PRINTKeeping the music alive
Barnhouse's Crazy Music stays loyal to locals
Kevin A. Roberts
Bill Barnhouse, owner of Barnhouse’s Crazy Music Store, has been working in the store since 2001. Barnhouse moved the business to its current location at 125 S. Eighth St. in 2006. He also took over the business after the previous owner passed away. Within the store, one can find music instruments and accessories.
June 3, 2009 | 12:00 p.m. CST
Bill Barnhouse points out a guitar made of rusted sheet metal that’s hanging on the wall of his store, Barnhouse’s Crazy Music.
Barnhouse says he likes to think that the guitar was made by a soldier, possibly from World War II — someone who knew more about metal work than they did about guitars. The frets on the neck are crooked, but the metal rivets that hold the guitar body together are evenly spaced.
“He just wanted a guitar,” Barnhouse says.
The guitar is one of the many unusual objects filling Barnhouse’s Crazy Music, a small music equipment store on Eighth and Locust streets.
For Barnhouse and employees Kevin Bucklew and Rob Lampe, Crazy Music is the hardware store for local musicians. It’s like your buddy’s garage — it has drumsticks, amps, guitars, weird objects and instruments that you didn’t even know existed, much less that you’d really like to play. There are recorders, tin whistles, necklaces with inch-long playable harmonicas, udus (vessel drums) and mandolins. There are ocarinas from Peru and a goat-hair trimmed djembe (a type of drum) from Africa.
WILD AND CRAZY GUY
A yellow and red kazoo suit — a person-sized suit made to look like a kazoo — hangs above the checkout counter. The part of the kazoo that buzzes is the eyehole and next to that the name “Mr. Toot” is emblazoned in black. In Barnhouse’s office, there is a picture of Mr. Toot shaking the hand of then-governor of Missouri, John Ashcroft.
The kazoo suit belonged to Ken Wikowsky, the first owner of Crazy Music.
Wikowsky was a prominent Columbia musician and played under the name “Ken Shepherd” for the band The Sound Farm, Columbia’s hot act in the 1960s.
Wikowsky opened Crazy Music Sound and Light in 1973 because he wanted something different from the traditional, staid sort of music stores he was familiar with.
“He wanted people to have fun, have a good time, not be the traditional ‘How do you do?’ thing,” says Bucklew, who worked under Wikowsky in 1995. Wikowsky was used to music stores that stocked all the normal instruments and displayed them in tidy, ordered rows.
Wikowsky thought of the store as a theater, Bucklew says, and so he deliberately created a persona of this crazy music guy. During the late ’70s, Wikowsky did a series of commercials for Crazy Music. The commercials were low-budget and had wacky effects. “Got a failing amplifier?” Wikowsky would ask over a shot of shaving cream coming out of an amplifier’s speaker.
In 2005, at the age of 60, Wikowsky died while jogging on the MKT trail. At his memorial, it was clear that Wikowsky had left a mark on Columbia as a community member and as a musician. Barnhouse played a loop of his commercials, and the DJs at KOPN played his records over the air during a tribute.
CHANGING HANDS
In opposition to his persona as the “crazy music guy,” Wikowsky was actually a private person. Wikowsky’s mother, Ruth Grove, likes to talk about her son but says she doesn’t know much about his early involvement with the business. When she visited him from Wikowsky’s home state of Illinois, they would have meals together and he would play his guitar for her, but he didn’t talk about the store much.
“When he died, I found out what a landmark it was,” Grove says.
Grove became friends with Barnhouse, the then-manager of Crazy Music, when she was dealing with her son’s estate. Although Barnhouse had never planned to buy the business, Wikowsky’s death changed things. Barnhouse was able to scrape enough cash together to cover the reduced price Grove offered him.
Barnhouse says that though Wikowsky’s family wasn’t overly sentimental about it, they “wanted to see Ken’s concept live on and not just be destroyed. I let them know that I understood what he had built enough that I could respect that.”
HOOKING THE FISH
After Wikowsky died, Barnhouse had to move the store from the corner of Tenth and Ash streets to its current location where the area is about three times smaller. Although the location has higher foot traffic, space can get tight. There are instruments packed to the ceiling in some places.
“There’s a lot of stuff that came from the old Crazy Music, which was a huge place,” Barnhouse says. “A lot of the stuff stacked in my little corners is from those little corners. And bit by bit we’re kicking it out the door.”
Because space is so tight, it’s critical that Barnhouse orders exactly what people will buy. Barnhouse’s method of doing this is part knowledge of the business and part guesswork — sometimes you can just get lucky.
“There is a little kick when you order something in, and it’s not even really uncrated before someone walks in and buys it,” Barnhouse says. “It’s kind of like fishing and accidentally hitting a fish with a hook, and then you reel them in. Weird.”
