Chuck Levin's Riff 'n' Ready Charm

Wayne Christopher, 33, is a mortgage broker by day, a wannabe DJ at night. Not buying today, just looking at upgrading his turntables. "I've finally got the money to do what I want, and I want to play. This is my new toy."

Jerry Brown, 54, a Voice of America employee who bought his first trumpet -- a King Cleveland -- at Chuck's in 1966, came in on a sunny, cold Saturday recently to buy a shakere, an African percussion instrument. But he couldn't resist a quick trip up to "the vault" just to check out what's new in the horn section. "The little boy in me still goes crazy every time I walk in that door," Brown said in an e-mail.

Then there are the real collectors. You might be impressed that Brian Cook, a 49-year-old IT director, has 26 guitars (plus a Paul Reed Smith 20th anniversary Singlecut on order and a jones for the Eddie Van Halen signature guitar -- "It's got the red color with Eddie Van Halen stripes on it"). That's until you find out Leventhal, he of the Gibson Mustang, has 44. "My wife is very sweet and wonderful and says go ahead and satisfy your illness," says Leventhal, a windbreaker-wearing dad who works in the City of Alexandria's finance department.

Paul Reed Smith himself can, of course, have any instrument he wants: his eponymous electric guitar business, located near Annapolis, is now the third largest in the country; his guitars are played by the likes of Carlos Santana. But when he worked as a repairman at Chuck's during high school, money was a little harder to come by.

"I was jealous. People would walk in there and buy a Marshall stack or a B3 or a PA. I had the money for a cable," says Smith. But still, "if you had bought something, you felt like a man, an adult, when you walked out of there."

A Sweet Cacophony

Chuck's can get a little loud. "Cacophony is the word that comes to mind," says Wil White, who has worked there for 19 years, his head resting on a hand heavy with silver rings.

Drums are stacked to a man's full height, and lines of electric guitars wrap around the back of the room, disappearing behind islands of black amps. Mikes hang from the ceiling, speaker stands stud the floor. There are strings and straps, shelves of cymbals, rhinestone-studded accordions, tambourines and keyboards, mixers and sticks.

A couple of guys get on the congas and, pronto: mini-jam session. Back in keyboards, someone is stuck on a three-note go-go riff. In guitars, they're deeply thankful that "Stairway to Heaven" has finally run its course, but "Sweet Child of Mine" has gotten really old, and you only want to hear Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train" so many times a week.

There is a lot of squeezing between things, and whole categories of items that are for sale aren't visible. Trumpets? Violins?

To see those, you have to get an escort to take you past the muscled security guard at the main door, through a heavy curtain of clear plastic straps and up a freight elevator, at which point you'll find yourself in a worn-out warren of offices and storerooms that resembles nothing more than the 1960s dentist's office it once was. The kind of box-filled hallway where doors have stickers that no one can explain anymore: "Caution: El Zorro lives here."

Once you make it into the back rooms, though, you have all the piccolos in the world to choose from.

Up there with the band instruments, the insistent beat of an electronic drum machine yields to an earful of scales: a wobbly trip up high on the flute, down so low on the rare, $20,000 Selmer bass saxophone that it sounds like the horn on the Queen Mary leaving port. A young girl quietly plays Miles Davis's "Four" on a tenor sax. The salesman encourages her to try it louder.