day gigs - made in myrtle beach
By Paul Grimshaw
For Weekly Surge
While it's true that playing a few gigs here and there offers area musicians the satisfying opportunity to perform, making a living by doing so exclusively, however, is not so common. To supplement their incomes many local musicians wait tables, work in the hospitality industry, and more than one writes for Weekly Surge.
We caught up with four working musicians, though surely there must be more, who've taken their love of music and an entrepreneurial spirit, and parlayed their skills into something quite remarkable. Here are their stories in brief.
Matt Garcia Garcia Amplification
A sampling of Matt Garcia's work.
Wearing his signature black bowler hat, which was more in style in the Edwardian era than in the new millennium, Matt Garcia, lead guitarist for The Tim Clark Band, is no stranger to the stage. He's been playing the guitar professionally for more than two decades, but it was through tinkering with electronics as a teenager living in Allentown, Pa., that Garcia developed his craft of electronics repairs, which later led to custom-built guitar amplification and effects pedals. "I ruined a lot of stuff when I was a kid," said Garcia, "because after I ripped it apart, I couldn't put it back together." Garcia eventually learned to finish the job he started and is known as one of the very few electronics repair technicians and custom electronics builders catering to the Grand Strand's music industry.
"I sell more distortion pedals [$400] than anything because they're a lot more affordable than a $5,000 amp. The fundamental differences between a $79 stomp-box pedal you can buy anywhere, and mine, are each is hand-built, with point-to-point hand-wiring and has a high-voltage tube circuit with a lifetime warranty. Tubes just sound a hundred times better than transistors, as far as tone goes. Most are sold by word-of-mouth or off the Internet. I still get calls from the article that appeared in Vintage Guitar Magazine [April, 2006]. Travis Newman (Craig Morgan, Eason) and John Ingram (Paul Reed Smith Guitars) use my distortion pedal and I guess I've sold 30 or so. I've sold 10 amps or so. I'm one of a dying breed, a dinosaur really, who still does repairs. We live in this throw-away society and kids don't sit around and tinker with stuff anymore."
See Garcia perform with The Tim Clark Band or visit www.garciaamplification.com
Jeff Mosby Mosby Guitars, Inc.
A sampling of Jeff Mosby's work.
Jeff Mosby is the tall, mild-mannered, toe-tapping, southern rock slide and lead guitarist known to locals and tourists for performing with the Bounty Hunters, and a few other local and regional acts (Smokehouse Brown,The Lubricators) during the past 15-plus years. He is better known to the custom guitar world as the artist behind guitars owned by Carlos Santana, Pat Travers, Fred Durst and other discriminating players and collectors. Mosby, who shares shop space with Garcia, creates custom abalone, mother-of-pearl, precious metal and gem stone inlays to guitar necks and bodies. He also fashions leather-clad guitars (similar to those owned by Waylon Jennings and Elvis) and has made custom guitar straps for Brad Paisley, and other country music guitar stars. "Being a stubborn do-it-yourselfer, I learned to do leather work when I played with a few bands in California," said Mosby. "I got some books and learned how to carve leather. I got into the inlays as an offshoot of the guitar repairs I used to do." Mosby performed with the Bowery's house band, The Bounty Hunters, off and on for nine years before slowing his local performance schedule to accommodate his growing business. His connections with Paul Reed Smith Guitars have developed to the point where he is now the sole custom, hand-crafted inlay technician for the company's Private Stock line. One of these babies will set you back $15,000 - $25,000, so start saving.
Mosby's work can be seen at www.mosbyguitars.com.
Johnny "Guitar" Sparks The Johnny Guitar Shop
Johnny "Guitar" Sparks only pretends to be insane. The Conway-born, life-long resident of the Grand Strand, known simply as "Johnny Guitar," has been performing, off and on, as a guitarist/vocalist with a variety of bands for nearly 30 years. Over that same period his day gig consisted mostly of surfing and delivering pizzas to Ocean Boulevard resorts via skateboard. Over time he also developed his own niche in the guitar repair realm and has had two commercial locations in the Myrtle Beach area in the past 13 years. "My shops were never all pretty and stocked with shiny merchandise and looking like the other stores," said Sparks, "so we [he and co-owner, wife Lina Sparks] decided to close the shop on 1st Ave. South." "You should see my photo album," said Sparks. In it are before and after shots of guitars and stringed instruments he's repaired that have been run over by cars, wrapped around cheating boyfriends' heads and the like. "I fixed my
own guitar once when I was 13 or 14 and later I couldn't find anybody to work on my guitars to my satisfaction, so I just started doing my own repairs." Sparks does complete rebuilds and major and minor repairs on virtually all stringed instruments. "Half of my work is on brand-spankin' new guitars. I can't believe the way some of these major guitar brands send their guitars out - they're unplayable - the nuts especially - it's like a 12-year-old kid made it and it was the first one he ever made. I can't even get people to put strings on a guitar the way I want them to, so I do my own thing and I've almost got all the work I want. One guy brought me two guitars that his girlfriend smashed in the parking lot and threw in a dumpster. I fixed both of them."
You can reach Sparks at 626-7930.
Jimmy Frech Mental Case, Inc.
Jimmy Frech, a co-founder of The Lubricators, is a lead guitarist with hot licks, jacked up amps, and a rack and road-case business that has exploded onto the worldwide backstage music scene (You may remember him from Surge's Oct. 11, 2007 Working 4 a Living profile.) The new version of The Lubricators no longer features Frech, freeing him to devote most of his time to his business, Mental Case, Inc. "I love playing and I give Mark (Serio) and Briant (Bowles - The Lubricators) my blessing," said Frech. "It got to the point where I was getting too busy with Mental Case anyway. I still play and record and will gig again but right now business is slamming." The shop, located near the Backgate of the former Myrtle Beach Air Force Base has recently cranked out road cases for Taylor Swift, Motley Crue, Cheap Trick, Alice Cooper, The Killers, Nine Inch Nails, Poison, Shine Down and the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts [the home of the original Woodstock Festival in 1969] in upstate New York. "We've bought property behind the mall for a new factory, which will come later. We've got a new CNC Machine (computer numerical control) that has made us fully automated and a lot faster. A case that used to takes us five hours to cut out now takes six to ten minutes with perfect accuracy. We've expanded with four to five full time people in the shop, three sales reps, and a bookkeeper," said Frech. "We've designed a guitar vault, the first one was for Eddie Van Halen, and the word is out after Eddie's took a dive from the stage and the guitars never even went out of tune - we sold 30 of those just in the last year. We're making the Lamborghini of guitar vaults. We're very proud of those. They range in price from $2,500 - $3,500. Myrtle Beach is not known for its industry but all of sudden we've got the music industry buzzing with what our company and others are doing out of Myrtle Beach. Repairs are becoming a bigger part of what we do because a lot of the stuff out there is made overseas and just doesn't hold up - it's crap. Under normal wear-and-tear ours never come back. We want to reindustrialize our little neighborhood. We want to bring the World War II mentality back. Made in America with American-made parts and manpower"
See Mental Cases at www.mentalcaseinc.com.
Have a thought, comment or newsworthy item for Weekly Surge Music Notes? Send an email to pgrimshaw@sc.rr.com.