Jenn Ladd got her heart broken by a guitar when she was a teenager.
“I couldn’t afford the guitar I really, really liked, which sounds sort of pouty teenagery,” she says with a laugh, reminiscing about the handsome, handmade Spanish classical she had been eying in a local guitar shop in Edmonton, where Ladd grew up.
After playing that first note on a handmade guitar Ladd instantly detected the difference it makes.
“A good guitar – it’s like a good meal or clothes that fit you properly – it just makes a real difference,” she explains. “They feel beautiful, they look beautiful, but it’s the sound.
You honestly don’t even know how good a guitar can be until you play a hand-built guitar. It’s like a meal made by your grandma versus a restaurant meal.”
Ladd’s lifelong love of music has led her to be involved in many arts scenes including the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. She moved to Hornby Island in the 1980s where she got a gig booking all the local bands for shows. That’s how she met musician Paul Haggis.
“He was in the band that I was always booking,” says Ladd.
Their lives took them on different paths, but they reconnected six years ago and opened their first guitar shop in North Vancouver in 2011 on West 14th Street. The business was born out of a frustration of sorts after the couple searched high and low locally to find a guitar shop focused on “really great sounding acoustic guitars.”
Despite the economic downturn, the couple immediately saw an opportunity to have their own business doing something they loved and were passionate about. The name Bluedog Guitars pays homage to their late Louisiana Catahoula Leopard blue merle-hued hound dog, named Solo.
Haggis and Ladd found “incredibly talented” local luthiers like Shelley D. Park, David Webber, David Iannone and Michael Dunn, and arranged to carry their instruments in the shop. Park is world-renowned for her gypsy jazz guitars, and she makes ukuleles that Ladd says have proved to be popular sellers at the shop, dubbed “a candy shop for guitar lovers.”
Bluedog has built an international following and ships handmade guitars around the world to places like Norway, Brazil and Paris every week. Their clients are attracted to the one-of-a-kind craftsmanship that Bluedog carries.
“The guitars we sell are rare, built by small builders,” says Ladd.
Bluedog has been known to carry the occasional banjo and Hawaiian lap steel guitars. They also get a lot of vintage instruments coming in too.
“Right now we have a 1950 Gibson L7 in the shop, a great old archtop guitar,” says Ladd.
In mid-August Bluedog made a move across town into a larger space, at 60 Orwell St., #121, in the Lynnwood Marina.
“We had really outgrown the other space,” says Ladd. “With every guitar comes a guitar case which takes up a lot of room.”
Looking at a large empty warehouse space at the marina with 26-foot-high ceilings, Ladd and Haggis, blown away by the acoustics, envisioned their new guitar shop and designed it from scratch.
They built a stage on the ground level and a made second floor that wraps around it, so everyone upstairs can see the performers. Guitars on display line the perimeter of both floors. There’s also the white picket fenced indoor/outdoor Chihuahua area for Frida and Sassafras, the couple’s rescue dogs, to run around.
“It’s really a dream guitar shop now,” gushes Ladd.
Last Saturday Bluedog kicked off their grand opening by welcoming Texas troubadour Billy Crockett to play an intimate concert at the new shop. Ladd tells the story of how Crockett and his wife visited Vancouver a couple years ago and made a side trip to North Vancouver via the SeaBus and then on foot to seek out Bluedog Guitars.
“It was a really hot day and they were sweating and tired but they come into the shop and they just sat down on the couch and they were just so happy to be in our shop,” recalls Ladd. “We didn’t know who they were. But then we found out that he owned Blue Rock studios in Texas and that he’s a major Texas singer-songwriter.”
Crockett bought three locally made guitars from Bluedog and has remained friends with Ladd and Haggis. Ladd says Crockett’s equally matched talent and generosity makes him the quintessential kind of artist they want to showcase in the shop.
“We really like that singer-writer or accomplished guitar players that are not just great guitar players, but great people. The sort of person when you ask them they are delighted to do it,” says Ladd.
In turn Bluedog offers for their visiting artists “a dream audience,” diehard fans of the craft who listen intently.
“Kind of like how music used to be,” says Ladd. “We’ve never once had to tell someone to put their phone down, here.”
On Sept. 1, Bluedog will bring in Thomas Leeb, a Lowden “signature” guitarist originally from Austria who now calls California home. Leeb had a YouTube video go viral a few years ago when he put a GoPro inside his guitar and played Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” in the hills of California. You can see the strings vibrating from inside the guitar and the hills behind in the memorizing video.
Ladd considers him to be one of the most accomplished modern finger style guitarists in the world.
“He’s sort of the forefront of this new percussive finger style guitar,” she says.
Leeb incorporates some African influence into his music, using his guitar as a drum to tap out the driving African beat in between the strumming.
“It’s a feat. It’s amazing stuff to see. They will see guitar like they have never quite imagined it before, that’s for sure,” says Ladd, of what the audience can expect from Leeb next Thursday.
Later in the month, Taylor Guitars, based in California, will bring their roadshow to Bluedog on Sept. 29 at 7 p.m.
“They play a whole bunch of different guitars and actually show you the difference between here’s what a guitar with a rosewood back and sides sounds like versus a mahogany. So it allows you to hear those differences,” says Ladd.
Ladd likens the event to a crash course in acoustic guitars or a fashion show “but with really expert commentators.”
Bluedog is also celebrating another accomplishment: they have been named a Top 100 Dealer by the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) - the global association of music products and music retailers - for the fourth year in a row. The organization recognized Bluedog at an awards event held in Nashville this past June.
“We are really honoured to receive this recognition as one of the top music stores in the world,” says Ladd.
More information on upcoming events can be found on Bluedog’s website at bluedogguitars.com.
