Housecalls

Normally, I would have laughed and told her that considering me a technical resource was a fair indicator of the direness of her straits. This time I happened to have an answer in my phonebook.

I calmly read her a phone number from my list of essential contacts. Before I even mentioned his name, the doorman at Sin-e who had been listening to my half of the conversation spoke up: "Sending 'em to Richie, eh?"

"Too late?" I asked.

Looking at his watch, the doorman shook his head.

"Nah. Even though he does late calls, I wouldn't really call after 1 a.m."

In the city that doesn't sleep, it follows that there would be all-night guitar tech support. Elementary, but who is this Richie guy? He must be an interesting cat, if only for the fact that he's never advertised, but has a full-time business catering to musicians running out of a one-bedroom apartment in Alphabet City. A legal business, too.

Though I can attest to the quality, speed and reasonable price of his work, I was drawn to meet him as much by the colorful stories I'd heard as by his services. Sure enough, Richie turned out to be a man of many dimensions.

Richie Baxt discovered his vocation in retirement from his career as Assistant Commissioner for the NYC Department of Probation. Since then, he's grown a flourishing career from his favorite hobby, guitar building and repair. His services are in such demand from recommendations alone that he works six days a week and estimates he repairs 1500 guitars annually.

Like everyone else, I heard about Richie by word of mouth.

One Sunday, Brad Penuel, an amateur guitarist working for an NYU research program, was browsing the offerings of a ragged sidewalk entrepreneur on Broadway. The guitar for sale was too pricey, so Penuel said he was looking for just a cheap beater.

"You gotta talk to Richie!' said the man.

When Penuel took the bait and asked "Who's Richie?" the man pulled a pen from his overcoat pocket, grabbed him and scrawled a phone number on his wrist. Curious, Penuel called the number, and soon after had an appointment to join the ranks of Richie's championing devotees.

Customers are by appointment only-no exceptions. Through the hollow rumble that tells me I'm on speakerphone, a voice says, "Yeah, Richie here."

The first time I called, he wanted to know my name, instrument and who referred me, but this time I remind him that I am a repeat customer, and though he says "Hi," uncertainty wavers in his voice until I describe my guitars. "Guild acoustic, Italia baritone, black and white Fender bass with the reversed polarity on the volume pots?"

"What can I do for you, John?"

I explain that this time I just want to talk to him about his business; there's a click on the line, and his voice is much closer. I manage to convince him that I'm serious, and we make a late-evening appointment the following night.

Richie greets me at the door with his broad, patient smile, pointing me to a sofa while he finishes up with a bass guitar. He test drives it through a little practice amp under his workbench, while Eric Clapton plays "Beware of Darkness" in a George Harrison tribute concert on a small tv to his side.

Try fitting 60 guitars and accessories in and around the cliché of the cramped New York apartment. Richie works daily surrounded by instruments on stands and hanging from forked wall mounts. Two of his living-room walls are paneled from floor to ceiling in pegboard and hold up a forest of cellophane-tiny bags containing every imaginable variety of knob, pickup, tuning peg, nut and bolt.

The little remaining wall space is filled with photos of what Richie calls "his bands": autographed promo shots of the Strokes, Reid Paley, the Lunachicks and a gorgeous semi-nude photo of Josephine Baker discreetly placed in a high corner lined by dismembered guitar necks. The only exceptions are a photo of President Bush near the door, and one of Richie himself running the NYC marathon a few years back.

Richie had a brief detour as a nutritionist and marathoner, part of an amazing comeback from a six-month life sentence with tuberculosis in 1976. Thirty years later, Richie steams along, one of those infuriating Buckaroo Bonzai polymath types, except that his quiet humility hides most of his accomplishments from direct view. "I've lived a lot of lives," he says, in typical understatement.

A large man with large features, Richie has slightly almond-shaped eyes in a round, youthful face that shows his varied heritage. Italian, Spanish, North African, Russian and Mongolian all funnel into him through Brooklyn, which imbues his speech with its lyrical accent. He grew up all over the borough, getting his musical start in Canarsie, where every street corner had its own a cappella doo-wop group. Richie's group was the Riffs, neighbors of the Impalas, briefly famous for their 1958 hit "I Ran All the Way Home."

Richie could never afford instrument lessons as a kid, so in the late 70s he made sure that his son had the lessons and instruments that he never could. Despite a brief spate of free lessons on acoustic bass, his own instrumental aspirations lay dormant until his 40s, well after he'd become a coveted guitar technician.

