The gig is up for Daddy’s

Surprise and sadness over the loss of a favorite musical instrument store

November 05, 2011|By Joel Brown, Globe Correspondent

Strolling the neighborhood around Berklee College of Music at Boylston Street and Mass. Ave. this week, Rick Peckham pointed out where the instrument sales and repair shops used to be: LaSalle Music Inc., E.U. Wurlitzer Music & Sound, and Jack’s Drum Shop. Cambridge Music Center and Boston Guitar Works also had locations nearby.

“The people that worked in those were not just salesmen, they were musicians who were involved in getting the lore across in a different way, a different way than it was at the music school, that’s for sure,’’ said Peckham, assistant chair of the guitar department at Berklee, where he’s taught since 1986.

The sudden closing of the Daddy’s Junky Music Stores last week removed the last major instrument shop in Berklee’s neighborhood, where every third person seemed to be carrying an instrument case.

“That was the spot, because you’d run into everybody down there,’’ said drummer Coley Rybicki of the North Shore-based Satch Kerans Band. He used to visit the area often but lately was a customer of Daddy’s suburban locations. “I was heartbroken to see they closed.’’

“If you can’t make it with a music store across the street from Berklee, you’re pretty much sunk,’’ said Robert Schlink, an associate professor in the school’s ensemble department, who was passing by.

Ironically, Berklee owns the building, where Daddy’s also drew customers from the nearby Boston Conservatory and other schools. The Mass. Ave. location was the 12-store chain’s busiest. The nearest retailer now is Rayburn Musical Instrument Company on Huntington Ave.

Statistics from the National Association of Music Merchants suggest the Daddy’s closing is not part of a major trend, though; association membership has gone down only slightly in recent years, from 2,777 in FY2010 to 2,765 in FY2011.

“[Daddy’s] closing is a little more abrupt and more unexpected than some mom-and-pop stand-alone store in Medford,’’ said Christian Wissmuller, editor of Needham-based trade journal Musical Merchandise Review.

Wissmuller said the industry seems relatively stable after a lot of store closings in the early 2000s. Daddy’s was actually the largest regional chain in a field now dominated by the national Guitar Center chain, he said. The decision to close several Daddy’s locations earlier this year had “raised eyebrows,’’ he said, but most believed the company would survive.

The closing came as a surprise even to Daddy’s founder Fred Bramante.

“I am brokenhearted,’’ an emotional Bramante said this week. “I had to tell all my employees, many of them with me for decades, that they didn’t have a job anymore, and they didn’t have health insurance. It was the hardest day in my life since the death of my dad.’’