5

Union Dues, Music Stores, and Buying Strategy

I was discovering quickly that Los Angeles was a huge metropolis, which had its pluses and its minuses.

A minus was the fact that Katmandu, after being a well-loved nonstop-gigging band in Miami, was scuffling in LA. We had to start all over, and it wasn’t going good.

A plus was the flip side of that—people from all over the country also came to LA to make it big and when things didn’t work out, they’d often have to sell their instruments to get home. So at least one of my careers was growing nicely. I was also psyched this was the home of Fender guitars and Rickenbacker guitars, and I might be able get my hands on stuff “closer to the source.”

The LA Times was my most important resource. Part of my detective work consisted of following the newspaper trucks as they left the printers and determining where their first stop was to drop off the papers. I soon found out that the Sunday paper came out Saturday morning at 5:00 a.m., and the first stop was the Greyhound bus station off Main Street in downtown LA. This was Saturday’s news with the Sunday classified section.

At 5:00 a.m., it was fairly dangerous down there, chock-full of homeless and desperate people. I saw fights and loads of drugged-out people and many things that might deter other people. I was kind of like a Rain Man when it came to guitars. I had the full-on fever of something that later became known as GAS (Guitar Acquisition Syndrome). That’s all I was interested in, and I was a pit bull at it.

Sometimes an ad would be very vague like “Gibson guitar” or “Fender guitar” and “amp.” I knew enough about the models to ask the proper questions, to determine if it was worth schlepping out to West Covina or Pomona to see it. If there wasn’t some type of label inside the guitar or a decal, I would ask questions on the phone such as, “Where it says Gibson on the headstock, is that a gold decal or is it in Mother of Pearl?” Anything upscale would have Gibson in pearl and possibly some other design underneath it. As far as guitars with gold decals go, I would first have to determine if it was hollow, if it had ƒ-holes or a center hole. If it was a solid body, I would have to ask the color and how many points or cutaways the guitar had, as well as how many volume and tone knobs it had. If it was solid and a sunburst, it would generally be a Les Paul Jr. or Melody Maker. If it was hollow, I would have to determine if it had ƒ-holes or a round hole. If it was flat-top, it could be anything from an LG-0 to a B-25, or if it was a larger body, it was probably a J-45 or J-50.

At one point there was a guy who was on to what I was doing. Somehow he must have been following me and figured out my strategy. I was down at the Greyhound bus station on a Saturday morning to get the LA Times, and I saw an ad for a Fender Precision Bass and Bassman amplifier. I drilled the seller to get whatever information I could and determined that it was a 1952 Precision Bass, and an early-1950s tweed Fender Bassman amp with one 15-inch speaker. He was asking $1,000 for both and claimed to be the original owner. He was out in Simi Valley, about a forty-five-minute drive from where I was. A deal like this always got me very excited. I got into the Chevy beater and jumped on the 405 freeway heading toward Simi Valley, going about seventy-five miles per hour. I looked over to my right and saw this other car almost in a dead heat with me. I recognized the driver and realized that he was heading to buy the same guitar.

We both raced to Simi Valley, got off the freeway, and we were going so fast, we both passed the street we needed to turn on to. We both doubled back to the house, and I knew I was going to have to make a move. In those days, I used to carry quite a bit of cash, just in case I found anything. When we both got out of the car, I told the other guy that the seller was asking $1,000 for both the guitar and amp. I said if we get into a bidding war, the only person that’s going to win is the seller, and I was determined to outbid this other buyer.

I pulled out a big wad of cash and got right up into his face. “I’m going to buy both of these for $1,000 and I’m going to give you the amp for nothing, but if I ever see you again doing this, I will outbid you and you’ll go home with nothing, even if I lose money!” I was protecting my turf, and it must’ve worked. I never saw this other buyer again. I hated to strong-arm him, but my livelihood was at stake. I ended up with a beautiful bass, he ended up with a beautiful amp, and that was the last I’ve ever seen of him.

•••

My band Katmandu was sporadically working, mainly because we played original material, and that made it difficult to get regular club gigs. Most club owners wanted us to play the Top 40 hits of the day, and it felt like a compromise. However, this very issue started to drive a wedge between us all.

When we all first got together, Bobby Caldwell was more of a Jeff Beck, rock ’n’ roll type guitar player. I was more into R&B and that influenced the band quite a bit. I sang the lead on 90 percent of the tunes we did. But when we finally recorded in LA, I encountered somewhat of a rude awakening. Bobby’s voice had a certain quality that translated to tape very easily. My voice kind of smothered the tracks but his had a transparency that recorded very nicely. It kind of upset me, because I was the singer of the band. But in retrospect, it of course helped drive me more in the direction of the vintage instrument business.