He started a band with his running buddies-members of his marathon training club, and has played in a couple of bands since, but never as seriously as he has approached guitar building and repair.

His son's guitars eventually needed repairs, and taking them to shops infuriated him. "I knew I could do that," said Richie. "All that high school geometry and physics that I learned directly applied to the guitar. It all made sense. The guitar is all angles..." His meddling observations at local shops led to his taking home piece-work from them, and his business sprouted quite organically from there. When he retired from his job with the city, Richie decided to make a go of the guitar shop, working out of his divorced-bachelor's pad.

"It's a very New York experience," says Penuel. "It's an exclusive, private business. But at the same time, you're in some guy's house, where you can get repairs and good instruments at a reasonable price."

Besides the variety of second-hand guitars encircling the doorway, Richie also assembles his own guitars, headstocks emblazoned with Richie's logo, "Richie's Guitar Shop," in his own slanted font.

"Richie built my guitar and it's by my favorite-modeled on a Tele custom with a humbucker in the neck and regular Tele bridge," says another customer, the Sighs' guitarist Doug Halsey. "I have a 1959 Les Paul Special I never play because Richie built it. It's such an incredible guitar?He knows everything about every facet of guitars. He's a fascinating guy to talk to as well."

He rises every morning at eight and begins by cleaning up. Gesturing at a pile of rags by his feet, he says "By the time I go to bed at three or so, it's a mess in here." He begins seeing clients around ten or 11, and between short appointments, fixes and builds guitars late into the night.

At 64, Richie has no plans to do anything else. "People ask me that all the time, but how can I retire from retirement?" He loves working with guitars, and feels he's participating in a good process, working to help people he likes. He contrasts guitar repair with his earlier nutrition work.

"People happily paid for advice, but they didn't want to change. Here, I could tell someone to string their guitar upside-down and backward, and they'd say 'Ok, whatever you say.'"

These clients want to be helped, sometimes desperately, and Richie derives great personal satisfaction helping them.

He periodically threatens to cut back, and even has a small cadre of aspiring apprentices who help out around the shop, but Richie is adamant that he keep up with the workload himself, reasoning that it's only fair to give his customers what they're paying for: his attention.

His clientele is a who's who of musicians in New York and touring musicians nationwide. Though it includes such luminaries as the Strokes or Sugarcult, Richie is diffident about his better-known customers. Though he admits working on Kurt Cobain's guitar, he says, "I don't really have a relationship with people like that. His guitar tech came in. I'd rather focus on my guys, like Simon and the Bar Sinisters. Everybody knows Simon; he's one of the great musicians of the Village."

Richie's own taste is for 1950s rock 'n' roll and classic blues: Robert Johnson, Slim Harpo, Elmore James. "I'm not that much into most new music," he admits, but adds with avuncular pride, "I like to go out and hear my bands play?"

Richie's loyalty to the locals may explain why you can hardly fling a dead nine-volt battery in a local rehearsal space or nightclub without hitting one of Richie's customers. That and his paramedic's calm in the face of all manner of guitar catastrophes, from loose connections to broken necks.

The night of my friend's guitar emergency, Richie had her come straight over and fixed her guitar on the spot. He shrugs off the bouncer's admonition, preferring a late-night call to an early-morning one any day. "Right from the start, I knew I was doing something different. I thought if I was working with musicians, I ought to work when they're awake. One asshole called me at 7:30 one morning. That's what really gets me."

Working out of his home, perhaps in combination with the advanced understanding of human nature he honed during his career in law enforcement, led him to establish a stringent set of guidelines. He hands a Xeroxed sheet to each new customer. Titled "My Philosophy," it is a list of simple but firm instructions in exchange for a clear outline of what you can expect from him:

"Please don't ask to use my phone. When you are at Manny's do you ask to use their phone?"

"Don't leave a message like this: 'I'm in Ohio and I need a new pickup installed tomorrow'? Wait a minute, that was my son."

Folksy but firm, the "Philosophy" is not limited to proscriptions. For example, Richie offers free repairs if a band donated a performance to any legitimate charity.

Asked about the rules, he says plainly, "I've had guys drop in, [and] if they don't have an appointment, I turn them away. One guy said to me, 'But I don't have your number!' That's not my problem. Ask around the East Village long enough, you'll find me if you need to."