When I walk into Guitar Maniacs on Saint Helens Avenue, Rick King is helping a customer in search of hard-to-find strings. He doesn't have any at the moment, but he can get them. The customer, who knows King by name and has the aura of someone who's been frequenting King's quintessential Tacoma vintage guitar shop for a long time, agrees to return, something you get the feeling he would have done anyway.

King moves on to the small box in front of him, which he's attempting to mail to a customer. Mail order has been a cornerstone of his vintage guitar business since back in the early days, when he ran Guitar Maniacs out of his house on Fawcett and South 17th, and would often hop straight out of bed and right into work, sometimes without even taking the time to clothe himself. He's rock-and-roll like that. King fiddles with a website, via his cell phone, until he eventually gets frustrated. There's no address to be found on the website, apparently.

We agree newfangled technology ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Once the important stuff has been handled, King turns his attention to me.  I've been biding my time gazing at well-worn Telecasters on the wall and the occasional Flying V. King's hair is a mess. He's dressed in rock ‘n' roll jeans that show some hip bone when he bends right, a green T-shirt and a snug-fitting warm-up jacket with a George Harrison pin on the collar - basically looking like what every rock guy out there hopes he'll look like when he grows up, before somehow waking up one day in a polo shirt and a pair of khakis.

For 2010, Rick King is the Weekly Volcano's honorary Best Tacoman. It's well deserved.
Why? Not just because Guitar Maniacs is the only vintage guitar store of its kind in Tacoma, having originally started in '86 and opened on St. Helens Avenue in '90. Not just because Rick King has grown up in Tacoma and has always loved, repped and been fascinated by this town in that way one can only love or be fascinated by something kind of scary. Not just because he's played in some kick-ass bands, stocked what turned out to be the grunge movement with guitars and has lots of good stories.
Rick King IS the epitome of a Tacoman, so the choice was natural.

"I always say you can tell how metal a town is by its women," King tells me. "People from Tacoma look like they're from Tacoma."

And so does Rick King. Through a childhood in Brown's Point (which he readily admits "isn't really Tacoma"), to high school at Foss back when it was new in the '70s, to running the first incarnation of Guitar Maniacs from his home and underwear, King has managed to personify the fiercely independent, blue collar, rough-around-the-edges Tacoma that the Volcano's Best of Tacoma Issue is all about celebrating.

You can judge how metal a town is by its women. And you can see exactly what Tacoma's all about by looking at Rick King.

"I used to hear gunshots every night," King tells of when he was a young man, with a young vintage guitar shop, making a foothold in what used to be a really gritty city. "And I'm not being romantic. But downtown was our playground (back then). Because it was empty."

King has a passion for not only restoring classic guitars, but also Tacoma's fading structures (and not just the obvious ones).  Along with other a few other restoration projects he's pursued, King currently lives in the 407 House - an infamous punk hangout with former tenants like Portrait of Poverty.  King says he's always taken pride in Tacoma, and is as realistic as ever when I ply him with questions about Tacoma's long-awaited moment of economic and/or artistic glory perhaps finally being close enough to taste.

"There's always been that struggle in Tacoma," he tells me. "Where is the population of Tacoma? I don't know. Are they at home, in their bedrooms, with foil over the windows, tweaking? I don't know."

So why stay?

"I'm a Tacoma boy. This is where I was raised," he says simply. "I've created a little market, and put a lot of cool guitars out there. With these restorations (guitars and houses), it's like I'm always reconnecting with these little pieces of my past."
King's past, in a way, is our past, Tacoma. And both are worth honoring.
Rick King is the Weekly Volcano's 2010 Best Tacoman. 

Best Tacomans
2007: Benjii Bittle
2008: Kelly Mickelson
2009: Little Holland Drive In