The Axe Man of Admiral Place

The hardscrabble life of a vintage guitar dealer

Andrew Winn wants to get a gun. 

I’m advising him against it.

I ask him if he’s taken his pill yet and he says he can’t remember.

I need to set a timer so that we can take our medication at the same time. Anti-anxiety medication is essential when you’re loading over half a million dollars worth of vintage guitars into and out of some of the cheapest motels dotting our interstate system—much more important than a loaded gun, I try to explain.

The Days Inn in Franklin, Tennessee is bleak. It’s February. The pool is covered and rightly so, the air temperature is just above freezing when we check in at 7 p.m. 

If you’ve ever wondered how many vintage guitars can fit into a standard motel with two queen beds, the number is roughly 138—that’s how many we’ve managed to jam into it, anyway. All floor space save for a small pathway cutting through to the bathroom is occupied by vintage guitar cases, battered and carrying with them the odors of a thousand guitar shops, juke joints and carpet fibers from underneath beds. The bathtub is full of bass guitars standing on end in their ebony cases leaned over slightly, resembling a stack of oversized dominos. 

For a little over a decade now, Winn has been ascending the ranks of the vintage guitar dealer market. There might be a hundred or so vintage dealers in the States, a couple dozen that matter. With this latest score Winn is nearing the top ten. 

These guitars, this collection he worked his way into buying, have been his for a week or so now. They haven’t been on the market for twenty years or more. The vintage guitar world is a small one and he’s been dodging calls from potential buyers who suspect he is in possession of fresh inventory. The trick is to set up a queue to rate clients on a set of criteria in order to maximize sales. First of all, they have to have ample cash.Secondly, they’ve got to be able to keep their damn mouths shut. 

If possible, all of the dealers he will entertain in this motel room need to think that they are the first to see these guitars—call it the “preferred customer” marketing strategy. If clients think that you have reserved something especially for them, they may buy more so as not to disappoint. The first dealer Winn invited has cash and a gun in his boot and he doesn’t talk to anybody. 

Winn didn’t always have these kinds of problems—the overflowing inventory, the worries about safety, the frazzled nerves. It wasn’t long ago that he had to split the rental of a guitar show booth with another dealer due to a lack of inventory and capital. Everybody has to start somewhere. At this guitar show, where the well-heeled stars of the music industry live, his inventory will spill over eight booth spaces. 

In through the out door

If it weren’t for lizards, Winn might not be in the vintage guitar business. 

“I was 14 years old,” he says, “and I worked at this pet store. They paid me in snakes and mice. Something about child labor laws and shit.” Winn and a friend started building lizard cages and he envisioned selling them to people who came in the store. “This guy comes in and he wants a cage, but he doesn’t want to pay me for it—he wants to trade.” The man offered Winn a Japanese-made 1987 Fender Strato-caster and a small amplifier for the reptile habitat. “I wanted the money, I didn’t want the guitar,” he remembers. “But somehow I found out the value of the guitar and amp and figured I could sell it for more money than I was asking for the cage.” 

Having been previously asked to leave violin lessons for practicing nothing but “Kashmir,” it’s fair to say Winn’s musical focus was debatable, though he had a good ear. “I set that guitar and amp up in my parents’ garage and started trying out figure out Led Zeppelin songs. It was so loud and distorted in that space that it kind of sounded right.” Winn fell in love with the instrument, and the appeal of working in a pet shop faded. 

“I went in to the local music store in Stillwater and asked them for a job,” Winn says. “I told them I’d do anything They basically hired me to scrub toilets.” So Winn hung around Daddy O’s Music and began to learn about the instrument that would come to define his career. “I wouldn’t leave. I’d do anything: set-ups, repairs, lots of dusting, janitorial duties for the shop and the apartment upstairs.” He worked there throughout his teenage years and was manager by high school graduation.

But it was in Oklahoma City, after a stint of trying on some other careers, that Winn would find his path. “One day this guy comes in and wants to trade a vintage guitar to the shop for some value into a new one. The owner didn’t want the vintage guitar, he just wasn’t interested. I asked him if I could buy that guy’s guitar with my own money and try and sell it.” Winn sold the instrument online in a matter of days at a decent profit. 

Ramble On

“Come outside with me and smoke a cigarette,” Winn says. “I don’t wanna stand out there by myself, it makes me feel like a sitting duck.”

“Yeah, well, there may as well be two of us out there,” I say. “That way we can both die at the same time.”

“We need a gun,” he says.

“We need a drink and a cigarette,” I tell him, “and then we need to calm down.”

We look out at the covered pool; stacks of plastic outdoor chairs have spilled over, likely due to wind, possibly several weeks ago. We’re so nervous we don’t want to go back into the room. I offer to grab a few more beers and our coats. We run through our smokes and keep lighting, trying to push through the wait. We talk non-sense, we haven’t eaten in hours, we barely slept last night and we know this pattern will not change for days. 

Before we manage to give up on dinner, Winn sells nearly six figures worth of guitars—all cash. It would have been more if his client had settled on the 1951 Fender “Blackguard No-Caster,” but he’s gonna sleep on that one. It doesn’t matter; it sells to the vintage buyer for a chain music store the next morning along with several other pieces for a tidy profit.

By midday on Friday, a day that the trade show floor is reserved for vintage guitar dealers only, we haven’t even had time to set up Winn’s booth due to the frenzy of activity from vintage buyers smelling fresh blood in the water. At the close of the guitar show that first day he’s re-introduced dozens of vintage instruments back to the market.

“It’s time for a drink,” Winn says.    

Bring it on home

The exterior of the Guitar House of Tulsa isn’t going to impress you. It’s got all the charm of a check cashing facility—a lean strip on a weathered blacktop that desires no “walk-up” traffic. With vintage guitars it’s about guts, not show. Guitar House has existed in Tulsa in one form or another since 1964—a date not lost on music historians. In its last iteration it housed a fine selection of new instruments that sprang from classic bloodlines—Martin, Taylor, among others. 

For over a decade, Winn has developed a network of clients across the world that look to him when they want to purchase a vintage instrument. Other dealers seek him out to consult when they are stumped as to value or authenticity of a guitar. He has been a paid consultant for a leading auction house verifying and describing their inventory for the public--and he's done it all without a store. 

So, why now? 

“I don’t know,” he laughs. “Well, here’s the thing. I’ve moved around. I’ve seen some things. I knew if I was going to have a shop it was going to have a different kind of vibe and it needed to be in a place where the people got it­—where there was a serious music history. I want to be able to put these vintage instruments in the hands of people who are going to appreciate them and use them.” 

Does it make sense to open a vintage guitar shop in Tulsa? 

“It does to me, because I’m an Okie. Oklahoma, especially Tulsa, is a music mecca. There has been so much of the history of rock and roll music come out of this place and there are current players making records here, making waves way beyond the confines of Oklahoma. I wanna be a part of that. These guitars were used by the true giants of the industry back in the day to make rock and roll and I’m glad to bring them back home.”

For more from Beau, read his interview with Iron Gate director Connie Cronley.