How an iconic SLO County guitar store became a destination for musicians across California

Nearly 40 years ago, Joe and Marelene Daoust spent almost every penny they had to buy an old musician’s “cruddy inventory,” hoping to sell what they could at the Nipomo Swapmeet & Fleamarket.

Starting Aug. 2, 1983, the Daousts spent every weekend taking their secondhand musical instruments to the Swapmeet, offering for sale whatever they happened to have in their collection each week.

By 1988, it was time to move the expanding business into a more permanent home, a historic building that was originally home to the Bank of Arroyo Grande, he said. Now, 35 years later, that home has only grown.

“Our original name was Lightning Joe’s Music Mania,” Joe Daoust told The Tribune. “We changed that name because people kept coming in here going, ‘I’ve died and gone to heaven,’ or ‘Wow, this is guitar heaven,’ and stuff like that, so we just nabbed the name from our customers.”

In the years since Lightning Joe’s Guitar Heaven moved into its current location at 110 Branch St., what started as a modest mobile collection is now a fixture of the San Luis Obispo County and California guitar culture, Daoust said.

“The (music stores) that used to be in L.A. aren’t there anymore, and the things that used to be in San Francisco aren’t really there anymore, either,” he said. “There’s a couple of stores that are left, but they are downsized greatly, whereas we just keep growing and growing.”

Business grew over time in historic location

“Lightning Joe” has been playing the guitar since 1964, according to his biography on the company’s website.

According to the biography, he has been a part of “more bands than he can remember,” including the SLO Motion Blues Band, Tidal Wave Cafe, Stark Raven, Gun Shy, The Shades, Prime Suspect, the 8th Wonder, Fusion, Just Good Stuff, Concrete Window and The Purpose.

He said he got the name “Lightning Joe” in 1980 from a bandmate in the SLO Motion Blues Band, for soloing too fast over the verses to Henry Mancini’s “Theme From Peter Gunn” during a performance.

It has stuck ever since.

During a break between bookings in 1983, the Daousts took advantage of the respite from performing six days a week to try to sort out their future, Joe said.

Marelene said she recalls Joe wanting to open a place for used instruments, as at the time, only Premier Music in San Luis Obispo sold instruments locally.

At the same time, part of those future plans included the couple’s desire to have a family, Joe said. With the birth of their son, Joseph, in 1987, those plans started to solidify, he said. They opened their store in downtown Arroyo Grande the next year.

“Eventually, in the ’90s or so, I was done playing in bands, and (Lightning Joe’s) was taking off, which we hadn’t counted on,” he said. “We took a gamble, and we lucked out. It worked because we were tenacious about making it work.”

Lightning Joe’s Guitar Heaven, the product of their gamble, has taken on many forms and business models, in no small part due to the ever-shifting layout of the store, Daoust said.

The first thing to change over the years was the instrument selection, he said.

In the beginning, the store sold secondhand music instruments of every style and type, including brass, woodwinds, keyboards, drums and, of course, guitars, Daoust said.

Initially, Lightning Joe’s occupied only the part of the building located next to what is now the Village Bike Shop on Bridge Street, which can still be seen today under a red awning, and did not extend to the corner store that now serves as the building’s entrance.

They soon stopped selling drums to save floor space, which was a concern in the store’s original footprint, Daoust said.

Daoust said the horns were next to go, as they were too high-maintenance and not in the Daousts’ area of expertise.

Finally, they stopped selling keyboards and went all-in on guitars in 1992 at around the same time they stopped going to the Swapmeet, which Daoust said was “no longer fun” and not worth the effort anymore.

The following year, changes in neighboring businesses presented another opportunity for the growing music store.

The corner store, which had recently changed hands several times when longtime ice cream parlor Burnardo’z moved across the street, again became available in 1992, this time under less pleasant circumstances, Daoust said.

That year, the space’s then-occupant, Designs by Walt, was raided by a SWAT team and closed soon after, Daoust said. Lightning Joe’s expanded into the space and before long occupied the entirety of the former bank.

As it turns out, Lightning Joe’s is not the first music store to occupy the space, or even the second or third, Joe said.

Payne’s Music, Packard’s Music and Green’s Music all occupied the upper floor of the building in the years between the closure of the bank in the 1950s and the opening of Burnardo’z in 1976.

Some vestiges of the original bank — which later became a Bank of America location — are still visible in Lightning Joe’s.

Customers looking for sheet music and guitar charts can find the store’s catalog in the bank’s original vault, now missing its circular steel door.

The former bank’s safety deposit vault houses the amplifiers in a small room lined with quarter-inch-thick steel walls, which Joe said provides good sound isolation for customers who want to test the amps’ power.

Reputation among guitarists brings in famous clients

Walking through Lightning Joe’s treats guests to a sensory overload of things to see, hear and even touch, especially if you’re in the market for a new guitar.

