| equipment for over
a year, everything came straight out of pawn shops and classified ads.
It was very profitable be- cause we had pretty much vowed to try and double our money on every sale, which is a hard thing to do when you're handling new gear. We just had a small shop in kind of your hippie part of town, all musician and artist types, and it started growing like mad. I guess there was a real need in town for a younger shop. "We expanded into two buildings and then three buildings and then four build- ings, and over about three or four years we took over the rock market in Memphis." Strings & Things grew steadily, a good old fashioned success story, until disaster struck. On July 2, 1978 at 10:00 pm. a Molotov cocktail was thrown through the back door into the store's warehouse area. By 8:00 am. the next morning the store was levelled, gone, 100% loss. Why a complete loss? There were no firemen. The day before, Memphis' mayor fired the city's fire fighters for going on strike. Between 8 pm. and Midnight of July 2nd, 225 fires were set supposedly by retaliating firemen. "We spent the next few weeks recover- ing," Lovell remembered. "We got a temp- orary building right across the street from the burned out store which was really a hole in the wall but we had no choice, so we immediately went into that building. Suppliers like MTI, Unicord, Hoshino, all these people just really helped us out. Yamaha got left hanging for a lot of mon- ey for almost a year, they never tried to sue us or foreclose on us-no one did. In fact, we had $14,000 cash burn up in the store. We had to immediately shut down the checking account which bounced several checks and even that the people were understanding about. "We had customers calling us at home the next day by the hundreds saying, we won't buy from anyone else.' The other stores in town were so glad, you can't imagine. They were feeling like, 'this is it, this is what we've been waiting for, close in on 'em, let's run some ads.' But their business did not go up at all. Our bank, our insurance company, our customers, our personnel, our suppliers put in just a tremendous effort because we had a big operation and when a big operation goes down it's not easy to get back up. We blindly dove into it and ran up a consid- erable amount of bills in the process. We didn't mess around long, we got right back to business." "Right back to business" is no exagger- ation. Eight weeks later, September of |
 CHARLIE AND CHRIS IN POORER TIMES- PERHAPS RIGHT AFTER THE FIRE 1978, String & Things re-opened in its own building (all brick on a solid cement slab) on Memphis' main street. Strings & Things has had a healthy re- covery and today, the store is basically four specialty shops in one. Physically separated (doors and all), individually named and managed, they are: the Sound Lab (sound reinforcement); the Grand Stand (keyboards); Drum Stand (percussion); and the central Strings & Things (guitars, amps, and accessories). According to Lovell, "A drummer can make all the racket he wants, he's not going to bother the guitar player who can make all the racket he wants because he's not going to bother the guy in the p.a. department. When a customer comes in for something specific, that's all they care about-that's it. Splitting into departments works really well especially if you can get your sales volume up to where you have two salesmen per department." Strings & Things operates a second smaller store in suburban East Memphis which Lovell calls "your doctor/lawyer part of town." Realizing the need for "planting those seeds," the second store |
is heavily involved
with an educational program as opposed to the downtown store which is a pro shop and doesn't offer any lessons. Of course Strings & Things offers its customers a good selection of product, but when asked what are his major lines, Lovell replies, "Peavey, Peavey, and Peavey." "I think Peavey is so successful because their intentions are really honest," Lovell pointed out, "What Peavey wants to do for their dealers, as well as their customers, is they want the dealer to make money and they want the customer to get the best product at the best price. I think a lot of other manufacturers are much more con- cerned about their piece of the action which is very small thinking, but so many of the companies are owned by corporate conglomerates. They are so 'out there' that they could probably hire your average musician in any town and this guy would be worth $100,000 a year compared to some of the guys they hire and pay. It's funny that all of us musicians know it, but these giant corporations with mega buck industries and all their research and deve- lopment are really a bunch of ivory tower BS. This is why they don't want retailers in wholesale, we know what the consumer wants. I'm sitting here with Fenders and Gibsons and Yamahas and Peaveys and I know what sells, I know what turns 'em on about each particular instrument, and that's probably more than (major manu- facturer) knows." Realistically, Strings & Things is not a Peavey factory outlet. The store's major lines include: Peavey and JBL in sound reinforcement; with guitars it's Strings & Things (their own line discussed later), Gibson, Ibanez, and Peavey; keyboard movers are Korg, Sequential Circuits, Moog, and Kawai; for percussion it's Pearl, Tama, Zildjian, Paiste, and Roxx sticks (Roxx is another Strings & Things line. Roxx sticks were designed by Drum Stand manager "Big Dave" Patrick, a percussion expert who regularly assists manufacturers in product development and writes col- umns for enthusiast magazines.) "I think what you're seeing in the industry is people are selling more with less brands," offered Lovell, "it's really come down to pick your two or three lines and I'll pick my two or three and let's stop selling apples against apples. "If you're fishing and you use 15 hooks and 20 different kinds of bait, that's not the way to do it. To have every brand of rock guitar just to sell one is a very unprofitable way to sell guitars. It's called 3 |