a band tryout. Liles didn’t ask Wisener for the instrument; it was just a gift.

“I wouldn’t be in the music business were it not for Bill,” Liles said. “God, man, that old store on Spring Valley was something else.”

When he heard the news that his friend Bill had died, Liles drove to the store on Lamar — the only thing he knew to do.

“It’s weird being in here without him being in here,” Liles said.

Wisener wound up moving to the Cedars in 2007, by which time he estimated he was losing around $100,000 annually at the North Dallas store. Moving didn’t make things better. But Jack Matthews refused to kick out Wisener even when he couldn’t make rent.

“Business is horrible,” Wisener told me in the fall of 2018. “It’s been horrible since I got here. People from up north come in here after all these years and say, ‘I thought you were dead.’ But I never had planned to quit doing this.”

This, in part, is why Chicago filmmaker Chuck Przybyl has been in and out of Dallas over the last five years making a documentary about Wisener. Because, as Draper said Saturday with some degree of understatement, the man was “complex” — a peddler of music, but also close friends with the likes of Stanley Marcus (who once gave Wisener his collection of 78s) and “Mr. Peppermint” Jerry Haynes and Longhorn Ballroom builder O.L. Nelms, all of whom he loved to talk about more than any band.

Wisener was the last man standing.

“He outlived his own time,” said 70-year-old Randy Wisener, Bill’s sole surviving blood relative. Over the phone, Randy sounds just like his brother — the same rumble, the same twang. “Bill could have been in New York or Los Angeles or any other city. But he grew up in Dallas. And he loved Dallas.”

I saw Bill only a few weeks ago — swung by one late-fall afternoon just to thumb through the stacks, to see if he was ready yet to part with that Judy’s cassette tape sitting behind the counter, to say hi to an old friend. We visited for a while, and said we’d see each other soon — probably the next time Przybyl came back to town to work on the documentary.

Bill Wisener smokes a cigarette Friday, Nov. 30, 2018 at his store, Bill's Records, in Dallas. (Ryan Michalesko / Staff Photographer)

Sure enough, the director emailed me Thursday: “I’ll be in town on the 14-16 of January filming with Bill and would [like] to pick up that interview with you.”

Fourteen months ago, Przybyl said this movie about Wisener wasn’t just about the record store, but about clinging to something you love so much that bad health and old age cannot pry you from it. Yes, he said, Wisener is “a fascinating person, a one-of-a-kind person,” a fine subject for any film. But it was Bill’s connection to his customers that fascinated the filmmaker so.

“For him, his family are the customers of his store,” Przybyl said. “In some ways, without his people he’s not himself. It’s all tied together. It’s the possessions and the people and the life. … I am hoping that this last chapter of his story could be a really beautiful and uplifting chapter.”

The last time I interviewed Wisener, actually put him on tape, was November 2018, when Przybyl began fundraising for his movie. We talked about his declining health and his hospital stay earlier that summer that required closing the store for a few days — sparking rumors then that Bill had died, his coffin nailed shut by Pall Malls.

He was adamant. “I’m not retiring,” Wisener said, again and again. And when he walked me to my car that afternoon, he told me, “I’m gonna live to be 100.”

A wake will be held for Bill Wisener at 9 p.m. Sunday at the Kessler Theater, 1230 W. Davis St.