How Bizarre

Bizarre Guitar, a 40-year-old music shop on a stretch of Oddie Boulevard that many residents incorrectly assume is Sparks instead of Reno, presented a clinic in contest-winning in the RN&R’s 2014 Best of Northern Nevada readers’ poll.

It was an impressive showing, with the store racking up wins in a variety of categories, some of which might seem surprising for such a niche business. Bizarre Guitar was voted Best Local Place to Work, Best Place to Buy a Musical Instrument, Best Local Non-Casino Business, Best Place for Music Lessons, Best Business Facebook Page, Most Female Friendly Business, and Best Local Website. It was voted Best Place to Buy a Firearm and second place for Best Place to Shoot Firearms, wins that should more properly be attributed to Bizarre Guns, the store’s conjoined-twin sister business, next door, owned by the same folks and closely intertwined. Bizarre was voted second place for Most Female Friendly Company to Work For (first place—and take from this what you will—was a brothel). Bizarre Guitar owner Greg Golden was voted Best Local Musician. His band, the Greg Golden Band, won Best Local Band. Greg’s wife, Shanda Golden, the “queen bee” of Bizarre Guitar, won Most Innovative Woman.

A year earlier, in the 2013 version of the contest, the business won Best Place to Buy a Firearm, and came in second for Best Place to Buy a Musical Instrument. The business appeared nowhere else among the winners and runners up, and neither did the Goldens. Bizarre Guitar’s strong showing in so many categories in this year’s contest seemed surprising to some readers, with at least one reader joking on social media that the paper should change its name to the Sparks News & Review—making that common mistake about the store’s location—or even the Bizarre News & Review.

None of this is necessarily to say that those awards were not deserved. Bizarre Guitar is quintessential of a certain kind of wild Nevadan aesthetic—a libertarian place where you can buy your shotgun and your Stratocaster at the same spot, where questions aren’t asked, where bluesy pentatonic guitar riffs still reign supreme. It’s a place that seems unique to Northern Nevada, a guitar shop with rows and rows of instruments and a legendary “vault” in the basement with vintage instruments and amps, and displays of 1950s Les Paul guitars as well as Civil War muskets. It’s hard to imagine it anywhere other than Northern Nevada. That alone puts it in the running in some of those categories.

But the various wins in the Best of Northern Nevada contest are just a symptom of Bizarre Guitar’s online dominance. On social media, the Bizarre-affiliated businesses rack up surprising numbers that tower over comparable local businesses’ social media presence. At press time, Bizarre Guitar had 154,493 likes on Facebook. For comparison’s sake, Nevada Humane Society, which came in second behind Bizarre in the votes for Best Business Facebook Page, had just 12,430. The Greg Golden Band had 78,968 likes. Second place band Jelly Bread had 3,830. Third place Moondog Matinee, just 2,072. The video for the Golden Band’s “Long Way Home,” a straightforward performance shoot of a hard rock tune, had more than 3.6 million views.

“I’ve been playing guitar since I was seven,” said Greg Golden recently. “I’m 61 this year. This is my 54th year of playing. It’s all I’ve ever done. I know every guitar shop, every guitar player, every kind of instrument, everything in the music industry. I’ve probably seen just about every major band there is.”

He has a lot of confidence and an air of deliberate machismo. He wears his black hair slicked back and rocks a Wild West mustache and goatee. He looks like a guy who prides himself on his knowledge of guns and blues guitar licks.

“I played on the road for years,” he said. “I played for Floyd Rose who invented the Floyd Rose tremolo. Several different bands. All kinds of different bands. And I toured, and just as I was making money on the road, making pretty good dough, I’d go to guitar shops and pawn shops, check ’em out, and I’d send those home as pay. Started paying money for guitars I knew would be valuable.”

Golden played for years in the Chuck Ruff Group, alongside the well-known drummer formerly of the Edgar Winter Group, and he’s proud of his many current musical associations with musicians like Paul Holdgate, formerly of Montrose, Bud Gaugh, formerly of Sublime, and Frank Hammond of Tesla. Holdgate and Gaugh will be among the guest musicians joining the Greg Golden Band for the group’s next performance, Friday, Sept. 26, at Chester’s Reno Harley-Davidson. It’s at the odd time of 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., but is a tie-in to the Street Vibrations festival. The band is signed to a record label called Premier Records.