The store is home to more than 1,700 guitars and stringed instruments, half of which are used, Daoust said.

It’s common to find shoppers camped out in different spots of the store, seeing if a particular model fits their liking.

“When you have a musician running a guitar shop, you have a little magic ingredient that might be missing if you took a businessperson or somebody like that,” he said. “I just know guitar players, I know guitars and I know what guitar players need, what they want.”

With so many options to choose from in the store’s inventory, Marelene Daoust said its important to make customers feel comfortable with asking the right questions.

“We all make an effort to welcome everyone, in because they’re reason we’re here,” she said. “We’d like everyone to feel at home.”

Over the years, other guitar stores have shrunk, closed or diversified into other instruments, leaving Lightning Joe’s as one of the few pure guitar stores of its size, Joe said.

As a result, Lightning Joe’s has become a sort of nexus for guitar players who want to be “completely consumed” by the guitar, and has attracted several famous clients over the years, Joe said.

“I’m helping this guy buy a guitar slide and, not thinking it was Jackson (Browne), I said, ‘You know, you look so much like Jackson Browne!” Marelene said. “He goes, ‘I am Jackson Browne.’”

Browne wasn’t the only famous musician to grace Lightning Joe’s with their presence over the years, Joe said. As Lightning Joe’s reputation has grown over the years, famous clients such as Paul Gilbert — who autographed a photo for Joe and Marelene as a sign of thanks — have been known to drop in, he said.

Other acts that have visited the store include the band America, John Anderson, Chris Hillman from The Birds, Kenny Lewis and Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo.

“We did some work for (Benatar and Giraldo) when they were playing the Santa Barbara County Fair,” Joe said. “Their bass didn’t work. They started just talking to people on the fairgrounds, and they said, ‘Go to Lightning Joe’s — he’ll fix it for you.’”

One bass repair later, the Daousts were the recipient of an autographed Pat Benatar poster, Joe said.

Store includes practice rooms and a museum

For clients who don’t happen to be in the store at the same time as a famous rocker, through, there’s still plenty of music history to go around.

Statues and pictures of characters and musicians from the iconic to the obscure — such as the business’ Elvis Presley figure that stands outside the store’s entrance or the life-size replica of “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” alien Salacious B. Crumb hiding among the ukelele collection — cover every non-instrument-bearing surface, which Joe said has led to some interesting stories.

Every day at opening and closing, Elvis makes his journey from inside the store — where he spends his nights under lock and key — to his post outdoors, usually carried in the arms of Daoust’s son and daughter-in-law, who are set to run the business for the foreseeable future.

Elvis did not always leave the building gracefully, or under the best of circumstances, including once when the Daousts got a 4 a.m. phone call from the Arroyo Grande Police Department saying the statue had been stolen and seemingly abandoned on the Swinging Bridge, he said.

“We found the police with their arms around Elvis, with a rifle in his hand,” Joe said. “They were taking pictures of each other — you can’t help it, people just gotta have a picture with Elvis.”

But it isn’t on shelves of Lightning Joe’s where customers can find the most interesting or iconic artifacts.

To do that, you’d have to take the Stairway to Heaven — which at Lightning Joe’s is an actual staircase emblazoned with lyrics to the iconic Led Zeppelin song and leading to the store’s second floor.

That level, which used to house several smaller businesses before Lightning Joe’s expanded through the old bank, is now home to a pair of practice rooms where interested students can take guitar lessons, along with a museum dedicated to the history and preservation of guitars, Joe said.

There, customers can find artifacts such as a 12-string guitar played by Elvis Presley in some of the movies he starred in, Joe said.

Along with the more famous memorabilia, several unique stringed instruments pack the museum’s shelves, from rare Gibson and Epiphone guitars to dozens of ukuleles from Portugal to a prototype metal-bodied National Reso-Phonic guitar produced in San Luis Obispo, bearing the serial number of 00002, Joe said.

The next generation of Lightning Joe’s

Joe said that while he’s entertained the idea of opening a second location in the North County, he’s happy with the store’s current size and shape.

“It’s nice being grounded,” he said. “There’s a lot to be said about having good roots and feeling like we bring into a community a sense of camaraderie.”

With Joseph Daoust, Joe and Marelene’s son, stepping into the role of the store’s manager in recent years, Joe said he does not have a set retirement date.

When that day comes, though, it won’t mean the end, he said.

“I’m retiring within X amount of time, but retirement doesn’t mean going away or anything,” Joe said. “We’ll curate the museum, and I’ll still help with repairs.

Joseph’s son, also named Joseph, is also in line after him, if he’s interested in carrying on the family business, Joe said.

“If we can live that long, his son might be the manager here,” Joe said. “Who knows?”