SERVICE WITH A SMILE
In the store, there is one set of shelves devoted to drumheads. Drumheads are the part of the drum that gets hit by the drumstick, so they wear out and need to be replaced. Made in varying sizes, drumheads can be clear or coated, and they can come with a circle in the middle or a ring near the edge. All these things change the sound, which means drummers can get very particular about which drumheads they use.
“They’re like ketchup,” Barnhouse says. “They’re all a little bit different, but they’re all ketchup.”
Except in this instance there are five or six brands of ketchup, and for each brand there are more than 10 sizes and types. So Crazy Music has to be careful which drumheads they stock.
Because of space, the store cannot stock them all. But despite space, if you need a specific drumhead, Barnhouse will order it. And if you continue to need it, he’ll start keeping it in stock. That’s Crazy Music customer service.
By the checkout counter, there is a hand-drawn map showing the locations of other music stores nearby. If customers are being rude and are not receptive to the easy-going environment the guys at Crazy Music cultivate, they can expect to be directed to the competition. That is Crazy Music customer service.
LOCAL MUSIC
In the front window of the store, there’s a three-tiered CD rack holding around 40 CDs. Some of the CDs look professionally made, and some of the covers are more amateur. All were made by local musicians. Barnhouse says that this CD rack is one of the fundamental building blocks of Crazy Music.
“While it’s not a moneymaker by any means, other than some pocket change for the store, it is a good feeling to know that you can come in and buy your stuff from us and make your records and do your shows and I’ll put your posters up and sell your CDs,” Barnhouse says.
“Crazy Music is a catalyst for young musicians,” says Bill Fussner, a local musician and longtime customer at Crazy Music. “They can go there to get excited about music. It keeps them wanting to be musicians.”
The kids start in junior high and become phenomenal musicians, Fussner says. And because they don’t all head out to L.A. or New York, a talent pool has built up in Missouri, which inspires even more kids.
All the Crazy Music employees are musicians. Bucklew bought his first guitar from Crazy Music in junior high. Lampe was hired because he bought a huge sound system from the first Crazy Music store and Wikowsky was so impressed when Lampe paid it off early that he offered him a job. In his teens, Barnhouse made his living playing music in Kansas City.
If Crazy Music didn’t support local musicians, Barnhouse wouldn’t see the point of staying in business.
“Without that, we could just go away,” says Barnhouse, smiling. “Everybody could shop the Internet. We’re more than willing to go home. Relax.”
MUSIC WORKS
Barnhouse looks at the pink violin hanging on the wall outside his office and says he’s thinking that wasn’t such a great buy. Sometimes you guess wrong, and you get stuck with an instrument no one wants to purchase. He thinks he might sand the pink off the violin and sell it as used. Maybe then someone will buy it.
Barnhouse doesn’t seem too worried about the violin’s cost. What seems to bother him more is that he didn’t anticipate that customer need — he didn’t hit the fish with the hook.
Crazy Music’s business isn’t booming, but it’s steady. Small local businesses always feel the pinch from bigger chain stores, and Crazy Music is no different. Chain stores have larger inventories, and the Internet is always a big competitor. To be competitive, Crazy Music tries to stock unusual, can’t-find-it-anywhere-else items and Barnhouse uses online prices to set Crazy Music’s prices.
But despite the relative ease of shopping online and the big inventories of the chain stores, people still steadily trickle into Crazy Music every day. There seems to be enough business in the music industry to go around.
During the economic slowdown in the ’80s, Barnhouse says lots of people turned back to music after they’d been fired from their day jobs. All of a sudden, it wasn’t about choosing between your dream and making a living. Your dream was all you had.
“People had always said, ‘What are you going to fall back on when music doesn’t work anymore?’” Barnhouse says. “Truth was, music always worked.”
Guitars are very distinctive. Even guitars of the same brand that are built in the same factory could have varying sounds.
“It’s an organic product,” says Ken Jeffs, 55, who’s played the guitar since seventh grade. “Woods have different density and moisture content.”
There are only a few general rules for picking a guitar, and a lot of little specific ones.
1. The more info the better. Go online: There are a lot of great resources for aspiring players. Try advice sites like About.com to find out what kind of guitar is right for you and common mistakes people make in the guitar-buying process.
2. Don’t go below $75. But if you find a quality guitar below that price, the differences among the brands are superficial and probably won’t be noticeable to a beginner. Some guitars have an arch to the fingerboard, says Jeffs, some don’t, but those differences don’t count much for someone just starting to play.
3. The sound of the instrument counts.
That’s where novices can run into problems. Their ear isn’t developed yet, so they can’t tell the difference between a guitar with a good sound and a guitar with a lousy sound. But if they pick wrong, everything they play will be slightly off, which can be very frustrating and can result in new players giving up.
“The best advice I can give anybody is get a second opinion,” Jeffs says. Try to find someone who has played for a while and who doesn’t have a connection to the store you’re shopping at.
“Columbia’s lucky,” Jeffs says. “We have a lot of guitar players.”
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