ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, September 26, 1996 TAG: 9609260007
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: N1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MEGAN SCHNABEL STAFF WRITER
HE beat-up old Kay guitar - solid wood, arched top, probably a 1930s model - is the latest hurt instrument to land on Steve Carlisle's workbench.
Carlisle runs a practiced finger down the guitar's neck and smiles.
"Feel right here," he says, touching a rough spot behind one of the frets. "Feel that? This guitar was played until it was worn out."
Carlisle, who owns Blue Note Vintage Brokers in downtown Salem, will bring life back to the old instrument, with its rusty strings and cracked neck. It will cost $300 or so to fix the guitar, which in its current condition is worth maybe $25. But it belongs to the father of the woman who brought it to Carlisle, and she's willing to pay.
Carlisle understands. The only guitar he owns that he'll never sell, he says, is one his mother used to play.
He turns the Kay over and shakes his head.
"They tried to fix it themselves," Carlisle says. "That's the worst thing people can do." He points to the back of the neck, split nearly all the way through. They tried to glue it back together, he says. Now the adhesive has seeped into the wood, and he'll have to try to remove it before he can repair it correctly.
On the walls of Carlisle's long, narrow shop on East Main Street hang 150 guitars, banjos and mandolins. He handles only vintage acoustic and electric guitars - those 20-plus years old.
He spends 40 or more hours a week repairing stringed instruments, for other people and for himself. Some he resells, some he keeps. He accepts some instruments on consignment.
After working for almost two years in the back of Olde Salem Stained Glass and Antiques, Carlisle moved a month ago into his new space, which has a window and door onto Salem's busy downtown street.
Kathy Spark, manager of Olde Salem, says Carlisle's business has grown tremendously since he moved next door. He seems to get a lot of repeat business, she says.
She credits both his technical expertise and his personality.
"He's been very well received in this area," she says. "We're just crazy about him. Whenever I have a question about anything, I ask him. He knows a lot about everything."
He certainly seems to know all the guitar lore. He can tell you about Les Paul's divorce and why it led the guitar innovator to have his moniker taken briefly off the guitar named for him. He talks about Kevin "Thumbs" Carlisle, lauded by Paul and others as a phenomenal picker - and perhaps his own relative. He knows about real blues guitarists and their cheap instruments, and explains that the ads showing them holding pricey models are probably set-ups.
He doesn't play much himself - he took piano lessons for a few years as a child and hated them - but he knows the culture and the mechanics of stringed instruments, and he possesses the steady, patient hands required to mend chips and tighten strings.
And he does it all by touch alone, for he cannot see.
Carlisle, 49, was born with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease in which the retina of the eye deteriorates over time. He had been losing his sight gradually since he was a child, but the problem worsened around 1983. Today, he sees only gray.
After years in the corporate world - among other careers, he's been a business manager for a mechanical contractor, a contract administrator, a box office manager - Carlisle began to turn his hobby into a business. He had been collecting guitars since the 1970s, and he discovered he could fix most instruments without seeing them. He started offering advice and repairs to musicians in the Baltimore area, where he and his family lived at the time.
When they moved to Southwest Virginia a few years ago, he started working at the Salem store. His wife, Norma, has been his best help, he says, especially when they go to guitar shows. "She knows me. She knows what I'm looking for. I couldn't do it without her."
He lets his customers tell him what's wrong with their instruments, but he doesn't really need their help.
"Generally speaking, I usually can feel more about the condition of the guitar than they can tell me." As with the Kay that's now on his workbench, Carlisle can simply run his hands over a guitar, cradle it on his lap, and tell you who made it, when they made it, and whether anyone has tried to refurbish it. He even can tell you what chords the performer was especially fond of and whether he used a pick, based on where the instrument is worn.
There was the recent case of the white 1966 Falcon, for instance. At a guitar show, a man approached Carlisle with a '66 Falcon, a guitar he'd been looking to buy for a while. The man had been told by the dealer who had sold it to him that it was all original, and he had paid $1,600 for it. He later discovered it had been refinished - something that isn't tolerated in vintage instrument circles.
Carlisle said he knew as soon as he touched the guitar that it had been retouched because the finish was gritty.
"If a blind person can tell you it's refinished, what's the matter with the sighted dealer who claimed he didn't know?" Carlisle asked.
Carlisle breaks his customers into three categories. There are the players, who don't care if their guitars are beat all to pieces, as long as they sound good. There are the collectors, who will spend thousands of dollars and travel thousands of miles to track down the perfect stringed specimen.
Carlisle considers himself a member of a third group: the happy mediums:
"I love it, and I'm somewhat immersed in it. But I'm not eaten up by it. I keep it in the proper context."
LENGTH: Long : 108 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: NHAT MEYER/Staff. Steve Carlisle, owner of Blue Noteby CNBVintage Brokers in Salem, poses with one of his many guitars, a 1954
Harmony Rocket. color. 2. Steve Carlisle removes the strings of a
guitar brought to him for repair. 3. Acoustic intruments of all
kinds line Steve Carlisle's Blue Note Vintage Brokers in Salem.
Carlisle specializes in repairing and collecting all kinds of
stringed instruments.