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Chelsea Now photos by Ed Hamilton Chelsea Guitars owner Dan Courtenay picks away at his Gibson electric earlier this week in his landmark Chelsea store. Dan’s Chelsea Guitars remains a relic of the Golden Age By Ed Hamilton
On a hand-painted sign atop an old storefront in New York’s famed Chelsea Hotel, a character in a long white beard and flowing robe reminiscent of Michelangelo’s God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel holds a guitar by the neck, ready to hand it down from heaven into the arms of some lucky mortal. Such a sentiment rather tidily sums up the attitude of the owner, the employees and a large part of the customer base at Dan’s Chelsea Guitars, a store devoted to the sale, repair and near-worship of Vintage guitars from the golden age of the instrument.
A throwback to the olden days, the kind of place that’s fast disappearing from New York in the wake of gentrification, the little shop is chock-full of rock ’n’ roll bric-a-brac and miscellaneous Americana. On the walls hang outsider paintings of bluesman Son House and Bob Dylan; death masks of Paul McCartney, Christopher Walken and Vincent Price; photos of various obscure guitar legends; and spectacular 3-D reproductions of classic album covers such as Cream’s “Disraeli Gears” and Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew.” The shelves are lined with tiny banjos and ukuleles, a Howdy Doody puppet and music-themed collectable dolls; atop a huge amp sits an ancient stuffed snow leopard, it’s fur quite scruffy, rescued from the garbage of 23rd Street.
“Anything old and weird and cool,” says Dan, the proprietor. And of course there are the guitars—electric and acoustic, a dizzying array of models—displayed in the windows, sitting on the floor and hanging in a thicket from the rafters. Part Shop, part Chelsea chill sopt The cast of characters who populate the shop, hanging out, swapping stories and, of course, playing the guitar are as varied and eccentric as the décor. Their names say it all: “Metal” John, “Tone Master” Coby, Sam “Jesse James” Greiman, Steve “The Godfather” Divenuta, “3-D” Bob (creator of the 3-D album covers) and “Gangster” Tim, their garb running the gamut from hippie duds to heavy metal regalia to country-and-western gear. United only by their passion for music, these guys smile and nudge one another as they give me their nicknames. Some of them, I believe, actually perform under these monikers, while others are simply pulling my leg, because I’m a rare outsider in these parts, someone who doesn’t play the guitar.
The stars visit Dan’s Chelsea Guitars, too. I hear various names bandied about by the regulars, including: Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Robert DeNiro, Russell Crow, G.E. Smith, Ethan Hawke, ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons and Richard Gere. David Crosby and Graham Nash stayed at the hotel and popped downstairs for a visit, as did Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. Members of the Allman Brother’s Band used to sleep in their trailer outside and come in to use the bathroom. Even General Westmoreland, who collected guitars, once stopped by.
And then there’s Dan Courtenay, the lord of the manor, the Zeus in this impromptu rag-tag pantheon of guitar gods. Tall, heavy set, long-haired and authoritative in jeans and a flannel shirt, Dan presides over the faithful from behind his glass counter, alternately dispensing detailed technical information or regaling those assembled with a wealth of anecdotes drawn from life, rock ’n’ roll and beyond.
“This place is like Floyd’s Barber Shop,” Dan says, referring to the famous small-town meeting place on “The Andy Griffith Show.” Steve Divenuta seconds that notion: “It’s like the front porch, where everybody comes to relax and hear Dan spin a yarn. We have to take advantage of places like this, before the chain stores take over and everything is homogenized. This shop is my home away from home.”
Meanwhile, 3-D Bob sums it up in his own terms: “You know, 21st-century living is a groove, but this place has soul.”
A young man enters the store, a thin hipster with an expensive haircut and a rockabilly swagger. He looks around a bit, then inquires dubiously about an obscure type of guitar called a Maccaferri.
“That’s what Django Reinhart used to play,” Dan says, naming the legendary gypsy jazz guitarist.
“That’s my boy!” the hipster exclaims, delighted to be understood.
“Japanese kids tie their fingers down so they can play like Django,” Dan says. “Django burned his hand and had essentially only two fingers. He’s like Michael Jordan, uplifting like that. You watch him play, and at first you’re in awe because nobody’s ever done anything like that before. With only two fingers! But then he makes you think maybe you can do that, too. He makes the impossible seem suddenly possible. There’s this famous run on the guitar he does on one of his records, and nobody could ever figure it out. But now they’ve got it on You Tube!”
