A Dylan Role for His Guitars Is Just the Latest Chapter in Lark Street Music Owner Buzzy Levine’s Vintage Saga

It’s a fair bet that any guitar-loving individual could visit Lark Street Music in Teaneck, New Jersey, for the first time and be right at home immediately. In large part, that’s because the place feels so much like someone’s home, or maybe more specifically, an extension of someone’s parlor—a someone who just happens to own a staggering array of valuable stringed instruments. Roomy but not overwhelming, graced with comfortable seating and just the right ratio of clutter to space, the shop exudes a laid-back, lived-in vibe. No one’s going to sell you hard here, but if you’re in a buying mood, you can do some real damage. The selection of new, used, and rare guitars, particularly acoustic ones, is elite. Martins are a specialty, and Lark Street is authorized both to sell and repair them.

For the past 26 years, owner Buzzy Levine has presided over this ground-floor storefront operation on Teaneck’s main drag, Cedar Lane. For 18 prior years, he was buying, selling and fixing guitars on Lark Street in Albany, New York (thus the carryover name). More than five decades ago, a youthful interest in the 1960s jug band scene led Levine into the career of an instrument repairman, and by the early ’80s he’d become a retailer too, drawing a devoted clientele that includes such names as the Rolling Stones, ZZ Top, Mike Campbell, Jackson Browne, Sheryl Crow, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. When he moved to Teaneck in 1999, West 48th Street in nearby Manhattan was still heavily populated with music stores. Today they’re all gone, and Lark Street remains. But Levine scoffs at being thought of as a noble survivor. He keeps the place going, he says with a chuckle as dry as a Tanqueray martini, because “I don’t know what else to do, really.”

At the moment, visitors to Lark Street are greeted by an eye-catching display toward the back of the shop. A near-life-size cardboard cutout of Bob Dylan circa 1965 stands alongside a handsome vintage guitar trio: a 1907 Washburn, a 1923 Martin 0-45, and a 1964 Gibson L-7C. These are three of about 25 instruments that Levine rented out to the production crew of the recent Dylan docudrama A Complete Unknown. In the movie, you can see Timothée Chalamet as Dylan playing the Washburn; the Martin belongs to Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez, while the fictional bluesman Jesse Moffette, played by Muddy Waters’ real-life son Big Bill Morganfield, handles the Gibson. This project was clearly close to the heart of Levine, who was a rabid Dylan fan as a kid—he saw the man play at the very same 1963, ’64, and ’65 Newport Folk Festivals that A Complete Unknown reimagines. (He also saw the Grateful Dead on their first East Coast tour and was in the crowd at Woodstock.)

Loaning instruments to be used in Hollywood films is only a small part of Levine’s business, but it makes for some good stories, as the following interview shows.

How long have you been providing guitars for movies?

There have been a few over time, but nothing heavy duty. The first one was when we were still in Albany: Ironweed [1987], with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. They filmed it in Albany, because William Kennedy [writer of the novel on which the movie is based] was from Albany and set so many of his books there. They rented about 20 guitars for one scene. And then we almost got Wayne’s World [1992]. They wanted a white ’64 Fender Strat and we had one, so we sent them a picture, but in the end they just went with a reissue. 

We’ve actually got a few guitars out now for this movie called Denim and Diamonds. It’s about a Neil Diamond impersonator in Milwaukee, played by Hugh Jackman, who meets a Patsy Cline impersonator, played by Kate Hudson. They needed some ’90s stuff, so we rented them three or four guitars. But then they said, “We need to rent them for another six months in case we have to do something different.” So we have three guitars that we can’t sell till June, but I guess it’s going to be a major movie.

Lark Street Music, Photo: Mac RandallIt sounds hilarious. So how did you get connected with A Complete Unknown?

Somehow the production people got in touch with Steven Kovacik, who’s a luthier outside of Schenectady. I send him repair work sometimes. They asked him about an 0-45, and Steve said, “Oh, call Buzzy, he has one.” Plus they said they had to spend money in New Jersey [where A Complete Unknown was filmed] for tax reasons. Michael, the prop guy, said, “I even have to buy my gas in New Jersey or else I can’t deduct it.” 

The ’23 0-45 for the Joan Baez character was the top item on their list, then.

