Chuck Levin's Riff 'n' Ready Charm

Talking about him, people slip into the present tense. Three years later, customers are still passing on condolences. His smiling face is on T-shirts, on posters, etched in blue on the store's plastic bags.

He was a clean-cut, somewhat stout older white man in a market that is all about youth and hipness, and yet somehow he was cool. The stories about his generosity are almost as legion as the stories about his prowess at squeezing manufacturers for a deal.

Your stuff got stolen off the stage at the Crazy Horse in Georgetown? The Levins might let your young band replace it at cost, on credit. Interested in setting up your own audio consulting business but have no experience with things legal? Set up a meeting with the Levins' lawyer.

But maybe, more than these things, it was the way he acted: that a kid was just as important as anybody else.

"It was a Friday night, and I'd gone out there. I was about 15 or 16. . . . I was standing there talking to Mr. Chuck. I wanted to buy an Ampeg SVT amplifier with two speakers," remembers Richie Harris, now a 46-year-old computer network engineer with a part-time band gig. "I saw this guy come in, and I pointed it out to my friends. I said, 'That guy has a P-Funk briefcase, an Anvil attache case.' "

The customer came over. "He said, 'Excuse me, I'm from Parliament Funkadelic. I need to rent some keyboards.' Mr. Levin pointed across the room and told the guy, 'That gentleman over there can help you.' He turned back and said, 'As you were saying, Mr. Harris.' I was just a little jive-time local band kid. It was the biggest feeling in the world."

Which leads one to wonder: How do you go about being a place called Chuck's without Chuck?

"It's tough," says Alan Levin. "When people get upset with you sometimes, the first thing they throw at you is, 'You're not your dad.' Tell me something I don't know."

Drawn to the Sound

There is something generational about Chuck's beyond Levin and his own children.

"I can't tell you how many guys who grew up going to Chuck Levin's, when their son or daughter became 12 or 13, they took them to Chuck's as a rite of passage," says Smith.

And something about being a musician, or just a gear junkie, hanging out in a music store that trumps the other labels you have to deal with.

"There was a camaraderie, a fraternal feeling between white musicians and black musicians," Brown says of his younger days at Chuck's. "We all came here, I don't care how you looked, whether you had long hair or an Afro."

"You go out there, everybody is the same color," says Harris. Chuck Levin "didn't care how deep a shade of green your money was."

Because for all these people, the lure, the hook, is the same.

On a late Saturday afternoon last month, during those halcyon days when Redskins fans could still harbor Super Bowl dreams, they thronged the store, the men who want to be boys and the boys who want to be men.

"When the Redskins started playing, we thought it would turn into a tomb. But the store got busier and busier as the afternoon wore on," recalls Schein. "That speaks volumes about how much people want to be in that place.

"You know, 'I just gotta look at guitars. The Redskins are in the playoffs, but I gotta go see a guitar.' "