Gregory Garmon, of Cranston, bought the last three Michael Jackson DVDs at Newbury Comics in Providence Friday.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

PROVIDENCE — When Alexis Marshall, 29, of Providence, heard that a reporter had come in to the Newbury Comics record store at the Providence Place mall to talk to customers and employees about Michael Jackson, he exclaimed unbidden, “I don’t care about Michael Jackson!”

Marshall took a moment from stocking the shelves to clarify.

“As a kid, I loved Michael Jackson,” Marshall said; “I wore one glove and sang the songs and danced around. He’s dead; it’s a shame. But people are dying all the time. My grandmother’s in the hospital for surgery right now; I don’t care that Michael Jackson’s dead.

“It’s a bummer … he did some great stuff; he revolutionized pop music. But he was a stranger; he’s dead. It doesn’t affect my daily life; it doesn’t affect anyone else’s.”

He had a point: Jackson always seemed to exist on a different plane from the rest of us, which made him easy to admire but hard to identify with. Tracee Johnson, 35, of East Providence, agreed that that was part of the appeal.

But as music-buyers said Friday, Marshall’s viewpoint didn’t take into account people’s memories — memories not so much of Jackson himself but of their own lives and the youth that Jackson’s music was such a part of.

Indeed, his was a decidedly minority viewpoint Friday.

Kate Amorin, 23, of Tiverton, at Newbury Comics says Jackson’s “stuff has been selling like crazy.” The store was down from about 20 Jackson CDs and 10 DVDs Thursday to 5 and none by early afternoon Friday.

“Every single phone call” has been about whether they have Jackson’s music, Amorin said. “And they’re always shocked that we do. But he’s one of the artists that we always will carry. Always.”

Carl Mello, director of purchasing at the Newbury Comics main office in Brighton, Mass., says that Jackson’s discs are “leaving the shelves as fast as we put them there.” He says they were shipping everything they’ve got Friday and are awaiting more copies from the label.

They were “caught flat-footed” because Jackson’s death was unexpected, and while eight copies of Bad may have been an appropriate number for the chain to carry as of Wednesday, “Normally, Sony wouldn’t have 2 million copies of Michael Jackson CDs floating around.”

He suspects that the emotional pull to buy Jackson’s music will still be strong.

Mello says that the aftermaths of the deaths of Johnny Cash and Ray Charles meant big sales on their back catalogs, and that Kurt Cobain’s death prompted a legendary sales surge, but that the combination of Jackson’s star quality and his relatively recent low profile could mean a posthumous bump not seen since John Lennon or Elvis Presley.

Sony Corp., the owner of the rights to Jackson’s music, said Friday that orders for Jackson’s discs were “unprecedented” — about 150,000 copies in one day — and that they would probably boost production of Jackson’s discs in July.

Jackson’s albums occupied the entire top 10 in music sales at www.amazon.com. as of 4 p.m. Friday, Tokyo time.

Marshall also said that people were coming into the store proclaiming themselves huge fans of Jackson, but he wondered: If they’re such big fans, why don’t they have all his records already?

“People were saying, ‘Oh, I’m such a big fan! I’m so upset! Where’s his music? I need to buy it, because I don’t know it.’ It’s foolishness.”

Regina Chaperon, 29, and Danielle Almeida, 28, who work together in Providence, came into the store and left with a copy of 2003’s Greatest Hits: HIStory Vol. 1. Almeida acknowledged that she could be described as “one of those random crazy people who says ‘Oh, let’s go get a CD.’ But ever since it happened, they’ve been playing all his songs on the radio, and I think, ‘Oh, I know that one, and I know that one.’ ”

So here they were.

Chaperon remembers singing “Man in the Mirror” with her brother, and has Jackson’s music on her iPod, and a section of her wedding video set to Jackson’s music. “I love Michael Jackson,” she says.

Johnson, of East Providence, also acknowledged that memories were part of what brought her to the store.

Holding her just-purchased copies of the Thriller 25th-anniversary reissue, a Jackson Five compilation and a copy of the Dangerous disc, Johnson recalled listening to Jackson since Thriller came out in 1982.

“I grew up with him. … We were all mesmerized by him, and we all wanted to marry him.”

She said she was talking with her mother on Thursday after hearing the news of Jackson’s death, and the conversation turned to specific memories they had shared — particularly MTV in 1982 announcing which times during the day the “Thriller” long-form video would be shown, and the Motown 25th-anniversary special in 1983, where Jackson first did his famous moonwalk, and there was confusion over whether the move had even been real.

She added that on Thursday night she saw footage she wasn’t old enough to remember of Jackson as an 11-year-old singing “I Want You Back” with his brothers. “He just completely took the stage. You could tell he was a star.”

Gregory Garmon, of Cranston, says he did remember those performances. He said he was one year younger than Jackson, recalls seeing The Jackson Five on The Ed Sullivan Show, and says Jackson “was like family. … He went to all different people, different races. His music pleased everybody around the world.

“That music is classic. It’s not going anywhere. And people are going to want to hear it more now that he’s gone.”

Garmon added that Jackson’s death “teaches us one thing — don’t take life for granted.”

He also talked about Jackson’s hard childhood, with an abusive father and grown-up responsibilities. “He [had] a lot of child in him, because he didn’t have a childhood,” Garmon said, noting that Jackson cut his first few records as a young child “doing the work of a man. Imagine being denied that your whole life.”

Garmon said he already had all of Jackson’s albums, and was leaving the store with DVDs of the Number Ones video collection, a concert from Bucharest and the short films that accompanied the Dangerous album.

“I want to go home and look at him,” he said.

Material from Bloomberg News was used in this report.

rmassimo@projo.com