Three Men Walk
Into a Guitar Shop…
Actually, one of them built it. One helped turn it into a clubhouse. And one stayed long enough to make sure the whole unlikely contraption kept working.
McCabe’s was never invented all at once. It accumulated; some wood glue here, a music lesson there, a pot of coffee, more pots of coffee, a repair bench, and a concert nobody had planned. Jerry McCabe, Walter Camp, and Bob Riskin each left a different set of fingerprints on the place. Between them, they made room for just about everything McCabe’s still does.
Gerald “Jerry” McCabe, furniture designer, craftsman, and the name over the door.
Jerry McCabe
The craftsman
McCabe’s began, as many dangerous ideas do, with a man who loved wood more than bookkeeping. Jerry was a furniture designer and custom builder moving in the same circles as Los Angeles folk musicians. Their guitars were cheap, temperamental, and forever losing bridges, sprouting frets, or cracking. Jerry knew how to glue things. Soon guitars began following him home.
On December 12, 1958, he opened a small Pico Boulevard storefront devoted to guitars, banjos, mandolins, strings, handwoven straps, and the radical idea that musicians deserved a place that understood their instruments. Jerry’s furniture career would become distinguished in its own right, but the first shop kept his maker’s spirit: useful, handsome, a little unconventional, and built to last.
Walter Camp
The connector
Walter arrived as a Santa Monica College student, became McCabe’s first full-time employee, and then became Jerry’s partner. The corporation behind McCabe’s still bears his name: McCabe & Camp, Corp.
Walter understood that a music store ought to be more than a cash register with guitars nearby. He helped Bess Lomax Hawes tune hundreds of guitars for her UCLA Extension classes, kept close to the Ash Grove and Troubadour scenes, built up lessons, and helped make McCabe’s a place where people could linger, learn, repair, listen, and compare notes over coffee. Bob later called him “a thinker and a visionary.” The shop is still running on that thought.
Walter L. Camp, partner, promoter, thinker, and believer in the musical hangout.
Bob Riskin, who came in as a teenager and, by his own account, never quite managed to leave. He did finally retire, though.
Bob Riskin
Longtime Head Honcho
Bob wandered into McCabe’s as a teenage folk-music convert around 1959. Walter would occasionally call him to cover the shop while he went to lunch. This arrangement expanded, as lunch breaks sometimes do, into summers, part-time work, full-time work, partnership, ownership, and roughly six decades of keeping the place pointed in the right direction.
Bob helped bring concerts into the shop, moved McCabe’s into 3101 Pico, and shaped the odd and wonderful four-part institution people know today: instrument store, repair shop, music school, and listening room. He believed artists should be paid the night they played and customers should be told the truth, even when the truth did not help sell a guitar. On his coherent days, Bob called running McCabe’s “the neatest job in the world.” Many would agree.
It started with furniture, folk songs, and a few guitars in need of mercy. The names and faces have changed, but the proposition remains: make room for music and people, then trust that the rest will sort itself out eventually.