Rick Kelly’s guitar shop occupies the ground floor of a red brick tenement at 42 Carmine Street in New York’s West Village. Kelly has been building, repairing and talking guitars on the site since 1991, having spent the 1970s punk era around the corner on Downing Street. “The city was real gritty and dirty back then, you couldn’t even walk in Central Park, you’d get mugged for sure,” Kelly says. “I liked it that way.”
Carmine Street Guitars, the subject of a delightful documentary by Ron Mann, is one of the last redoubts of “Old New York” as Kelly calls it. On a typical day, Kelly’s elderly mother Dorothy will be working the cash register; his 26-year-old apprentice Cindy Hulej, will be blow-torching a custom design on to a guitar body; while Kelly will be at his workbench planing away a piece of wood. At one point in the film, Hulej teases Kelly for not having a cellphone or the internet. “You need to move into the 21st century.”
“Why?” he responds.
Kelly’s signature design is based on the Fender Telecaster, the first mass-produced electric guitar, only he makes his with a single electric pick-up – because why complicate things? – and an acoustic guitar-style “snake” head, with three tuning pegs down each side. But it’s the wood that’s the thing. He builds his instruments from “the bones of Old New York”: reclaimed white pine that he rescues from skips and building sites. His customers have included Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, jazz legend Bill Frisell, and punk guitarist Lenny Kaye, whose “Kellycaster” is carved from the ceiling beam from a Bowery flophouse that dates back to the 19th century. “When I play it, I feel like I’m playing my neighbourhood, I can feel all this energy within this piece of wood,” says Kaye. “It’s kind of alchemical.”
There is something alchemical about Mann’s documentary too. It presents a week in the life of Kelly and Hulej. Nothing much happens besides lathing and jigsawing and shoptalk. A parade of characters drop by, including Kirk Douglas of the Roots, Eleanor Friedberger of Fiery Furnaces and Jamie Hince of the Kills. At a time when the very idea of wandering into a shop is thrillingly transgressive, it is a restorative experience. “We always said that the movie would lower your blood pressure,” Kelly tells me over the phone from New York, as Hulej chisels in the background. “It’s like petting a dog, it kind of calms you down.”
It was Jim Jarmusch who set the movie in motion. “I just find Rick a fascinating person,” he says. “Often, you’ll go into the shop, and it seems like nobody’s even in there. Rick and Cindy will be in the back, building instruments, so you can just go and hang out in the front on your own. I always leave there covered in sawdust.”
The central event in the film sees Kelly cycling out to pick up a piece of 160-year-old wood from McSorley’s Old Ale House, New York’s oldest bar, founded in 1854 and the subject of one of the all-time great New Yorker articles by Joseph Mitchell. Canadian director Mann seems to take his cue from Mitchell in his unhurried approach, capturing something more than merely guitars. As Kaye put it: “Shops like Rick’s, they just give a sort of hominess to a city, you know? In the afternoon, whenever I happen to need a break, I like to smoke a joint and stop into my favourite places. The used book store, the comic book place, the shop that sells bizarro antiques. Maybe buy something, maybe not. But just immerse myself in the museum of mankind.”
And those guitars are really something. (I’m afraid they now sell for $1,500-$5,000). The New York wood is no mere gimmick; Kelly insists it’s the best for the job. When the Europeans arrived, New York was covered in white pine forests. They ended up being used to build Manhattan. “Almost every building down here is framed out in this wood,” says Kelly. “And now the wood has been indoors for about 200 years so it’s completely seasoned to the point where it’s incredibly resonant. So it’s very special wood as far as guitar-making goes.”
There is one ominous note in the movie – when a real estate agent enters the shop like a great white shark having just sold the next door building for $6m. But Kelly insists that the future is secure. “There used to be a bunch of grocery stores around here, Portuguese, Chinese. Now it’s yuppies and corporate stuff. But if anything it’s probably helped our business because we have people who can afford the product.” The building has been owned by the same family since 1905; his rent doubled when the latest generation inherited the building a decade ago, but demand is higher than it’s ever been.
Lockdown has presented its own challenges: they have had to deal with a flood in the backroom and rioters outside, but it’s also given Kelly and Hulej the chance to work through their two-year backlog of orders.
No one is pretending that guitars occupy the same position in popular culture as they once did; but Carmine Street Guitars made me look at my own guitar with renewed appreciation. “I don’t think you’re going to do much with a guitar that hasn’t been done already,” says Kaye. “But I don’t think that’s so bad. The fact is, there will never be another instrument as versatile, portable and easy to play. You can learn three chords in 10 minutes and express yourself immediately. And then you have a lifetime to master it.”
Carmine Street Guitars is released on 26 June.
