Brothers Guitar Shop Brings Strength of Strings to Upper East Side

“Lay down your weary tune” Bob Dylan wrote and the Byrds echoed, “Lay down the song you strum. And rest yourself ’neath the strength of strings.” This is just one of clarion calls that might lead one to the musical oasis that is the Brothers Guitar Shop in Yorkville on the Upper East Side. It’s not just folk and folk rock that resonates with siblings Frank and Shawn Gorelik. Classic rock, metal, blues, funk, jazz, rock and roll— these bros have an infectious passion for it all.

Shawn, 36, and Frank, 39, are the business and creative minds behind Brothers Guitar Shop at 316 E. 84th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues. In a family style, they got their entrepreneurial spirit from their parents, both of whom have operated sucessful Upper East Side businesses for years.

Their mother, Vicky, owns Windows, Walls & More on First Avenue, and in 2017, the siblings bought their father Michael’s long-standing Second Avenue hardware store, which they grew up working in. “I was pricing things when I was eight, nine years old,” says Shawn. That location is now closed, but the brothers opened two others in its place: First Avenue Supply is on 82nd, and New York Paint & Hardware on 87th.

It was in the latter store where the Goreliks guitar shop began.

Says Frank, “Shawn and I have been playing guitars for years. One of our hardware employees was a guitar tech, so I said, maybe he can fix up ours. Customers always saw our guitars laying around the hardware store, and started bringing in theirs, and we started repairing them. That’s how it started.”

Straus News visited the Goreliks at their remarkable shop and amid the Fenders, Gibsons and numerous other makes, both acoustic and electric, we spoke of business and the commnity and how deeply the two are intertwined.

You opened in November 2020. Did anybody think you were crazy to do this during COVID?

Frank: I don’t know. I never asked anyone.

Shawn: We go from our intuition and heart. Frank and I have been in business together for a long time. So, we are very in sync with our ideas. We just consult with each other.

Walk me through how you created the store.

Frank: COVID hit, and we saw a big boom of people wanting to maintain their guitars. We put a YouTube video out about how we pick up guitars at your apartment, repair them, and we deliver them to you. And that set us apart.

Shawn: Also, there were so many guitars in the hardware store that we were out of space, and that’s when we opened a dedicated location.

You also offer lessons.

Frank: Yes, we have a studio where we do lessons, or we go to clients’ houses. We have several teachers who teach all ages. Our oldest [client] was in their 80s, and the youngest are little kids.

What’s your mission?

Frank: We don’t really approach this business as a money-making operation. We want to grow slowly, organically, and involve the community, and kind of grow like that.

Shawn: It’s more about bringing music to the community, to children, and organic instruments to be more in the forefront.

Does your experience in hardware apply here?

Shawn: Yeah, we definitely approach the guitar business in the same way that we approach the hardware business. Fast-paced, customer service, and community involvement. Since we’ve been in the area since we were children, we have a community of friends and neighbors–they all know us.

Frank: What does matter is that you know what you’re selling. You have to know the product inside and out.

Shawn: I would say that we definitely learned this is a different kind of business.

Frank: The hardware store customers try to waste as little time as possible. They come in, want their stuff, want to go to work. Here, people come in, and they want to shop around. They want to look, touch everything.

How do you guys divide the responsibilities?

Frank: We just attack everything head-on together.

Shawn: In the beginning, we had specialties.

Frank: Shawn was more behind the scenes on the computer side, building the website and marketing; I was building the store out, filling the merchandise, and dealing with employees, the day-to-day.

What happens when you disagree on something?

Shawn: How we approach it...whoever is more passionate about a certain topic or a certain direction, the other will support him.

Where do you see the business in the next five years?

Shawn: We’ve been developing brand partnerships with more prominent guitar companies, and that has differentiated us. I think I see us doing more partnerships to make us more desirable to the community, like community events. People want to have experiences.

We have also been developing a music festival in Central Park for four years, at the Bandshell, and there’s a vlog on my YouTube, about this event. We’d like to expand it, get some sponsors, get some more interesting acts to bring more people in. It’s definitely a grassroots thing, but it’s been more interesting every year and it’s something that we do, pro bono.

Frank: We don’t see a direct profit from that.

Shawn: Or even really a return of any sort. But I enjoy it, and I believe in it.

When someone comes into your store, or after they leave your store, what do you want them to take away?

Shawn: When someone comes to our store, we definitely give them a crazy amount of attention, more so than I recognize in other stores. It’s really personalized, like, teaching people a couple of chords, teaching them what the guitars are. So, when they leave with a guitar or just interacting with us, I hope that they leave with a good impression of the business, and they’re inspired.

Lorraine Duffy Merkl, a frequent literary and entertainment contributor to Straus News, is the author of the novel, “The Last Single Woman in New York City.”