Chuck Levin's Riff 'n' Ready Charm
The Wheaton Music Store May Not Be Flashy, but It Keeps Strumming Along

By Claudia Deane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Maybe your junior high school band teacher tipped you off. Maybe your wistful father took you on your 13th birthday. Maybe you heard about the place from Jimi Hendrix's original drummer.

But if none of those things happened, and you just happened to drive by the aqua-tinted, disco-era storefront in Wheaton, with Mr. Levin's jovial, jowly face mostly rubbed off the Yamaha sign on the building's side and some broken glass in the second-story windows, you'd be forgiven for not immediately recognizing Chuck Levin's Washington Music Center for what it is: a retail powerhouse. A local institution. A throwback, a standout, a hangout, an industry legend.

"When you do $50 million of business out of a collection of locations in suburban Maryland, it's pretty anomalous," Brian Majeski, editor of the Music Trades, says of the overgrown mom-and-pop instrument seller. "The biggest two markets for the stuff he sells are New York and Los Angeles. And he outgrosses any individual store in Los Angeles or New York City by a wide margin."

You haven't seen the ads, you say? Yeah, Chuck's doesn't really do much advertising. Also, employees don't really have titles. The two guys running the place -- Levin's sons, who took over when Chuck died three years ago -- don't really have offices. Most instruments don't really have price tags. Until six months ago, the store didn't have a formal return policy. Buy something and your receipt's handwritten.

Yet somehow, out of its jampacked, run-down, bazaarlike buildings, Chuck's continues to sell more instruments than any other single music store in America.

"People are used to these big beautiful box stores like Wal-Mart, Costco and dare I say, chain guitar stores. Our store with its facelift is prettier than it was . . . but by modern standards it's still a pawnshop gone horribly awry," says Paul Schein, for 25 years the store's guitar guru and mad prophet.

"If you walk in on a busy Saturday, you have to be kind of brave. It's like the Carnegie Deli. People screaming orders across the room. 'I need a corned beef here and two Stratocasters on white over there.' "

Asking a man if he remembers his first guitar is like asking a woman if she remembers her first kiss.

"It was a Fender Mustang. It was blue, with a racing stripe," says Philip Leventhal, 49, whose federal judge father first took him to Chuck's when he was 15.

Chuck's, like most music stores, is heavy on the Y chromosome. It's full of men, and boys, and men who wish they were still boys.

They're cradling expensive electric bass guitars in their arms, deeply involved in some serious thumb funk, while their girlfriends look around vacantly. Or they're playing covers on keyboards, side by side, ignoring each other. Dreaming a dream that, thanks to Mick, seems plausible even well past middle age. Thinking that maybe, after 20 years of trying, 2006 is the year they'll get that Clapton riff right.

Howard University grad Aaron "Ab" Abernathy, 23, is at Chuck's picking up an amp for the second keyboard player in his band, Ab & the Souljourners. But he's also come to visit his other love: "My dream is over there -- the Roland Fantom-X8," he says, motioning to a sleek gray keyboard. "It's probably like $3,000, but I'm going to come back and get that Roland Fantom in the next three or four months. Definitely."

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.

Add to this the insistent interruption of the public intercom: "Band sales, line 2 please." And then, reminding you that this is a family business after all, Mom calls: "Alan, Mrs. Levin on 1. Alan, Mrs. Levin on 1, please."

All in the Family

Chuck and Marge Levin, then in the pawnshop business, opened the Music Center in 1958 at 12th and H streets downtown. It lasted there for 10 years, and then there were the riots.

Brown, a teenage horn player then, remembers defying his police officer father by going down to check out the damage with some other music students. "Going through the alleys, there were drumheads on the ground. Walking through them, it was like potato chips, crispy, burned up by the fire," he says. "Folks around had guitars, instruments and stuff. It really bothered us because they had no right to have that stuff. It was so precious to us, they had no idea what they had."

With shipments in transit being rerouted to his house, Levin settled on an empty furniture showroom on Veirs Mill Road in Wheaton as the store's new location. In the way of family businesses, the place has become the physical embodiment of one family's life together.

