The music industry’s most influential players are often its least visible: the record executives we never see, the lawyers whose names we don’t know, the recording engineers whose names we’ve heard but who we wouldn’t recognize on the street. These are the people that see how music is made and know how the artists act offstage. We may not know their names, but they are the industry’s gatekeepers, its preservationists and visionaries.
Take Dick Boak, director of the museum and archives at C.F. Martin and Company who entered the business 40 years ago while dumpster diving. During the counterculture movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, Boak was a poet, artist, and woodworker who specialized in building instruments. When he requested permission to pick through the guitar factory’s leftover wood scraps while traveling through Nazareth, Pennsylvania in 1976, he was impressed by their selection. “I hit the jackpot with rosewood and mahogany and ebony and spruce: woods I had never seen before, let alone at the dimensions and sizes I needed to experiment with guitar making,” Boak recalls. After he sorted through the piles, Boak was asked for samples of his work and shortly thereafter was offered a job. In the decades since, Boak has built hundreds of specialized guitars and helped develop Martin’s artist relations and archive departments, becoming the company’s in-house expert. “I’m a little overly close to Martin,” Boak says now. “I would’ve done the job for free.”
In his early years at Martin, Boak introduced the idea of signature guitars to the company. In 1994, the company produced their first, the Gene Autry model and, since then, the specialized, artist-driven guitar has become an industry staple.. These days, Boak busies himself with cultivating Martin’s historical documents, a task most recently documented by The Martin Archives, a book co-authored by Boak and Jim Washburn that was released this month by Hal Leonard. “It’s Dick’s life’s work, in a way,” Washburn says of the book. “He has a huge appreciation for what the company was and has the vision to project that into the future.”
Brackett fully considers Winehouse’s legacy ten years after her multi-Grammy winning album – exploring the origins of a global cultural phenomenon by examining her roots as a storyteller; studying her swift arrival as a demonic pop diva; the crucially important creative role played by her gifted producers in the studio; the historical musical influences on her style; the soul magic of her superb backup band, the Dap-Kings; her live performance style onstage; and her magnetic public image as a video star. 
The rock band KISS has galvanized the entertainment world with an unparalleled blitz of bravado, theatrically, and shameless merchandizing, garnering generations of loyalty rabid fans for more than 40 years. But if not of a few crucial months in late 1975 and early 1976, KISS may have ended up nothing more than a foot note. What changed it all? Their album Destroyer. 
The name ‘Maynard’ came from his poetry.
Onstage & Backstage 