Dirty Ragz Music: Sales, Service, and Stories

It takes a little effort to find Newberg’s newest music shop, hidden in an unassuming west Newberg neighborhood. Without the help of a mapping app (and even with it), you might think you’re at the wrong address as you travel past house after house with no sign of any other retail stores.

Word to the wise: keep your eyes peeled on the sidewalks for a lawn sign with neon-colored text pointing you toward a short, curved driveway and under a deck. When you see a bright neon sign hanging in the window, you know you’ve made it to Dirty Ragz Music.

You might walk in to find Dirty Ragz’s owner, Terry Carlson, who opened the guitar shop in November 2023, working on a guitar with an ornate headstock. The room probably has a faint smell of oil, classic rock will probably play over the speakers, and his workbench will be filled with various strings and tools to help complete the job of the day.

The active project was an antique guitar from the late 1960s — made of Brazilian Rosewood (which is no longer exported from the country) covered with a prized “checking” pattern created by 1960s nitrocellulose lacquer (no longer used because of its environmental and physical harm) with a mahogany neck and spruce headstalk — brought in by a George Fox University student. He told his grandma that he wanted to learn how to play guitar and she gave him this.

“It’s a cool part of the job, being able to do things like this,” Carlson said as he wiped a rag between the frets on the guitar’s neck. “This is a really cool guitar, and it could have ended up somewhere else or destroyed. But instead, it was a gift from grandmother to grandson, and now I get to help preserve that gift for a long time to come.”

Driving the Music

“I’m very passionate about music; I always have been,” Carlson said. “I was around such incredible people; it was hard not to be.”

Carlson said his first experience with a guitar was asking for one when he was 4 years old. His parents gave him a Roy Rogers model toy guitar, which he took door-to-door with his sister in his Minneapolis suburb neighborhood singing songs and asking for money.

“My mom found out we were doing that and put the kibosh on that pretty quickly,” he said with a laugh.

Music largely fell by the wayside for Carlson until 1976 when one of Carlson’s friends sold him a 1968 Red Label Yamaha acoustic guitar to make a quick buck (a guitar he still owns to this day).

Years later in 1988, Carlson was looking for work and took a job as a driver with Van Halen. He was living in Half Moon Bay, Calif., and heard from a friend that the production company was looking for drivers for their musical acts.

“They gave me directions to a rest area and said there would be a big truck pulling in there, and that the driver’s name is ‘Snake,’ and he’s going to take you to your truck in L.A.,” Carlson said. “First of all, I didn’t want to be standing alone in a rest area waiting for a guy named Snake, but sure enough, in drives this big Kenworth (semi-truck), and all it says on the side is Road Show Services Inc. I hopped in, and everything went from there.”

His first tour was hauling gear for Van Halen, Scorpions, and Metallica (which had just released the album “…And Justice for All”). He later worked for names like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jeff Beck, Steely Dan, Rod Stewart, Jimmy Buffett — the list goes on.

If you open the conversational door, Carlson will tell you stories about each and every band he toured with and the stories associated with them. You’d learn how the other bands didn’t welcome Metallica when they first started making it big (“Nobody would sit with them when we stopped to eat,” Carlson said. “They were really eager to talk with people.”) or when Trey Anastasio from Phish rode his motorcycle with girlfriend (now wife) Sue in tow, or how Christina Applegate was such a sweet person when he met her backstage at the Pacific Amphitheater.

“I was very much a ‘wait, you can talk to me?’ moment,” he said. “But she was so friendly and down to earth.”

From Driver to Desk to Dirty Ragz

The last musician he worked for was Billy Joel when a 600-to-800-pound cable case tipped over onto his leg and caused irreparable damage. He struggled to find his way for the next seven years until he went through a technical education program in San Francisco and started building and networking computers for local small businesses.

Those jobs kickstarted the next phase of his career — a senior network systems engineer for some of the largest enterprises in the world like Adidas, Nike, and IBM, eventually transitioning to project manager before deciding to retire in 2022.

However, retirement didn’t last long. He dove into his guitar collection during retirement, and it dawned on him that he could make his retirement hobby his next job.

“I started growing a large collection of guitars,” Carlson said. “Every time another would show up, my wife would say, ‘my God, do you really need another guitar?’ The answer to me was yes, but to her was probably not. But then, the light went on — ding!”

Carlson started by creating his own logo, then started building the website and social media profiles. His existing workshop was already well equipped to operate as a storefront. Soon he was connecting with customers through locally-driven social media channels.

Dirty Ragz is a Newberg-based business but plans to serve a national audience via e-commerce soon. His shop is mostly used guitars, with new and used amps, and a broad collection of strings and accessories. He offers service and repairs as well on instruments and equipment.

And while he gets a lot of requests, he doesn’t have any band or orchestra instruments yet.

“It’s something I’d like to look into in the future, just because there is a need for it here,” he said. “But it’s nothing that we can do quite yet.”

As for the name “Dirty Ragz”? Carlson was riding motorcycles with a few friends around in the desert when his bike broke down. After finally getting a tow to the nearest town, he pulled the bike apart and used a greasy rag to plug the cylinder while he worked on it to keep sand and dirt from flying in. When he reassembled the engine, it wouldn’t start up.

His buddy helped him asked if he had taken the dirty rag out of the engine block.

“My nickname was ‘Rags’ after that,” Carlson said.

Visit Dirty Ragz music at 613 W Sheridan Street in Newberg Tuesday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m., or on Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Follow Dirty Ragz via social media for updates (Facebook, Instagram). You can visit the Dirty Ragz website for more information.