“Greg is unique in the fact that not only does he have a really bitching store, he can play like a motherfucking riot,” said Shanda. “My man can play.”

Golden opened Bizarre Guitar in Aug, 1974, at a location in Sun Valley. The business moved into its current location in the borderland between Reno and Sparks in 1978. Golden and Scott Bergstrom, the owner of Starsound Audio, the business next door, led the construction of the building specifically for their businesses.

Since then, Golden has sold many, many guitars and built up quite a collection of rare and vintage guitars, including a 1954 Fender Stratocaster that’s serial number six, but that Golden believes is likely the first one actually constructed. He says he’s sold guitars to many high-end collectors, including some legendary guitarists, like Carlos Santana and B.B. King, and their autographed albums adorn the walls of Bizarre’s downstairs vault.

That vault is the primary setting of In the Vault with Shanda Golden, a YouTube web series in which Shanda conducts informal interviews with touring musicians.

“I interview rock stars,” she said. “I typically grab them from manufacturers, so I’ll interview endorsed artists. But I’ve become independent press somewhere along the line. … It’s not just an infomercial anymore.”

She’s interviewed people like Lemmy Kilmister from Motorhead, David Ellefson of Megadeth, and the guitarist Zakk Wylde. In the interviews, she loves to play the role of the vivacious, bodacious blonde, and also does some modeling under the name Goldie Golden. In that guise, she’s often seen in Bizarre Guitar’s advertisements. In the Vault is self-produced with Shanda’s own cameras and equipment, usually with just one cameraman, and she edits it herself.

She’s originally from Orange County, but moved to Reno, which she calls her “adopted hometown,” in her 20s, during the ’90s. She’s worked in the corporate world, doing escrow, and done different kinds of modeling, including classic pinup styles and modeling for life drawing classes. But even before she and Greg got married in 2009, music was a constant force in her life.

“I love music,” she said. “I really do love music. It’s been a saving grace for me my whole life. I don’t want to get too personal, but I had a really, really tough childhood. There’s kids that have it worse, believe me, but I had it pretty bad. And music has always been my saving grace.”

Of the slew of awards that she and her husband won in this year’s Best Of, the one that stands out for her is the one attributed directly to her, Most Innovative Woman.

“I thought that was really special because my mother would have loved that I got an award like that,” she said.

She also advocates for the local Food Bank, and always makes sure there’s a food bank barrel in the store.

“People who know me know that the Food Bank is a passion of mine,” she said. “It’s important to me because I was a hungry teen, a homeless teen, and that was important. There’s all kinds of really great little organizations out there and they help you get coats and all this stuff. I think there’s nothing better than having your belly full.”

Shanda compares Bizarre Guitar’s social media success with tape trading, a culture she says she saw a lot of growing up, wherein music fans would record and share their favorite albums and make each other mix tapes.

“Heavy metal was started by tape trading,” she said. “I saw the boys doing that. I saw that culture kind of develop itself. For me, this is what we’re doing now with the internet. We can do that in a positive way. People put down the internet—oh, there are so many bad things on the internet. There are bad things if you look for it, but there are a lot of really great positive things. So we started a Facebook page for the store, and we slowly started to develop it.”

She said that part of that development was just sharing information and asking others to share it as well.

“For instance, I’ve got this kid in Japan that shares all my stuff,” she said. “They take that link and then they share, hey, like this page, or share, share, share. It’s going back to that tape trading thing. Everybody just shares it.”

She said that Greg does a lot of that development himself.

“He spends about three hours in the morning doing that on his own,” she said. “He belongs to all kinds of different Facebook groups. If you get into Facebook and you really want to work it, and you don’t want to air your dirty laundry, and worry about what other people are doing, you will do very well with Facebook. And because he’s been around for a long time, we know a lot of people.”

They focus on cross promoting the store, the band, the web series and the modeling.

“She has her own site, cross promoted with Bizarre Guitar, Greg Golden Band, and then I go through and invite her friends to like my fan [pages],” said Greg. “It takes time. You have to have guys for certain tasks, buddies that you show them kind of what to do, if they want an extra thing, OK, this is what we need done. Ask those people to like our page. Send those guys a promo or something. It’s not rocket science, man. But it takes fucking time, and [Shanda] and I are very aggressive about it.”

