The CRAZIEST Guitar Store Stories Across the USA

a really nice Martin

guitar

, so we were able to get this really stellar Martin

guitar

and Grace Potter was doing Grand Point North, which she does every year here in town, and she ended up coming along with 50 or 60 friends and family and we hid them in the acoustic room and the gentleman came in to get strings and they led him over there and there was Grace Potter handing him this beautiful Martin guitar and they actually ended up playing a tune together and that was it. Really amazing, one time the lock on the front door broke and we had to call the local locksmith.

Turns out he walked in and looked at the wall and said, "Oh, you're carrying my father's strings, um, who's your father? Apparently that's Deodario, so you never really know who's going to walk in through the door." front door. Dia Dario's son fixes the locks. We have a slide that you obviously saw, um, and someone called me and I was managing the Instagram account at the time and they said, hey, you have to go out to the slide, check it out. , there's a group of nuns at the music

store

and then We're also going down the slide and I'm like I walked there and I got my phone ready and seriously like 50 nuns hanging out and they were having a great time Many years ago I had a these two guys here from England who wanted to buy me a uh sg, Gibson is cheap and I was dealing with them and there was a guy walking with his pea coat on his hair all pointy and then I called my brother to go to sal and I told him I had Like a homeless guy walking in a

store

I said that looks very suspicious I'm trying to deal with these two guys that want to buy two guitars I said but you know, you can keep an eye on this guy because he's walking around the store more or less I started talking to these guys They were talking after a while I said oh so you guys are when Tony leaves yeah we're playing in paradise I said oh Grace said uh I mean who are you with he's going with John Paul Jones like Oh Great, John Paul. jones of what's going on and says, yeah, I'm coming, yeah, what's he doing now, he says, oh, he's there, so the guy I had looking at, who I thought was a homeless person trying to be John Paul Jones, and I went, what's the one who really takes Cake, a couple of years ago a guy came in, a challenged individual who was trying to raise money for his addiction of some kind and he called me several times on the phone that day and I talked to him and Some of the other guys had to do it and we told him we weren't interested in what he was selling, I see, but he showed up with the items and, when I told him I wasn't interested in buying them, I said, you know, we discuss. on the phone he said man if you don't buy them I'm going to break them I'm just going to break them and I told him you can do whatever you want with them but you can't do it here and He proceeded to lose his mind and right here near your camera , destroyed some kind of imported SG guitar, smashed it to pieces and I was able to throw him out the door and then he hit a couple more things.

The light pole broke into small pieces and he crossed the street and passed out. A guy came in with one less ball to sell me an old Les Paul from the 70s and it was like it was missing. He had two ropes. Tuners were missing from it. upstairs and everything came in with it without a case and said he got it out of his basement, it was all dirty and everything and I said, well, that's a cool guitar, I can fix it up and make some money, so I told him how much do you want. so he's like a hundred bucks I was like yeah, yeah, 100 bucks, I can do that no problem, so I gave him 100 bucks, so I was like, oh, this is cool, I'll put it in the back, I'll fix it someday, right?

You know? maybe like an hour later, Thurston Moore from Sonic Use walks into the store and says, Did you just buy a Las Paul by any chance? And honestly, I didn't even think I said no because there's no way it could have been the guitar. I thought they would want you to know what they would play and I said to myself, oh yeah, I did, it's missing tuners and it has two strings, it's like, oh yeah, that's how we use it, yeah, yeah, and it was his guitar that they were using. that night and the guy had reached into his truck that he was driving that night and stuck it out the window and no one was looking, he walked around the corner because the club was around the corner and he sold it to me, so we had a sales event.

Time and Paul Reed Smith, the man himself, was here and I got distracted and was talking to a customer and at the time we had an original 1959 fender that had all of its original hang tags on it and had never really left its case or anything totally significant. . and it was hanging in a display case about five feet away from where I was standing and the next thing you know I lost sight of Paul and I turned around and the guitar wasn't in the display case, yeah suddenly my heart sank and I was a little nervous and walked back to the repair shop and found Paul Reed Smith on the bench in our shop.

He was taking apart this original 1959 Strat fender and he said to me, "Well, I can't talk to Leo Fender, but I can talk to this one." guitar and he can talk to me while he removes the pick from this original 1959 fender. When I started this business, I started in my garage selling only small guitars and my wife said to me: what are you going to do with the money? and I said, well, I'm retired, so I'm going to donate it to charity and at that time we rescued a dog named Rusty in Manhattan, New York, who was left after 14 years and people didn't want him anymore.

We flew and got them and brought them, that's why the dog is the logo exactly of this store and everything we do is in his honor and memory because he lived a full life and he didn't want to give up, he just kept going So we donate everything here to charities to guitars for vets, animal rescue initiative and children's education here in Charleston at the Gail Yard center.