Cassells Music
Where it all started!
Cassels was not your ordinary music store. It was a tiny giant among indies and the antithesis of the big chain stores. A genuine family music store in a small town of San Fernando CA. Millions or movie goers remember the “No Stairway” scene in the movie Wayne’s World. For generations of locals, it was where they got their start in music. Ritchie Valens was one of them. So many dots connected and paths crossed. The place has a very high level of nostalgia and meaning in my own life! It represents a decade of my own life/career that sustained my family, and quite literally where the TogaMan GuitarViol launched from in my off hours. Here’s my story, your mileage may vary….
Background: I wound up working in music stores in the early 90s. It was my way of escaping the horrible office cubicle farm water cooler scene. Initially I took a pay cut by leaving the cube farm and taking that first music store job at Big Valley Music in Northridge. Most certainly I was far happier applying my skills and passion in a setting that I could best serve the public with! Within a short period of time I had a lot of repairs and lesson work on the side. One of my guitar students introduced me to a pretty lady who would eventually become my wife (here we are 30 years later!) . At some point I worked at Sam Ash for almost two years. In fact I was part of their grand opening crew and the guitar department manager. Eventually I became Unhappy with the corporate culture hamster wheel of the chain stores and missed working for a smaller Indie. In 1999 they decided to change the computer system before the Y2K bug (right before Christmas - we weren’t too thrilled with a learning curve during the busiest part of the year!) One of the horn repair guys there told me that I should go talk to a guy name Ed Intagliata at Cassells in San Fernando. The breakfast meeting at Pancake Heaven went well and I put in my notice at Sam Ash. The rest is history!
After I worked my last day at Sam Ash, I took an uncharacteristic week off. I think it was early November 1999. Even walked into a Nissan dealer because we needed a second car. (I used to walk 2 miles down De Soto to work). I’ll never forget when filling out the application at the dealer “how long at present job?” “I start in a week“ Cassells music in San Fernando”. Amazingly, we drove off with a barely used 98 Nissan Sentra. When I did arrive for my first day at Cassells, Ed was shaking his head smiling. “customers are already asking for you!” “I guess the rumor got out!” Apparently my name was also circulating with manufacturers reps (which also probably helped me land the job without a résumé). Line 6 even called me at Cassells offered me a job as a road rep! Though I was tickled they were thinking of me, I was content to keep my new job and did not want be on the road doing dog and pony shows at dealers across the state with a family waiting at home. I was just happy for a new start at Cassells!
Here’s a peek at my first initiated project:
Besides doing some initial merchandise rearranging on the sales floor, The first project I took on was that of cleaning out an otherwise unused storage room and converting it into an acoustic guitar humidor show room. The Dry Santa Ana seasons of Southern California we’re not kind to the acoustic guitar merchandise and I applied some of the rough lessons from Sam Ash when their store humidity system was failing A couple of years prior. But I was also just rolling some paint on the walls and dolling up the lesson waiting room area as well. Ed wanted somebody to inject new creative energy the store and I was there to do it! Somewhere in January 2000, when the newly minted acoustic room was under construction, I recall getting a call from Taylor guitars. (They knew me from Sam Ash). “We found you! We heard you left Ash and started calling all the stores in the area! We see that you’re in a region that we’re not represented in, would you be interested in selling our guitars?” Yep. We became a Taylor dealer and We eventually held some workshops. Yes it was a monumental task moving all the fixtures and merchandise off the floor in order to fill it with rental chairs and make a little stage for the likes of Doyle Dykes and Artie Traum (RIP). Good times! Also a couple of other non-Taylor concert workshops featuring Bass virtuoso Michael Manring and another with myself opening for Jim Earp!
