As anyone can tell you about any retail operation, Guitar Sys "Inc. is a funny place run by people who have no sense of humor whatsoever. Founded by Sidney Schnitzelberg in 1991, Guitar Sys Inc. was a big box music store business model built on the ashes of a once flourishing Hollywood used keyboard operation, Massive Organ Central.
It had been dying a slow torturous death since the early seventies. The management had assumed that both electric guitars and synthesizers were gimmick driven entities that would soon outlive their usefulness as means to express human creativity.
In the deepest of ways they were absolutely right. As former used car salesmen, however, they should have foreseen that this very gimmickry would fill the needs of a massive vanity market loaded with uncreative customers.
The primary demographic is simple. Men from sixteen to sixty are rife with dissatisfaction in the quality of their playing on the instruments they have not sufficiently practiced on in the first place. Many of the older ones have been promising themselves for years to play catch up with the dead idols of their youth.
As fathers are wont to do, some have even projected these dreams onto their sons, who also are regular visitors to the store. These young fingers kazoo out cheesy Black Sabbath riffs older than their own masturbation loving hands. They blast this turgid fluff through the amplifier risers that punctuate GSI outlets nationwide, blissfully unaware that their favorite riff might very well be what their parents copulated to at the spasm of conception.
Sidney anticipated this trend. He visualized a self perpetuating client base of discriminating dilettantes who would gladly spend at least a hour’s worth of driving time coupled with two hours selection time on a gizmo to improve the tone of their amplifier’s output, for example.
A total of three or more precious hours that could be devoted to musical expression invested in a shiny overpriced object guaranteed to reproduce That Authentic Blues Tone, for example. This time wasted on a false solution generates other similarly time wasting purchases.
The client justifies this wasted time and energy by telling himself he is getting a deal on the junk because they invariably get the sales associate to come down a little on the price of the product, which already has a guaranteed lowest price. This added value of a couple of bucks inflates the ego and provides the architecture of the experience of the sale, which supersedes the value of the sale and drives the market for something that was never needed in the first place. A cosmetic store for ugly men.
Sidney, as we are encouraged to call him, came into music after successfully driving Golden Triangle Inc, a struggling Chinese restaurant supply company, into the Fortune 500 by outsourcing fixture contracts to the Chinese prison system and brilliantly underbidding all other suppliers in the process. Until his competitors caught on, he had the market locked down for about five years of gravy laden profit.
After a glowing career complete with write-ups in everything from the Wall Street Journal to T-Shirt Entrepreneur, Schnitzelberg retired at forty five to "re-examine his life and perspectives."
Sidney’s lifelong dream had been to be a musician, and since he had not invested his body’s formative years in the development of the skills necessary to excel there, he did the next best thing.
At forty seven, after spending two years in a Kosher Buddhist Ashram, he published his book, Grinding the Organ That Has No Keys: Virtual Capitalism in the Twenty First Century.
In it he discusses his business model for a music retail company devoted to guaranteed lowest pricing, customer satisfaction, in-house teaching, and the greatest variety of gizmo driven gear in the entire world. "With the increasing diminishment of the tangible, dreams dwindle into reality. Since dwindling profit is your reality, sell them their dreams, and maximize your profit."
Like the music industry on which it feeds, the appearance and affectation of youth are vital assets in music retail. Sidney took what is sometimes called the "Catholic Church" model for management training. Cull the store managers from the sales floor and try to have them as lacking in formal education as is humanly possible.
In a speech he delivered at the Ponzi Convention in San Francisco 2001, he states, "Make the managers proud of their ignorance. The Zen of management is to need to know a little less with every passing successful day, until you finally know nothing and own everything."
Indoctrinate them in the "corporate culture" which will keep them far too preoccupied with tasks to indulge in any kind of introspection or large picture assessment of their lives. Convince them that as per the cult of Sidney, they too will be able to retire in their mid-forties to pursue their dreams, which, as the company handbook will tell you over and over again, is Sidney’s dream for you.
Of course, this is based on a business model whose premise is draconian and Darwinian rolled into one. Few employees last long enough even to qualify for benefits at all. The few successful examples are the outcome of thousands of employee turnovers.
It is a testament to our ripeness for any cult of personality that Sidney is referred to in the hushed and awed tones that people probably once reserved for a Pope or Emperor. Managers treated his rare visits to the store with the kind of punctilious attention to detail that Captain Ahab might have employed in anticipation of a visit form the owner of the Pequod.
Sidney has an intensively demanding golf schedule, which reflects his embodiment of the Zen Corporate Model. A well run company should be running itself.
No doubt in some Shangri La there is such an enterprise, but we know this is not the case here. The company is run on the backs of the disposable. And I am a vertebra.