Eventually Bobby decided to move back to Florida. He ended up signed with TK Records (who had the monster sellers, KC and the Sunshine Band) and has had quite a bit of success as both a musician and songwriter. Remaining in California, I figured I could hook up with some of the other quality musicians I had met through my guitar business and maybe buy some time until my musical career might start to happen.

Every morning, being situated in a very central location, I would get in my car and drive in one direction or another. One day I might go south into Santa Monica and work my way down through Long Beach and all the other towns between San Diego and my apartment in Sherman Oaks. Other mornings I might head east through Hollywood and eventually find my way as far as Palm Springs.

I left no stone unturned. I discovered every music store, pawnshop, thrift store, bulletin board, et cetera. I was determined to uncover any and all buried treasure out there. One of my regular stops was at the Hollywood Musician’s Union, Local 47, on Vine Street. I can’t even tell you how many instruments I found from listings on the bulletin board in there. The membership handbook also became useful, as I cold-called many musicians. This was long before cell phones, so making phone calls by the hundreds could become quite expensive, and many were toll calls.

My wife, Marlene, always very creative, suggested looking for names that sounded like older folks. I mean, how many “Delmers” “Calvins” and “Vernons” would be gigging in rock bands in the seventies? Many of these players had great older guitars and were ready to sell, to fund their retirement.

I also called players who were listed as banjo, mandolin, ukulele, or bass players. Anything with frets. I would always have the seller tell me their asking price. I would never offer pennies on the dollar, and if their asking price was reasonable, I acquired their guitars. Many times these players had large collections, as they had been endorsees of Gibson, Martin, Fender, Gretsch, Rickenbacker, D’Angelico, Stromberg, Mosrite, et cetera. I found many historical instruments by using this strategy, and I believe if I didn’t do this, I never would have accumulated the number of quality instruments that have become my personal collection.

When our band was on the road, the first thing I’d do was check in with the local musician’s union and get the roster, so I could start calling. My ploy was that I was a musician thinking of moving to whatever town I was in and wanted to talk to some of the locals, to see how it was going. My true motive was to call guitarists and see if they had anything to sell.

There was, of course, always a learning curve with all of this. If I called somebody early in the day, and they had a guitar I was interested in, it gave them a chance to call music stores to get a value, or find someone else to bid against me. So I started making the calls after 6:00 p.m., so they couldn’t get ahold of anybody. This is long before someone could just look up the value of a guitar on the Internet or even in a book.

I also used to put ads in all the local newspapers, including the Daily News, and the now-defunct Herald Examiner. I was always playing around with the wording for newspaper ads so that they might attract attention. Marlene came up with a suggestion to put some of my guitar-wanted ads in the newspaper section under “Horses for Sale.” Her logic was that cowboys often played guitar. Oddly enough, I ended up finding some of the coolest guitars that way, including an incredible prewar Martin 000-42, several prewar D-18s and even a few 1950s electric Gibsons and Fenders along the way.

•••

I made it my job to visit all the local music stores listed in the Yellow Pages. I did quite a lot of business with Sol Betnun’s Music Store on Larchmont Street in Hollywood. It was actually a ramshackle house, chock-full of various kinds of equipment. Guitars and amps were stuffed high to the rafters, and you’d have to dig around not to miss anything.

Sol was an older gentleman, a professional union horn player from a bygone time, who opened his store in the sixties when he saw the writing on the wall for jazz and swing. Though he had no love for the new music, clearly Sol saw great opportunity in dealing in all those kids’ obsessions with guitars who were being spawned by the Beatles’ popularity.

I liked Sol because he was willing to make deals. He had a nice selection of used instruments and loved to trade with me, as long as I kicked some cash into the equation. There was always a huge influx of new acquisitions coming in, and I was there trying to make deals on anything I felt was a good investment.

The scene in his store was always crazy. His family was, to put it mildly, extremely colorful. Sol would come into the store and was always wearing about two shirts, three sweaters, and an overcoat, even though this was LA, and it was probably eighty degrees outside. His wife, Lil, was also a character, and they had this little Chihuahua that acted like it owned the place.