Bear in mind that this is when the Internet was just taking off and the era of the.com crash. Ed was early into the eBay thing. Digital cameras and dial up Internet. Imagine that! And boy was he moving (NOS) new old stock of hard to get still in packaging parts for classic 1970’s Japanese guitars! eBay was quite a boom in those days! I was really absorbing Ed’s Online skills as I was a relative newcomer to having a computer and the Internet in general. (Ed taught me stuff like CNTL C and CNTL V moves LOL). Actually, a couple years later I went to Borders and bought that “Complete idiots guide to HTML” book (Borders Books, remember them?) to launch TogaMan GuitarViols. In reality I was just trying to put up a site where I can send people the links rather than attempting to send photographs over the Internet. In those “dial-up” modem days, it was a thing! We would spend hours uploading photos. I had no idea that TogaMan GuitarViols would takeoff the way it did! Actually I thought it was going to be a happy side hustle: Play a few gigs, sell a few CDs. No big deal! Ironically I had sort of a home court advantage working in a music store! On the other hand it took off from a crummy cobbled together website in 2002. Little did I know where this thing would go!
Those days after 9/11 were something else! We were initially on a roll selling Taylor, Dean, and Cordoba guitars from that acoustic room. People were just so shocked and depressed from the events in New York. Selling a $3000 acoustic guitar just felt like such a soul-less thing in the context of that moment. On the other hand people needed music (for morale) more than ever! We were there to be of service! Whether it was that kid getting his first guitar, violin, trumpet or that panicked electric guitar Player on the way to a gig showing up at closing needing a quick solder to the output jack, we were there to make it happen! (It was also the era of toxic sub prime Home loans and Nokia phones).
When I say that countless people got their start at Cassells Music, it’s not a joke! Ed would often host school tours for pre-school to kindergarten age kids and anxious soccer moms. The store would become a cacophony of kids trying out instruments for the first time! (In those days I suffered migraines, that did not mix well!) However, I personally know locale professional game media composers Who once upon a time where those kids that Ed introduced Music to!! In fact I’ve had coffee and breakfast with some of those people many years later! The point is, he was creating lifelong customers! So many stories of musicians (now middle aged adults) who started their musical journey through Ed & Cassells! If that’s not enough, to this day, I have friends who are successful (famous) record producers who started their careers at Cassells as Music instructors. If that’s not enough, Ed introduced a program called “play it forward” which would essentially be donated (reconditioned) instruments that would to local families who wanted to put their kids in music but could not afford an instrument! Lots of success stories there!
The other unique feature of family life during the years I worked at Cassells? We lived in the tiny cottage on the lot behind the store! Each morning I would walk out the front door to another door a few feet away (with keys and morning coffee in hand!) Yep, Ed rented us the cottage! We were living on the cheap which allowed us to send our son Andrew to a local private school. At the end of the shift I would walk in the door “Dad, can you go get Foster‘s burgers tonight for dinner?” Life was hard (as in all I had to do was walk across the street from Cassells and get those delicious Fosters burgers and walk them over!) What a brutal commute! While we lived in that little cottage we fixed it up the best we could. (I restored crystal door knobs of a bygone era, art deco kitchen cabinet hinges, and even a mural in an otherwise drab back patio aka “the Bistro”. The tiny 1935 era garage was literally Where The first TogaMan GuitarViols we’re born! The very one you heard famously used in the movie 300 (Plus tons of others including John Wick) was made in that very setting! It was a humble existence Albeit a happy one! As demand for my instruments escalated, my career as an assistant manager of a legacy Music store eventually hit its age limit. I cannot thank Ed enough for those years! I will go as far as to say that the story that people know me for (the GuitarViol thing) May not have happened (at all) any other way! In a sense, mine is just another story in the tsunami of ripple effect impact that is Cassells Music!
Through the years after I left Cassells, there was a sense of comfort and home base level nostalgia in my heart for the place! It was a privilege to live through the impact of the Internet and the first decade of the 21st century there. So much has happened! So much has changed! Cassells is literally among the last of a real brick and mortar Family music stores to have outlived thousands of them that have come and gone. Even the greatest among them are no contest for the times we live in now. There is a chance that the new owners of the building and cottage on the lot will rent to somebody who will continue to operate as a music store. Hopefully that happens! In either case it is the actual end of an era and I was proud to be in the mix for most of that Y2K decade.
Wishing Ed all the best for his next chapter!
Further reading: An article by Semantha Norris from the San Fernando Sun
As always, Stay Inspired!
Jonathan