Abstract

From Guitar Shop to Big Box and Resistance to Reinvention

Established in the Uptown Neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1973, the Knut Koupée Music Store served as a hub during the flourishing “Heyday” of the Minneapolis music scene. Knut Koupée was unique among the many competing music shops in the region in that it not only sold guitars, basses, amps, drums, and keyboards, the store also featured a fully appointed (through profoundly DIY) lutherie shop that employed a series of talented and resourceful craftspersons. Though Knut Koupée’s owner was in many ways a visionary leader in his attempt to reinvent his small urban boutique shop as a regional chain of full-service music stores, his dream ultimately failed to materialize and Knut Koupee went bankrupt in the early 1990s, yielding the market to the Guitar Center, the national big box juggernaut of suburban malls. Grounded in oral history narratives collected from customers and employees of Knut Koupée, this paper explores the reasons for shop’s failure to successfully revise its business model. Historians have frequently noted the significant role that iconic record stores, local record labels, music shops, unique clubs, idiosyncratic radio stations, and inspired cohorts of artists have played in the creation of local music scenes and subcultures. This paper will focus instead on the role that local scenes have on the businesses that serve them and the way those scenes can imprint themselves on those businesses. Ultimately, this paper will suggest that the scene the Knut Koupée Music Store helped to create inhibited the store’s ability to change and adapt, suggesting that notions of authenticity and the realm of craft bound the store to a culture that exerted a force that constrained the guitar shop’s ability to adapt and survive in the era of the big box store.