Greg says he currently has two employees he’s hired and trained to work on social media promotion.

“We’d be happy to help people with that if they need help,” said Shanda. “Or just contact Greg on Facebook and say, ’Hey man, will you share my page?’”

In addition to the informal “tape trading” development, however, there’s also paid promotion on Facebook, which the Goldens take advantage of for all their endeavors.

“If you have a page and you have 100,000 people on the page, Facebook limits it now where you only hit 6 or 7 percent of those people total, but it’s how you do things,” said Greg. “There’s a lot of tricks to the trade, man. And it’s amazing, but I do know a lot about that. … I’m going to advertise my page, so instead of like seven percent, they make it like 12 percent, so you get that much more exposure. So, what I do that’s smart is that I go back through, and I have a programmed computer, and it’s just a stock thing, but I go back through and invite those people who are going to the event or respond in any way or comment on anything, to like the page.”

This kind of promotion requires dedication and a bit of an obsessive attitude.

“When ’Long Way Home’ came out, I posted it on 400 walls once a week for six months,” Greg said.

Austin Pratt, the singer of the Reno punk band Spitting Image, has a different attitude about aggressive promotion on social media.

“We have used social media—Facebook, Instagram—to get people to come out to our shows, and when we put out our seven-inch [record], the label that did our seven-inch, Broke Hatre, did a national press release, so we got some coverage,” he said. “We do things like that, where it’s a natural progression—not being more than we are in terms of our press and media outreach. We try to be as straight-ahead and straightforward as possible, which means that if we’re not doing something, if we’re not playing a ton of local shows, then we’re not ballot-stuffing and trying to be best band in Reno in the Reno News & Review. … I would only reach within my means. I would feel weird if people were voting me best band and they didn’t see me play a show. … I would prefer to have some authenticity or credibility.”

“Local bands don’t do shit to promote themselves,” said Greg. “And to be honest, they don’t have the right stuff to promote. It’s when you have something to promote and you have a great show, and you’re organized, and you’re on time, and you’re playing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing, and you let the people know who are interested because they’re your buddies. I’ve kept the mailing list since I started this freaking business. That’s how come I’ve survived, because I’ve got mailing lists that go back to the very beginning.”

Yelp, a consumer review website with user-generated content, is kind of the opposite of Facebook as far as control of presentation. Most business owners hate it. Yelp currently lists “37 reviews that are not currently recommended” and no “recommended reviews” for Bizarre Guitar. Bizarre Guitar’s unrecommended reviews tend to be extreme—positive or negative. The negative, one-star reviews complain about customer service problems and some even claim that Golden sent them threatening, profanity-laden emails or Facebook messages. The positive reviews are almost all gushing, typo-heavy, five-star reviews written by reviewers who, perhaps suspiciously, have not written any other reviews. Many of them make very similar comma splice grammatical errors. (A Yelp user named David Ian B. claims that Golden sets up dummy Yelp profiles.) The page also lists 16 reviews that have been removed from Yelp for “violating … content guidelines or terms of service.”

Despite their strong social media presence, the Goldens say they did no actual, specific promotion to help their success in the RN&R’s Best Of Northern Nevada contest.

“Just being honest, I thought it was rigged or something,” said Golden. “We always got second or something. And my band never got nominated. I don’t know if it’s just because of seeing us on Facebook or what, but we didn’t say vote for us—not a fucking thing, but we just ended up being voted. It kind of blew our mind. … But how could it not be for the gun shop? Or the guitar shop? Or even my band? I mean, we smoke, we’re a fucking awesome band. Her being most innovative female? That gets my fucking vote and I know everybody in this fucking town, too. What else? Best place for women? We’ve got four or five gals, a rock ’n’ roll gal, a heavyset gal. We got people who work here—women who work in kind of a men’s environment, guns and guitars, but they dig it.”

“Maybe some of our friends did it for us?” wondered Shanda. “Because there was a certain thing when it would come out, where people would get really upset—how did Maytan or whatever win over you guys? I don’t know. Maybe it was just happy luck.”

“It was more than happy luck,” said Greg. “The guys from Premier Records sent me a note saying that the News & Review thing had come out and that they had voted for me in a number of categories.”