Carmine Street
Unique Guitars 60
Carmine Street Guitars - Exclusive Feature Film DVD
Once the center of the New York bohemia, Greenwich Village is now home to luxe restaurants and buzzer-door clothing stores catering to the nouveau riche. But one shop in the heart of the Village remains resilient to the encroaching gentrification – and is a mecca for musicians everywhere – Carmine Street Guitars.
There, custom guitar maker Rick Kelly and his young apprentice Cindy Hulej build handcrafted guitars out of reclaimed wood from old hotels, bars, churches and other local buildings. Nothing looks or sounds quite like a Rick Kelly guitar, which is the reason they are embraced by the likes of Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and Patti Smith, to name just a few.
A chance meeting with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (who gave Kelly some wood from his loft to build him a guitar) led to Kelly’s discovery of Adirondack timber: pine that had been lumbered in those virgin forests nearly two centuries ago to build much of modern New York. Reclaiming these “bones of the city,” Kelly began crafting electric guitars primarily modeled on Leo Fender’s classic Telecaster design.
Featuring a cast of prominent musicians and artists, and some virtuoso performances, the film captures five days in the life of one shop in the heart of Greenwich Village that is a tribute to an all-too-quickly vanishing way of life.