Bibb Music Center community mainstay for more than 50 years
To see the best part of Bibb Music Center, you have to go underground.
Head down a winding staircase from the showroom, and find a narrow hallway. There, legions of instruments hang neatly from the ceiling or lie stacked together on benches.
Near this musical salvage yard are repair benches that have been mending broken instruments for more than 50 years. But at some point that could come to an end. The Cotton Avenue music shop went up for sale in 2013.
General Manager Larry Letson is ready to retire. The original owners, the Motes family, and their partners, the Maxwell family, just think it’s time to get out of the business.
But local musicians and band leaders worry that a half century of musical community could fade away.
MENDING HORNS
Before becoming general manager at Bibb Music Center, Letson was a customer. He bought his first guitar there about the time the store opened in 1962 and kept coming back. In the 1970s when Letson was a high school band teacher, then-owner Arthur Motes asked him if he knew anything about instrument repair.
“I do,” Letson answered. “I like to tinker with them.”
He started to spend more time in the shop basement, fixing instruments for fun.
“Long story short, I ended up with a key to the store,” he said.
He quit teaching and came to the shop full time, eventually becoming general manager in 1999.
Letson can play anything that he works on, so a lot of times he can intuit what’s wrong with an instrument. He said he can get so focused that even the slightest human interruption will startle him.
“I know what the instrument should sound like,” he said, “and when I get it here and it’s broken and won’t play certain notes and won’t play due to a bent key or a bad pad or a missing pad and I’m able to replace that or straighten that or adjust that, it gives me a gratification that’s hard to explain. I just enjoy it.”
Some fixes over the years have been more mystifying than simple bent parts. Sousaphones, the marching version of tubas, seem to be particularly prone to the bizarre.
“We blew a frog out of one one time,” Letson said, “He was still alive. Barely, but he was still alive.”
Other random objects left in sousaphones have included plastic bottles and at least one set of partial dentures.
“Sometimes I wonder, ‘How in the word did they do this?’ ” Letson said of the students who bring in their instruments.
The instruments get fixed, though. Over the summer Bibb Music Center repaired over 600 marching band instruments in time for band camp.
MORE THAN JUST REPAIRS
A community of musicians well past high school age still calls the shop home. Some are musicians who were in Macon during the city’s Southern rock glory days. Others are former area band teachers who bring in rescued instruments -- yard sale finds -- for resuscitation for struggling band programs. Still others, like local attorney Paul McCommon, show up for a space to practice and stay sharp.
For five days a week for over 20 years, McCommon, an assistant U.S. attorney, has been practicing in the basement at Bibb Music Center. You can hear him down the hall from the work benches.
“I come down here most days during my lunch hour and try to get a practice routine in,” McCommon said. “And they’re nice to let me do it.”
McCommon’s practice space is a storage room with all kinds of guitars in a row against one wall. There’s a metronome for keeping time, but he doesn’t use it. On a recent afternoon a little electric fan kept the air moving. His suit jacket was placed across his leather satchel behind him. In front of him was sheet music with scales and music he uses to stay in tune. Up and down the scales he went, then into a tune, then back into scales, more than drowning out the hum of the fan.
McCommon said Bibb Music Center is more to him than just a place to practice.
“It means something to have a local music store that takes care of you,” McCommon said.
His trumpet, the sheet music, the random parts and fixes, all of it was bought there. Because, as McCommon said, the people at the store know him.
SHOP SPANS GENERATIONS
Eldon Lundin is another Bibb Music Center employee expert at keeping marching bands marching. One afternoon Lundin worked on a trombone that had seen better days.
The instrument was a chance yard sale find by retired Peach County High School band director Randy Lindsey. Lindsey makes it a habit to bring in discarded instruments, and Lundin fixes them. The repaired instruments help keep the Trojan Marching Band making music.
Lundin hammered the slide out of the trombone. Then he started sanding the piece, so it could move like silk again.
Back when Lundin was a high school band teacher, Letson would make house calls to band rooms to fix ailing instruments. Lundin said he started looking over Letson’s shoulder to see what was going on. Then he too got the bug. When he retired from teaching, he took up a spot on the Bibb Music Center workbench.
Every day is different, every problem unique.
“We don’t throw much away because you never know when you’re going to need something,” Lundin said. “All these trumpets just hanging from the ceiling have just been here for a very long time.”
While diagnosing a saxophone, Lundin grabbed from a ceiling rafter an electrical cord with a tiny light bulb glowing from one end. With the sax mouthpiece removed, he dropped the bulb down the top of the instrument. Light bleeding through at a valve would be sign that it wasn’t airtight and wouldn’t sing so sweetly.
Lundin now finds his teaching life and his time at the workbench crossing.
“I’ve got my former students now are bringing their children into the store to buy their first instrument,” Lundin said. “And they see me and are ‘Mr. Lundin!’... and they start talking about when she was in high school, and she introduces me to her daughter. ... It still kind of catches me off guard.”
The kids with their first horns, the guys who have been trading at the store for decades, the music scene old- timers who come in to talk about the old days, Letson said he shares something with all of them.
“They’re like me,” he said. “I’ve got not only physical attachment to this place, but I’ve got an emotional attachment.”
Burgess Brown of Georgia Public Broadcasting contributed reporting to this story.
This story was originally published October 17, 2014 at 9:58 PM with the headline "Bibb Music Center community mainstay for more than 50 years ."