Saying goodbye to Greenlaw's

LACONIA — For 67 years, Greenlaw’s Music has been a mainstay on Main Street – the Lakes Region’s emporium of heart’s desires for musicians and audiophiles who come for lessons, repairs, the latest in speakers and home studio equipment, their first set of strings, or just to talk tunes.

The wall behind the cash register is lined with a rainbow of banjos, ukuleles, mandolins and glistening acoustic guitars. On the opposite wall hang a lineup of sleek electric models. The floor between holds everything from keyboards to drum sets, sheet music and CDs, vinyl records, and sound systems, and stocking stuffers for players and listeners.

“If I had a nickel for everyone who walked in here and said, ‘Wow. This place is like a smorgasbord,’ said Pete Bissonnette, who has worked here for 42 years.

For music lovers, Greenlaw’s is a smidgeon of heaven.

One thing is certain: the downtown store will be missed when its owners, Dave and Laurel Greenlaw, and their long-time employee and right hand, Bissonnette, retire when the contents are sold. Greenlaw’s Celebration Retirement Sale starts Monday, with 25% off.

It’s a bittersweet rite of passage for a family that has enjoyed catering to the universal human need for sound. Dave Greenlaw, 76, and Bissonnette, 64, said it’s time to move on. Greenlaw, a Laconia native who played percussion in the Laconia High School band, said he’s looking forward to traveling with his wife to visit their grandchildren. Bissonnette, who recently underwent open heart surgery, said wryly, “I don’t know yet.  Maybe I’ll go fishing. We’ll see where that takes me.”

It’s a chapter closing in downtown’s history.

“It’s heart-wrenching,” said Amber McLane, Greenlaw’s daughter in Gilford. “I’ve been forever going to that store as my parents’ store.”

Greenlaw said they tried unsuccessfully to find another music purveyor to take over. Internet sales, even of tactile musical instruments, have cut into sales for local music stores, which count on personal service to a dedicated clientele. Pandemic supply chain stops have hampered inventory. Like computers and cell phones, “receivers all use microchips. They’re all fighting for the same supply,” said Bissonnette. “Today, you can do your homework online, but a lot of people still want to touch and feel it.” 

Most of all, Bissonnette and Greenlaw said they will miss seeing their customers. The store has been a gathering place. People come in and talk.

“You make a lot of friends and meet a lot of good people in this business,” including regulars who come weekly or monthly, said Bissonnete. “There’s a bond between music lovers. It’s like putting 10 chefs in the same room. They’re going to talk about food.  You can have 10 musicians standing in here. Four are very seasoned. Two can’t figure out which end of the guitar to hold. Musicians are pretty good about not looking down on anybody. They remember, that was me, too.”

“Some people would come in and talk politics,” said Greenlaw. “It was fun.”

“In this industry, you’re seeing faces all the time,” said Bissonnette.

“We were always solving problems with people’s sound systems or instruments,” said Greenlaw.

 “You had audiophiles with a million questions and musicians who thought the world caved in because their guitar wasn’t working. It was being like a shrink. But it added to the fun of it all,” said Bissonnette.,

They witnessed movements in music history. When Elvis Presley was on the road to stardom, Greenlaw’s sold 400 copies of Presley’s album, “Nothin but a Hound Dog” in a single year.

“We saw the disco era to the New Age era, to the New Wave era with the Talking Heads and the Eurythmics. The punk movement with the Clash and the Ramones. Diehard American rock bands like Aerosmith. It was like watching a butterfly. Music really morphed and changed over 40 years,” said Bissonnette.

Greenlaw remembers celebrities who stopped in, especially when actors were making one or two movies each year and came to the Lakes Region to appear in summer stock theater. “Henry Fonda was in here looking for percussion material,” he said. Notables included blues artist Robert Cray, Justin Hayward from the Moody Blues, actor Vincent Price, Sonny and Cher “when they were still married,” and actress Olivia de Havilland. “These people would wander around the city and come in,” he said.

For decades Greenlaw’s has supplied school music programs and Lakes Region musicians who became regular patrons, including a number who bought home studio equipment during the pandemic. Area residents came for lessons with specialized instructors in studio rooms in Greenlaw’s basement, who will now have to arrange for alternative space, perhaps at the Music Clinic in Belmont, Greenlaw said.

Ordering instruments and equipment for customers, like stores everywhere, became a challenge during the pandemic and long delays linger throughout the U.S. Online shopping had already put a dent in business. “The age of the internet made everybody armchair shoppers. This country has hemorrhaged more stores in the last five or six years,” Bissonnette said. Manchester lost four of five music stores in one year, he added. “It’s sad when things become just a commodity.”

Bissonnette is optimistic about the trend he sees now in downtown Laconia. “We’ve seen it go from alive and vibrant to dead and buried, to coming around to alive and vibrant. At some point, the downtown becomes more a part of life. People are sick of the digital world. I hear it a lot from people, ‘Facebook and Instagram, I’m done with that.’ It made hermits out of people.” 

But music, though practiced in private, is a public experience, and a social event for both audience and performers – and people like to hold and inspect what they buy.

“Maybe there’s a young guy who wants to start one of these somewhere. There will be a place for it,” Bissonnette said.