Marge, now mostly retired, was a fixture behind the register, den mother to a thousand sons. "My father was the business side, she was the soft side," says Robert Levin. He now runs the place with his brother, Alan, 53, who started wiping down the store's glass counters when he was 13, went full time at 18, and has worked there six days a week ever since, never living more than three miles away, never marrying.

Their sister, Abbe, 51, though substantially less involved, also pitches in when needed.

Robert recalls, "When my parents were away and Alan was here alone, I would drive home from school, and he actually hired somebody to type my paper as I was writing it, working the cash register." Robert, 47, escaped the force field long enough to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, but not a day longer. "I asked for two weeks off, and then the guy who was kind of like the store manager at the time, he left the day I graduated. . . . I lost my weeks off."

Where the Stars Shop

Yes, yes, yes, you gossipmongers -- famous people have shopped at Chuck's. Stevie Wonder is one. "Whenever he's in town, it seems, he'll stop in. You talk about somebody with the gravitational pull of a neutron star," Schein says. "The store looks like a boat wake, all these people start following in a V-shaped pattern."

Foreign rulers too. The British Embassy called to say that Cherie Blair wanted to buy a guitar for her husband (the PM got a Taylor acoustic). Idi Amin's people "said they needed all these small drums for pygmies." ("You asked. I'm telling you," says Alan.)

Then there's the local talent. "I've got 11 guitars, and six I bought from Chuck's," says Chuck Brown, Washington's own godfather of go-go, who bought his first guitar, a Gibson, from the Music Center in 1963 and his last one there just four or five years ago. "I gave one to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, one to the Smithsonian and one to the Library of Congress. That's three of Chuck's guitars that I've donated."

The Music Center has even grown its very own rock star: Chris Culos, drummer for the rock band O.A.R., to whom Chuck Levin was "Uncle Chuck" and whose father, Carl, has worked at the store for 27 years.

"We were in such a fortunate position," Culos says of his band's connection to the store during their Wootton High School days. "In the beginning, we didn't know what we were doing, what equipment we needed. . . . We would book on a random offer. Maybe we got an offer to play in a small little bar that night. Maybe they don't even have a sound system.

"I would call my dad, and say, 'Um, Dad, we need a PA system tonight.' "

"He'd come home from work with a PA system in the back of his car, help set it up and run the sound for us. . . . It was all because Chuck Levin would let us use the stuff, because we were part of the family."

Now when Dad is there for a sound check, it's in Madison Square Garden, which the band sold out earlier this year. But they still buy all their equipment from the Levins.

"I saw Robert write an order for the Rolling Stones, a monitor console, on the back of a string pack in the middle of a conversation with me," recalls Smith. "It took about 15 seconds. And he never said, 'That was the Rolling Stones.' Robert is not going to do that. He's not a boastful guy. It's the natural course of business there."

All Business

Okay, kill the smoke machine. Groupies, exit stage left. Behind the daydreams of fame is the no-nonsense scaffolding of a serious retail business.

Chuck's has thrived by keeping a wide and deep inventory in its warehouses and basement storerooms, by getting ultra-knowledgeable salespeople and keeping them around for decades, and by never missing an opportunity.

"When Kennedy died, Mom and Dad had a bathtub full of dye for the harnesses for the instruments. The marching bands had to wear black, but nobody had black straps," says Alan Levin.

To hold the line against what Robert calls "the bane of my existence" -- the Guitar Center chain, with its four area stores -- Chuck's has also stayed flexible, following the curves of the business as it shifted away from live bands toward DJs. . It rents thousands of instruments each school year and does millions of dollars in institutional sales. The Music Center is selling to the Navy, Air Force, Army and Marine bands. It's selling to schools in places like Cobb County, Ga. It does a heavy volume of church business.

Finally, there's just the good old-fashioned sell-sell-sell ethic of the family business. "When all of a sudden the phones weren't ringing for some reason, that would drive Mr. Levin nuts," says Judy Drengwitz, a 28-year veteran who handles institutional sales. "There's no such thing as sitting around, flicking on the Internet."

In an online testimonial, one regular customer remembered asking Chuck Levin what instrument he played. His answer: "The cash register."

Everybody Counts

You don't want to get someone going about Chuck Levin.

"When Chuck died, there was a line of cars, and I'm not exaggerating, that went a third of the way across Montgomery County," says Smith, the guitarmaker. "It was one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen in my life."

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.' "