Actually, we still have the guitars,” an employee at Ed Roman Guitars told me. “It’s just that we don’t have five or six of each one, like they did at the old place. That’s about the only difference.”
And that now, once again, all those guitars, both custom- and common-made—Bakers, Fenders, Scorpions, Pearlcasters, Eastemans, Gibsons, Abstracts, Paul Reed Smiths—hang over and around you at any given point in the store, which is much smaller than it used to be.
“Definitely,” the employee, a player himself, said: “It makes for a much better ambiance, especially for a musician.”
That, the ambiance, is what had made ERG beloved in Las Vegas when Roman brought his guitars to town in early 2002. While ERG is famous worldwide on account of its roster of superstar clientele, for whom the shop has become an international destination—Eric Clapton, Joe Perry, Meat Loaf, Paul McCartney, Pete Townshend, ZZ Top, Toby Keith, Eddie Van Halen, just to name a few—it was the ambiance that drew the locals.
The walls were lined with so many colorful, exotic and well-placed guitars that it was as if you were inside an art gallery as much as a guitar boutique. The air was perpetually still, so that you could hear with clarity both the erudition of the staff as they picked a guitar off the wall and showed it to you, and its sound as you sampled a few of its strings.
But when Roman expanded his shop in 2004, from an intimate showroom just south of Flamingo and Industrial Roads to the world’s largest guitar store, a 44,000-square-foot warehouse next door, he lost that feel. Along with some of his employees.
In December of last year Roman sold his store to a local car dealership, and, this past June, he liquidated his assets. Now, as of six weeks ago, he has opened a whole new store—under the same name, to which he retained the rights—a little farther south down Industrial Road, at the cross street Tompkins Avenue.
It’s much smaller now, and many of Roman’s original showroom employees are back. And thus, so too is the ambiance: the artful walls, the erudition. The guitars, one employee told me, are still the same, as diverse and beautiful and irreproachable as ever. There just aren’t as many.
In any event, of the 30-plus stores in the Las Vegas Valley that sell guitars, there is still none like Ed Roman’s, and, as one employee told me, they still anticipate seeing the world-famous guitar players walk through at any given point in time.