One Upper Valley guitar store is hearing the call to play it again while the longtime customers of another guitar store are gently weeping.
Blue Mountain Guitar, which closed its West Lebanon store in LaValley Colonial Plaza nearly three years ago, is returning to the Route 12A commercial strip by reopening a store in Glen Road Plaza later this month.
At the same time, Bear Hollow Vintage Guitars on Miracle Mile in Lebanon will close in June as the owners say they are ready to retire.
“We’ve loved serving the community and our customers,” said Sally Laurant, who with her husband, Neil Laurant, have run Bear Hollow Vintage Guitars for the past 12 years. “But it’s time for us to move on and retire.”
Sally Laurant, 64, said it was “always in our plan to retire this year,” although recent health issues with her husband “just confirmed” their decision to close the business. Neil Laurant, 69, however, will continue to repair guitars by appointment out of the couple’s Windsor home.
But Upper Valley musicians will not be left in the lurch.
In a contrarian move given the slew of retail store closings over the past few years, Blue Mountain Guitar will reopen in its new store on April 20 in West Lebanon in the space formerly occupied by The Country Cobbler.
Barbara McKelvy and her business partner, Tyler Gino, had continued Blue Mountain Guitar as an online seller of music instruments after McKelvy’s former husband closed the West Lebanon store in 2016. The following year she and Gino opened a small Blue Mountain Guitar store across the street from Colby-Sawyer College in New London (McKelvy lives in New London and didn’t want to commute to West Lebanon).
Things went so well that McKelvy and Gino in 2018 expanded the New London store by taking over adjacent space and began offering private music instruction. Their online business grew, too.
But McKelvy said that even though online purchases now account for 50 percent of Blue Mountain Guitar’s sales, musical instruments are still a highly personal product that people want to put in their hands and play before purchasing.
“Most musicians really do prefer having a music store. If they are going to put down a few hundred dollars or more to buy a guitar, they want to play a few, really know how it feels and what it sounds like,” she said. “You can’t do that online.”
Unlike Bear Hollow Guitar, which sells only vintage guitars, Blue Mountain Guitar offers a range of musical instruments and equipment, including drums, keyboards and amps and supplies like strings and pedals.
McKelvy said she doesn’t think having stores in both New London and West Lebanon will cannibalize each other. “A lot of people don’t want to drive to New London,” she said.
The West Lebanon store and online store will work in tandem to generate higher music instrument sales, she believes. “One will feed off the other,” she said.
The Yankee barber is bringing his clippers and combs to Claremont.
Eric Hector, the barber behind the swivel chair at the Yankee Barber Shop in West Lebanon, is opening a second location in downtown Claremont on Washington Street.
The new clip joint, called Claremont Barber Shop, will be staffed Monday through Thursday by Nat Cook, a New London native and recent graduate of the New England School of Barbering in Concord. Hector, a Claremont resident, will man the shop on Fridays.
Hector said opening a shop in Claremont has always been in the back of his mind because it’s where he lives — and pointedly will help him stay nearer, at least one day a week, to his family of seven high-energy school age kids. But he held off until the right spot opened up.
In fact, before he opened Yankee Barber, Hector said he originally had hoped to find space along Washington Street but nothing was available. Instead, he opened Sugar River Barbers in partnership with Dave Cannistraci in the Oscar Brown Block on Pleasant Street in 2008 before selling out to his partner two years later.
A Plainfield native, Hector graduated from Lebanon High School in 1985 and said he was drawn to barbering because he’s a “history nut” and the barber’s trade “is really a part of Americana.” After apprenticing for two years under Corine Wright at Guild Family Haircuts in Newport, Hector ventured out on his own by purchasing the Lebanon Barber Shop from Karen Gardner in 2005.
Although Hector takes pride in his old-school methods — he doesn’t accept debit or credit cards and allows that his attention to customers means he “may not be the fastest barber around” — he nonetheless will be introducing a high-tech innovation in Claremont: online scheduling for appointments.
“We’re going to try it out in Claremont first, see how it goes, and then maybe expand it to West Lebanon,” Hector said.
Have business news? Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