My friend Chris Bristol, who later became a big shot at the Roland Corporation, basically ran the store. Chris had a great understanding of quality guitars and was always easy to deal with. When Sol wouldn’t be moved, Chris would step in to smooth the deal, understanding that it would have to make sense for both of us.

In Pasadena, my old friend Bob Page also ran a store called The Guitar Shoppe. Bob’s specialty at the time was acoustic instruments. It was kind of in the basement of this shopping center in downtown Pasadena. He had at one time played with the iconic sixties band the Association, which had monster hits with “Along came Mary,” “Never My Love,” “Cherish,” and quite a few others, so he had some experience with “the big time.” I believe he joined the band for a while but ended up opening his store in Pasadena.

Bob was very knowledgeable about older guitars, and I learned a lot from him. This may be difficult to believe these days, but there was no published information available on anything! You had to seek out people who had experience with old guitars and wheedle them for their insights. I was relentless on that front. I had an insatiable desire to find out all I could.

I believe the first Martin Herringbone D-28 that I ever owned came from Bob. Over time, I purchased a treasure trove of instruments from him. We traded on a regular basis, and I used to stop by Bob’s place at least once a week. My friend Dave DiMartino, who was one of the early founding fathers of Guitar Center, got his start with Bob.

There was a store in the Redondo Beach area that I did some business with called Hogan’s House of Music. When I headed south each week in my car, I always made sure I dropped in there. Later on I found out that one of the guys that I was dealing with at Hogan’s, Ron Block, an excellent guitar player, joined Allison Krauss and Union Station and is still having great success in the music business.

   

Martin 1941 Herringbone D-28. (Photos by Jen Angkahan)

There were other “establishment” places in Hollywood, like the famous Wallich’s Music City on Sunset and Vine, which had been an institution in LA, back since the music business was based around selling sheet music. Glen Wallich had been one of the founding partners of Capitol Records with Johnny Mercer in the forties. Even in the seventies, Wallich’s was still selling sheet music, but I didn’t really deal with them much. I was the youngster coming in with my wild “jew-fro,” a renegade willing to pay crazy high prices for used guitars. I believe they thought I was crazy. The guitars I was buying were later referred to as vintage, and they’re still around while, sadly, Wallichs has been long gone for decades.

•••

Probably the best places to find stuff back then were the pawnshops. They were a very valuable resource. The owners would also inadvertently divulge crucial information by letting me inspect all the instruments that came into their stores. Sometimes even before they came out of pawn.

On Van Nuys Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley, there was a pocket of about five or six pawnshops within a two-block area. There was a shop called San Fernando Jewelry and Loan, owned by my friend Mark Zimmelman’s family. Mark was a good guitar player who went to Berklee School of Music and later became a famous diamond broker.

One of the most colorful areas was downtown Los Angeles. The pawnshops were almost all on Main Street. This area was a little more sketchy, but I acquired lots of great stuff there. There was one called Eagle Loan and Jewelry, where I did a lot of business. The older fellow who ran the place really took a liking to me and sold me some unbelievable instruments, including early Les Pauls, Strats, Teles, and high-end Martins. In those days, you could actually get those kinds of guitars from pawnshops!

One of the wildest of those places was Mad Man Louie’s Pawnshop. I found lots of cool stuff in his pawnshop. Old Les Pauls and all of the models anyone might ever want would regularly appear in the window.

I guess you had to have a gimmick to stand out from the crowd, and Louie pretended he was crazy. He was quite old, and his son basically ran the place. They always had this funny shtick, riffing off each other.

I would come in, find some guitars that I wanted, and negotiate the deal with Louie. After the deal was made, his son would take his shoe off and start banging it on the counter. He would always say to his dad, “What are you crazy? You can’t sell that guitar for that little!” That routine happened almost every time I bought a guitar from them. It was always hilarious. I never knew if they were kidding or if they were serious.

I don’t know if any of this shit means anything to anyone else, but when you’re a young man, it makes an impression. It’s important to have fun and laugh, in whatever your business is. I wouldn’t trade these memories for anything.

Eventually, the local stores came to know me as sort of a renegade guitar buyer and seller. Most of them were not that interested in buying used guitars, so I became an outlet for them to sell their trade-ins. They probably thought I was crazy for paying more for used guitars than new guitars. But eventually it became more than evident that I had amassed a decent collection of collectable instruments and customers started coming to me, via word of mouth.

One such store was University Music in West LA on Wilshire Boulevard. The owner, Dale Rossman, liked my band, and he and I became good friends. Little did I know that he would send a customer to me that would change the course of my guitar-selling life.