Maybe it was waking up with a face that looked like a paper shredder after one saloon brawl too many fighting my way out of someone else’s fight. Maybe it was the deep and inevitable process by which a man begins to yearn for stability when he comes to the realization that he has not died at twenty eight in a blaze of glory. Or perhaps it was simply the radio ad that I heard pointing out that Guitar Sys Inc. was recruiting for a store that they had recently opened four blocks from me. I decided to apply for a job there.
The bottom line was I needed regular work. I was getting too slow to keep ducking the bullets that came with irregular work.
After the last set of charges had been dropped against me about four years ago, I realized I had to get some kind of a normal job, or otherwise always find myself included among the "round up the usual suspects" brigade. It was time to become a productive citizen. And how do you put "knock around local guitar hero" on your resume anyway?
Before applying, I stopped by the store and was utterly horrified. Several months ago, I had awakened to my local rock station recruiting employees for Guitar System’s Grand Opening. Happenstance had it nearby. Nevertheless, I immediately forgot about it the first time I heard about it.
I remembered thinking that the last thing the musicians of the world or America needs, is a musical equivalent of Rite Aid with a plethora of mediocre guitars on the walls.
Seemed more to me like a cross between a UFO landing and Satan taking up residence in my back yard. Another tribute to the destruction by dilution of all the values I’ve ever held dear.
Appropriately enough, the radio ad was driven by the voiceover of a deeply resonant constipated male voice full of self importance and portentousness hawking the idea of being a musician, with the same kind of tone you could use to shill cough drops. The Wizard of Oz tradition of advertising. There’s less to the picture than meets the eye.
Arriving there filled me with an experience inestimably worse than any contempt I might originally have been bringing to the table.
I stand on the corner of 69th street and Abilene Blvd. on a glorious spring afternoon, and I cannot find the place. Although I see the GSI logo on the brick façade of the two story building next to the grinning rodent anti-Christ, Cheezey Chuck (soon to be dubbed Upchucked Cheese. It is a cross between an upscale pizza place dispensing ptomaine food coupled with the trappings of a high end playground complete with Karaoke. The kids love it!!), there’s no sign of a music store. On impulse I walk through the 69th st entrance and grab an escalator under the rodent’s grinning teeth, and there it is. GSI
The walls are papered with famous Rock Stars right next to the posters of Upchuck and his rodential hench-rats. There is a line for Upchuck that is at least 70 diaper buckets long. All screaming for "Cheese!"
I bathe my nostrils in the redolence of feces and talcum powder. Could this be my future generation of brain surgeons and other health care professionals?
I’ll be saving that last bullet for myself, thank you.
Oops, almost tripped over an adorable budding Einstein who’s waving a handful of poop with a toothless grin that screams, "Eureka! Look at this!"
Mom is nowhere to be found, unless she’s that fourteen year old moppet giving me a filthy dagger-laden look.
Wending my way past the reeking baby carriages of the fruitful and multiplying I reach the gaudy neon Guitar Sys Inc. entrance just in time to watch a grinning and adorable seven year old female piece of our future strewing Gummy Bears all over the freshly mopped gleaming linoleum tiles.
She steps on said Bears, crushing them into a virtually indelible airy thinness, and her pudgy Latino mother watches and says nothing. I note a pair of butt cheeks on this woman that could grease the frying pans of a battalion’s worth of hungry troops.
Directly behind her is an Islamic mother robed head to toe: Chador and all. She accompanies her eight year old daughter who is wearing nothing but skin tight shorts and a tube top.
The prepubescent shimmies like a Madonna in training to ten year old rock tunes blaring from a five foot television over the Chuck entrance. Unemployed actors dressed in pastel colored rodent costumes dance on the screen, courtesy of the Cheese network. I wonder what the Q’ran has to say about that.
Fathers are harder to find here than white guys on a pro basketball team.
The only concession to mob control other than this TV broadcasting proprietary Upchuck programming is a rather harried looking uniformed (costumed?) Upchukette urging the disorderly mob of parents who need parenting and children with no real parents to "stay in line."
Eric Clapton’s visage looks down on the scene from an eighteen foot poster with the dignity of an avuncular priest. Looking pretty chinless himself, I might add.
However nothing so innocently loathsome as this could prepare me for the full sale assault on my musical sensibilities that arrives when I batter my way through the last of the crowd and squeeze myself through the entrance of Guitar Sys Inc.
As I pass through the entrance turnstile, I am greeted by at least six heavily amplified guitars in full roar played by members of the two demographics I will learn to dread and detest: potbellied middle aged men and their pierced and tattooed younger counterparts.
My first stroll down one of their legendary "Walls of Guitars" truly is one of stupefied WOW! Not only have I never seen so many bright shiny new guitars in one place, but I never saw anything that made me fell less like playing one in a genuine and concentrated manner.
After a wake up call like this, you know that you may have fallen just a little short of the grand schemes and high ideals your parents had in mind in the back seat of the car in which you were conceived. BACK TO THE CONTENTS