Tiburon man has treasure trove of instruments
By Paul Liberatore, Marin Independent Journal, July 15, 2002
Eric Schoenberg has a disease. He caught it from his older brother when he was a kid. It isn’t life threatening, but it’s chronic and highly contagious. Call it “guitaritis.”
“I have the disease pretty bad,” he confesses, surrounded by his symptoms: rows of fine guitars in his Tiburon shop. “I got it worse than my brother did, and I’ve been unemployable ever since.”
That may be, but Schoenberg has been able to turn his affliction to an asset. He is the proprietor of Eric Schoenberg Guitars, a tiny trove on Tiburon’s Ark Row that is a sort of Ali Baba’s cave for acoustic guitar players.
The walls are arrayed with beautifully crafted instruments, many of them vintage Martins and Gibsons labeled by year and make and model as if they were in a museum (one 1928 Martin recently sold for $31,000 to a buyer in Japan.
Schoenberg also has his line of acoustic guitars, made to his own specifications. And he stocks a number of mandolins, ukuleles, banjos and shiny silver National resonator guitars.
“I’m not big on the collector side of the business,” he says as a customer noodles on a guitar and another asks if he can try out a mandolin. “I focus more on the players. I think a guitar has to be set up to play.”
A soft-spoken man with thinning, sandy-colored hair, a neatly trimmed beard and glasses, the 55-year old Schoenberg has been a guitar player since he was 13, introduced to the instrument by an older brother when he was growing up on the East Coast. “I think I just picked up on his enthusiasm more than anything else,” he says.
After that early exposure, his enthusiasm turned into an obsession. Inspired by musicians Merle Travis, Doc Watson, Chet Atkins and Mississippi John Hurt, among others, he continued his exploration into the guitar at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey and at Oakland University, a branch of Michigan State University.
“I learned much more guitar in college than anything else,” he says. He became so accomplished at folk-derived fingerpicking that he went on to perform on the coffeehouse circuit in the early ‘70s and was a major factor in reviving the ragtime style of playing. With a guitarist cousin, Dave Laibman, he recorded a duet album, “The New Ragtime Guitar,” on the Folkways label. He also did two solo albums, “Acoustic Guitar” and “Steel Strings,” for Rounder Records.
As his performing career was winding down and he was looking for a more stable way of making a living, he and two friends opened a guitar shop, The Music Emporium, outside of Boston in 1976. The store still exists, and Schoenberg maintains his partnership in it.
While he was developing as a guitarist, Schoenberg became involved in playing and restoring vintage guitars, specializing in instruments from the early 1930s and earlier. Working with craftsmen, he was constantly making modifications and improvements on the original designs.
“There weren’t guitar stores like this in those days,” he says. “We were all figuring it out as we went along. I have an idea how guitars should be. I want them to disappear in the guitarist’s hands.”
During this period, he began a long association with the Martin company, which made guitars to his specifications that were inspired by Martin’s Orchestra Model, or “OM” solo concert instruments that are smaller-bodied than the common Dreadnought and have wider necks and fingerboards.
Eventually the Martin factory made guitars that carried Schoenberg’s name and, for a short time, he operated his own small factory. He now has about 15 Schoenberg guitars a year made by individual luthiers, among them Petaluma’s (CA) Bruce Sexauer. Their prices reflect their quality, ranging from $4250 to $15,000.
Scott Nygaard, a professional guitarist and editor of Acoustic Guitar Magazine, owns a Schoenberg.
“I love it,” he says. “I played it in the store, and I wouldn’t leave without it.”
After living on the East Coast for most of his life, Schoenberg moved to Tiburon 5 1/2 years ago, when his wife, Debbie Mazzolini, was hired as the director of the Belvedere-Tiburon Library. As she went to work at the library, he opened his guitar store on quaint Ark Row, a popular tourist street that is the extension of Tiburon’s Main Street, thus the address of 106 Main Street. Local guitar buffs have been thanking their lucky stars ever since.
“There aren’t many stores like this around,” Nygaard says. “It’s a real treasure.”
*Contact Paul Liberatore via e-mail at liberatore@marinij.com.
photo by Frankie Frost