Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith all played guitars made from wood salvaged from New York buildings. Now there’s a documentary about the eccentric genius who crafted them
Rick Kelly’s guitar shop occupies the ground floor of a red brick tenement at 42 Carmine Street in New York’s West Village. Kelly has been building, repairing and talking guitars on the site since 1991, having spent the 1970s punk era around the corner on Downing Street. “The city was real gritty and dirty back then, you couldn’t even walk in Central Park, you’d get mugged for sure,” Kelly says. “I liked it that way.”
Carmine Street Guitars, the subject of a delightful documentary by Ron Mann, is one of the last redoubts of “Old New York” as Kelly calls it. On a typical day, Kelly’s elderly mother Dorothy will be working the cash register; his 26-year-old apprentice Cindy Hulej, will be blow-torching a custom design on to a guitar body; while Kelly will be at his workbench planing away a piece of wood. At one point in the film, Hulej teases Kelly for not having a cellphone or the internet. “You need to move into the 21st century.”
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