Yes, that was the key to the whole thing. It was a guitar that a local guy brought in around the time we moved here [to Teaneck]. I bought it and I’ve kept it ever since; it’s never been up for sale. It went back to Martin in about 1931, when they put the belly bridge on. In ’23 they were using those straight-across bridges. Joan’s guitar actually went through the same change, but the 0-45 she used at Newport still had the straight-across bridge, not the belly bridge. So far, no one’s called me on that, maybe because her arm is mostly covering the bridge when you see it in the movie.

Did the production people know what they needed besides the 0-45?

Yeah. They needed a D-28 for Johnny Cash and a D-18, which Brownie McGhee was playing in the movie. They just ended up buying both of those. Then there was the Epiphone non-cutaway Triumph that you sometimes see Timmy [Chalamet] posed with.

And then there were about 15 others that they needed for props. They sent me a picture of the front window at Izzy Young’s Folklore Center [in Greenwich Village, a hub of the early ’60s New York folk music revival], and we had the exact stuff that was in that picture. They also gave me a list of instruments for Pete Seeger’s cabin, one of which was a [Deering] Goodtime banjo, which didn’t exist until 1980 or ’90. I said, “No, that’s not right, guys. You don’t want that.”

How did the 1907 Washburn fit into the picture?

I’d forgotten that was one I rented to them until I watched the movie! That’s in the party scene at Alan Lomax’s apartment; Timmy’s on the couch and someone slips him a guitar. I don’t know how historic that one would be. I guess they wanted something that had a certain look. 

Didn’t you do some repairs for the film as well?

We repaired Timmy’s [Gibson] J-50s. The J-50s that Gibson made for the movie were really good—they even had the offset screws—but they were falling apart. One of them had two cracks. On one of them, the bridge was almost falling off. So we repaired those for them. And it’s fun ’cause you can see . . . like the first guitar he’s using in the hospital scene [with the dying Woody Guthrie], you can see there’s a little crack. And then he’s using the other one, with no crack. It was fascinating. 

Then there were two [Gibson] Nick Lucases that they wanted us to age for them. We were going to crackle the finish, so we’d spray it with a freezing spray. But it didn’t work. Apparently Gibson finishes are now made to withstand [temperatures that are] nine times freezing. [Laughs] So we had to keep going with it. Not that hard, but a lot of time. And then they kept wanting us to change Pete’s, or Ed’s [Edward Norton, who plays Seeger] banjo head. First it was too clean, then it was too dirty.

They want it to be accurate, but they also want it to look the way they want. 

They were very accurate, in everything. [Luthier] David LaPlante was a friend of Peter Yarrow’s, and he had built an exact replica of the 12-fret [Martin] D-28S that Peter used back then, so they rented that from him, too. Did we ever see it in the movie? I don’t know. I gotta watch it a third time and try to look for it. If it’s in there, it’s pretty well hidden. But that’s movies. 

The most fun part of the whole thing was going to the shoot in Hoboken [which stood in for Greenwich Village across the Hudson]. I brought my 17-year-old grandson. When I told him we were involved in the movie a little bit, the first thing he said was, “Can I be in the movie?” I said, “I don’t know, are you in the drama club at school?” “No.” “Have you ever acted before?” “No.” [Laughs] Anyway, I took him to the Hoboken shoot, and the thing that blew his mind was the cars. Because they were all from like ’59, ’60—so beautiful—and he’d never seen anything like that in real life. He was like, “Wow, cars aren’t like this anymore.” I said, “Yep, that’s true.”

You know, all the people from the movie were really cool to work with, but obviously this is just an interesting little sideline. We don’t depend on rentals. This year has been unusual.

I gather that you were supposed to be credited in the film but were not.

That’s true. And they brought it up. I didn’t say, “Hey, am I gonna get a credit?” They said, “In the credits, do you want your name or the store name?” I said, “The store name.” And then it wasn’t there, so I was sort of disappointed. But it was such a good movie anyway. A credit at the end would have been nice, but it goes by so fast. A friend of mine did say, “Hey, why don’t you tell them to add it to the streaming version? They should be able to do that.” So I mentioned it to the prop master, who was here like three times a week with stuff that we fixed for them or picking up other things. He said, “Okay,” but I don’t think it really did anything. Maybe we’ll make the director’s cut.

This article originally appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.