The Wall

Thanks to Andy Schwartz for pointing out this story by John Seabrook from the New Yorker. Its the incredible tale of the fate of the famous collection of autographed musician photos that cover the walls of Manny's Music here in New York City. It also, perhaps unwittingly, describes what can make the face-to-face retail experience in New York so much fun.



Manny’s Music, one of the largest of the West Forty-eighth Street musical-instrument stores, is closing soon, and among the matters yet to be resolved between Manny’s owner, Sam Ash Music, and Manny’s founding family, the descendants of Manny Goldrich, is the fate of the hundreds of publicity photographs of musicians that line the store’s walls. Many of them are inscribed with personal notes to Manny, who died in 1968, and to his son Henry, who is seventy-six and retired.

It was Holly Goldrich, Henry’s daughter, who, together with a filmmaker named Sandi Bachom, had the idea for Manny’s Virtual Wall, a social-networking site. Holly and Sandi are working with Kodak to scan the photos and to get camcorders into the hands of longtime Manny’s customers, who include many of the world’s best-known rock musicians. Their idea was that those musicians who couldn’t make it into the store for interviews could film themselves talking about their memories. The images and the interviews will be posted on Manny’s Virtual Wall.

One afternoon last week, three musicians gathered in the electric-guitar showroom at the back of the store to help build the Virtual Wall. John Sebastian, a founder of the Lovin’ Spoonful, arrived first, and was soon joined by Tom Chapin and Leslie West, the guitar player from the Vagrants and, later, Mountain. Sebastian, who was wearing a fedora, and Chapin, who had on a blue work shirt, played some country blues, while West, in a black shirt with a samurai sword embroidered on the back, tried out guitar effects. All three have been coming to Manny’s since they were teen-agers, fifty years ago.

Bachom asked Sebastian, who wrote “Do You Believe in Magic” on a Gibson J-45 that he bought from Henry, what made Manny’s special. “Other stores, they wouldn’t be as rude. It was more fun to call up Henry and then insult him, and then he’d insult you, than ‘Hello, Guitar Center,’ ” Sebastian said, in a simpering voice.

Soon Henry turned up, and he sat at the center of the group. West moved in closer to him.

“Get out of my face,” Goldrich said. “Seriously. You’re bothering me.” West retreated.

Manny’s is a vestige of a vital cultural industry that once flourished just north of Times Square—session musicians and band members used instruments purchased at Manny’s to perform songs written in the Brill Building, on Forty-ninth Street, and in the recording studios and ballrooms around Fifty-second Street. Manny’s, founded in 1935, provided not just the instruments but a place for players to hang out between gigs. Under Henry’s management, with the rise of the electric guitar, the store grew larger. Jimi Hendrix bought many of his guitars there. Ringo Starr got the Ludwig drum set used in the Beatles’ “Ed Sullivan Show” performances from Manny’s. Generations of guitar-besotted teen-agers followed their heroes through the doors, where they were greeted with thinly veiled hostility by the sales staff. The store didn’t encourage you to play the instruments unless you were famous, and you didn’t get to keep the pick when you were finished. “You gonna buy it today?” the head salesman, Carl, would ask menacingly. But there was a bracing in-your-faceness about the experience which felt like real New York.

“Henry would never let you turn the knobs up above two,” West complained.

“That was just you,” Goldrich said. “I let these guys.”

“These guys played acoustic!” West said. “Did you ever play an instrument?”

“I played cash register,” Goldrich replied.

After busting each other’s chops for an hour or so, the group walked to the front of the store to look at the pictures. Sebastian found himself in an eight-by-ten glossy of the Lovin’ Spoonful. West examined a shot of Keith Moon thrusting his tongue into West’s mouth. “Do I look fat?” he asked.

Goldrich was content to settle into his old spot, on a stool near the counter. “Every piece of popular music ever recorded was by people on these walls,” he said. “Only one who never came in was Elvis. He wanted the stuff delivered to the hotel—he stayed at the Warwick, I think. The Beatles—the Beatles were always very courteous. Almost all the rock stars were. Don McLean, Tim Hardin, Soupy Sales. The Who. John Entwistle—now there was a gentleman. He invited my wife and me to his house—his castle, I should say—in England. It took us forty-five minutes to go through it!” On and on, until it was hard to tell where the Wall ended and Goldrich’s memories began.