The upshot of the encounter is that Dan doesn’t have that kind of guitar on hand at the moment, but he thinks he may be getting one like it soon. Dan gives the young man a card and tells him to call and ask. The hipster leaves, hardly disappointed however, and you get the sense he’ll definitely be back someday.
“That’s the name of the game,” Dan says. “Most people who come in here don’t buy anything. But they see how cool it is—a shop totally dedicated to people like us. Who knows where that guy’s from, but he’ll go back to Minnesota or wherever and tell his friends that there’s this great shop in New York.”
A shrine of music and pop-culture paraphernalia awaits visitors along one wall of Chelsea Guitars. The shop sells Vintage—as opposed to merely used—guitars. “Used guitars are cheap, but not vintage guitars,” Dan says. “It’s like the difference between an old Vega and a ’65 Mustang. Objectively, they may seem pretty much the same, but one’s a piece of junk and the other’s a classic. Vintage guitars are more battered and beat up, but they play better.” “Kind of like a Stradivarius,” I suggest. “Exactly,” Dan replies. “The golden age of electric guitars was the ’50s. They were crafted individually and made from old-growth wood that you can’t even find these days. By 1965, companies like Gibson and Fender had taken over the industry, and they didn’t put so much effort into them anymore. They found that they could mass-produce them and make more money.” Dan used to have to travel all over the country to buy his guitars, but now he mainly buys them off the Internet. He says he doesn’t make much money because he pays so much for the guitars. “It’s not even musicians buying these things so much anymore,” Dan says of his pricier models. “They just can’t afford them. It’s doctors and lawyers who collect them because these guitars have become cultural icons.” A man comes in whom Dan seems to know fairly well. He greets him warmly and then turns away to attend to another customer. I strike up a conversation with the man, and it turns out his name is John Hagopian, a music producer from Montreal. He points to an amp sitting high on a shelf, surrounded by other amps, and says he’s waiting for Dan to get it down so he can try it out. It’s the first time I notice that the store—perhaps unsurprisingly—also sells vintage amps. “This is a 50-watt Marshall amp from the ’60s,” John says, explaining that he wants it for the studio of one of his clients. “This is the exact kind of amp that Eric Clapton used when he was with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Combined with a vintage Les Paul or 335 Gibson, it has a particular sound that you can’t get with any other amp.” Dan has two part-time employees, Matt Lyons, a pony-tailed fellow who plays in heavy metal bands such as The Disgruntled Postal Workers, and Tonemaster Coby O’Brien. Dan says that one of his employees repairs guitars, without specifying which one, and so later I ask Coby, “Are you the one who fixes the guitars?” “No,” Coby jokes, “I’m the one who breaks them.” “We’re looking for an artist to paint the trash can to look like Coby,” Dan says, “since we may as well throw the guitars in there as give them to him.” However, when Coby demonstrates his mellow tones, fingering the strings on an ancient, fragile-looking model, his technique seems anything but abusive. Dan has owned the guitar shop for 18 years, although he says the space in the Chelsea Hotel has been a music store of some kind since the 1940s. He remembers when it was a record store called Interesting Music. “The place sold all kinds of stuff,” Dan said, “Sheet music, classical records, you name it. I used to come here all the time when I was kid. There was an old man working here, and he was kind of cantankerous. If you tried to buy a piece of sheet music, he would ask you questions about it, and if you couldn’t answer them, he wouldn’t sell it to you.” Longtime Chelsea Hotel resident Tim Sullivan, who worked in the music store in the ’80s, says that the man who ran Interesting Records was named Vinnie. After Vinnie’s time, the store was owned by Sol Gold for two or three years in the late ’70s. Mark Straus bought the store in 1979, renamed it Chelsea Music, sold all kinds of instruments as well as records, and owned it until Courtenay bought it from him in 1989. The guitar store has been responsible for everything good in his life, Dan says. While it’s true he doesn’t make much money, he nevertheless considers himself a rich man, since he’s doing what he loves. He even met his wife in the shop, though he’s since divorced. When asked how he got into the guitar business, Dan says, “I’m 52. I was born in 1954 and I’ve been doing this since I was 15, buying and trading guitars.” A native New Yorker, and the son of corruption battling Police Chief Dan Courtenay, the younger Dan grew up in Queens and went to Archbishop Malloy High School. “Me and my friend Joe McVeigh were totally into music when we were kids, and we lived in a great city for music. We went to see all the old bluesmen,” Dan said. “One time, we saw Buddy Guy at the Village Gate—playing for like 12 people! He was playing a beat-up guitar, looked like it had been through hell. But that sound! After the concert, we went up to him and asked him how we could sound like him, and he said, ‘Use old guitars.’ “We were kids,” Dan went on, “just discovering music, and we naturally wanted to have the best sound. I know it sounds crazy, but we actually thought we could sound like Buddy Guy if we just had the right equipment. It shows you how young we were. Buddy Guy: He could play a broom stick!” Dan, whose influences include Albert King and Otis Rush, was always in bands as he was growing up. “This was the late ’60s, early ’70s,” Dan says. “I was so hung up on the world, I couldn’t really talk to people. It was all about trying to meet girls. And music worked. That was the one thing that did actually work. And music provided so much discipline that it kept us together, and kept us from being consumed by drugs.” Dan continued to play in bands periodically throughout adulthood, also working as a pre-school teacher and a bartender before he bought the guitar shop. Back in the shop, Hagopian, the music producer, is still waiting to test the Marshall amp. Joe Gangster starts talking to him and suggests a way to jerry-rig a much less expensive modern amp to sound similar to the Marshall. Even I can tell from the outset that, clearly, this is not going to be good enough. Hagopian rolls his eyes and says, “I’m very picky. I’m willing to pay what I have to pay.” When Dan moved to Chelsea 26 years ago, he says it was like “a secret neighborhood on the lower West Side. I was blown away by its beauty. It was populated by gay men, retired dock workers and coke dealers. There were all these great places to eat and to hang out.” But that was well before the recent gentrification of the neighborhood. “Now, unfortunately, no artists can afford it.” When asked about his store’s place in the Chelsea Hotel, Dan, who lived there for two years after his divorce four years ago, says, “The hotel is the anchor of the neighborhood. There’s this collection of incredible talent in this hotel, all these people with this great passion for their art. The Chelsea is filled with people who have left their hometown and come to New York, looking for their lost tribe members. You know that kid who sat in the back row with acne—every high school had one. Now he’s living at the Chelsea, and he’s a famous designer or something, and all these reporters are interviewing him in the lobby.” In Dan’s eyes, the guitar shop is an extension of the hotel. “You’ve got shops in this building unlike any other,” he says. “There’s the Balabanis Tailor Shop. It’s an old couple from Greece and they’re great tailors—and really cheap. And then there’s the Capitol Fishing Tackle Store,” he says, referring to a shop that recently was forced to move out of the hotel due to rising rents, and which, Dan says, had a niche culture similar to that of the guitar store. “One Sunday morning I was coming to work and in the middle of the street there’s this old guy with a cig hanging out of his mouth, casting a fly reel. And he’s hitting the headlight of a bus, just flicking it with his line over and over again, and it’s amazing: he’s the greatest fly fisher in the world. I’m electrified and nobody else is watching it—everybody else is rushing by. There’s something breathtaking about the whole scene—and now we’re losing that sort of thing in New York.” John Hagopian is still waiting for Dan to get the amp down so he can test it. Finally, he says, “Do I have to get down on my knees and beg?’ “Oh, dude, I can’t sell you that,” Dan reveals. “It’s not even mine. I’m just storing it for a friend. He’s waiting for it to appreciate and he doesn’t want to sell it now. The price has been going up so much that next year, it’ll be worth twice as much. I don’t dare plug it in, because what if it blew?” Dan convinces Hagopian that there is indeed a better way to get the same sound. (It involves modifying another, though less expensive, vintage amp, but the particulars go over my head.) Trying to use the Marshall amp professionally is not a good idea, Dan suggests, because if you blow it, it will cost almost as much as the amp itself to get it fixed. When asked where he would go if he had to close the shop, Dan turns pensive. “It’s impossible for mom-and-pop businesses to survive anymore. Nobody could open a store like this in New York these days. Actually, I don’t know where I’d go. Las Vegas? Disneyland? New York is my home. I’ve never lived anywhere else. I could run the store out of a house Upstate, selling on the Internet. I’d make more money, but I like the people. That’s a big part of it.” “But you know,” Dan continues, “my dad said something to me once. He said, ‘New York is going to be around a lot longer than you or I.’ There will always be people like us coming to the city, people with this kind of great passion, because that’s what drives New York. And who cares what color their skin is? It runs in cycles. In 10 or 20 years the tide will turn. But for the present generation, we’ll be out of here.”
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