Local legend is on the move

If you're not friends with Rodney Marsh, be glad. If you are, you might want to make yourself scarce for the next week or so.

Marsh has a big moving job ahead of him, and every able-bodied soul with a hand truck is a potential victim.

Marsh is the owner, operator and guiding spirit of Marsh Woodwinds, the long-standing Hillsborough Street business that is both a music instrument sales-and-repair shop and a shrine to the god of clutter. But the business needs more space these days, so after nearly 17 years in its present location, Marsh is moving a mile away next week to a storefront in Mordecai.

This will be no ordinary exercise in haulage.

If Marsh doesn't have at least 100 dead, half-cannibalized saxophones hanging on the walls of his store, then grits ain't groceries. If the adjoining storage area doesn't have everything from a sailboat mast to a stuffed monkey perched in front of an antique organ, then eggs ain't poultry. If Marsh's idea of inventory control doesn't usually mean simply opening a door and heaving something inside, then Mona Lisa was a man.

"I never throw anything away," Marsh says.

This may still be January, but that utterance already qualifies as the understatement of the year.

The phrase "local legend" is often used carelessly, but it surely applies to Marsh. His shop is the sort of place where you might bump into jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis as he's killing time in the back. Marsh himself is a gifted jazz saxophonist and flutist who has played gigs in the Triangle for four decades. His lean, heartthrob good looks have remained intact over the years, as has his hair (damn him). If you ever see some Byron-esque guy making his wobbly way from bar to bar downtown on a bicycle, it's probably Marsh. He may be 60 years old, but the man still knows how to have a good time.

But it's the store upon which much of the legend rests.

In addition to the magnificence of its clutter, Marsh Woodwinds has had a classical entrepreneurial arc. In the 1970s, Marsh worked out of his home, buying used music instruments from pawnshops and selling them again after he'd repaired and refurbished them. In time, people started taking their instruments to him for repair. In the early 1980s, Marsh opened a store on New Bern Avenue (where for a while he kept a rat snake around for company). In the early 1990s, he moved to Hillsborough Street, which is where he made the transition to both the realm of local institution and the major leagues of mess.

Marsh's problem -- or his charm, depending on your tolerance for chaos -- is that his interests are varied and promiscuous. That's why he has custody of a pile of old movie posters, a pair of timpani, boxes of old college textbooks, a scattering of accordions, a flock of rolled-up rugs, a coffee roaster, a tandem sled, etc. Collectively, all this stuff makes for an interesting place of business. But it also makes for a nightmarish moving challenge.

Marsh says that the new store, at 707 N. Person St., will be more orderly. I suppose that could happen. It's possible.

That stuffed monkey might also play Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor" on his organ.

You know, as long as we're talking about possibilities.