Business

Nederland’s Brightwood Music Is Coming Out of a Dark Time

"This was our retirement -- what we've been building up so we could have a retirement. So it's devastating for us."
The Caribou Village Shopping Center was destroyed by fire on October 9.

Photo courtesy of Doug Armitage and Barbara Hardt

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Doug Armitage has devoted much of his life to the crafting and care of musical instruments. It makes perfect sense, then, that for him, the destruction of his beloved business, Brightwood Music, and seventeen others in a fire that consumed Nederland’s Caribou Village Shopping Center is symbolized by a guitar.

“I arrived in Nederland on September 20 of 1975, when I was twenty years old,” recalls Armitage, who’s originally from New Jersey. “I had a backpack and a twelve-string Martin guitar, a D12-28, which I sold to a store in Boulder so I could pay rent on a little cottage in Nederland.”

That specific guitar is history. But years later, Armitage obtained another Martin D12-28 that he could share with Brightwood customers. “It was hanging on the wall for people to play,” he says.

Today, that wall is no more, and all of Brightwood’s meticulously maintained stock is ashes as well — the communal Martin D12-28 included. “It’s a sort of goes-around-comes-around-and-goes-away-again type of feeling,” he says.

Barbara Hardt, Armitage’s wife, is more direct when describing her emotions in the aftermath of the blaze, as befits her background as a journalist. In addition to co-owning Brightwood, she’s the managing editor of The Mountain-Ear, a 48-year-old Nederland newspaper that captures all that’s best about the community it serves.

“We’ve been building Brightwood for the past sixteen years together,” Hardt says. “This was our retirement — what we’ve been building up so we could have a retirement. So it’s devastating for us. But it’s also devastating watching all our friends and neighbors, people we’ve worked with every day, go through this.”

Doug Armitage and Barbara Hardt in Nederland.

Photo courtesy of Doug Armitage and Barbara Hardt

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Plenty of questions about the Caribou Village fire remain, with the biggest being its cause, which authorities have not yet determined (although investigators have taken foul play off the table). But the scope of the catastrophe is clear. Along with Brightwood, multiple eateries, wine and liquor purveyors, art galleries and assorted other enterprises were incinerated.

The conflagration was first reported around 3:40 a.m. on October 9 by a Boulder County Sheriff’s Office deputy on patrol. The location was certainly familiar: A sheriff’s office substation was located at the center.

The news reached Hardt quickly. She was driving to Nederland at 4 a.m. to pick up a couple of Mountain-Ear staffers who were scheduled to accompany her to that week’s National Newspaper Association conference in Minneapolis when “I got the call that the shopping center was on fire,” she recalls. “Sure enough, it was. I pulled in and called Doug and told him what was going on — and we canceled Minneapolis.”

Instead, the Mountain-Ear crew got to work providing the best, most comprehensive coverage of the disaster to date. The fire was extinguished in “a couple of hours,” Hardt estimates, “but it smoked for a day and a half.” By then, it was clear there was little to salvage. “We’ve been watching crews take the wreckage apart with a giant excavator,” she says, “but other than a couple of signs that were outside businesses, there’s nothing there.”

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For longtime Nederland residents, the fate of Caribou Village Shopping Center echoes what happened forty years earlier to a Nederland landmark with a similar name: Caribou Ranch, a famed recording studio that ceased operations after a 1985 fire. And coincidentally, Caribou Ranch is part of Armitage’s personal history, too. He worked at the facility for three years during the 1970s, when many of the most famous musical acts of the era recorded there — bands such as Chicago and The Beach Boys and solo artists ranging from Joe Walsh and Dan Fogelberg to Elton John, who named his 1974 album Caribou.

Not that Armitage spent much time rubbing shoulders with the rich and fabulous. “I met a bunch of people and I wish I could give you all the names, but I don’t remember a lot of that,” he admits. “I was working as a security guard in the guard shed from midnight to eight in the morning. I’d like to say it was the most fun I had with my clothes on, but I’ve had more fun.” Indeed, he was so broke that he had to walk to work from the cottage he obtained by selling his Martin D12-28 for the first year, “until I could afford the down payment on a Volkswagen Beetle with horrible tires.”

Inside Brightwood Music before the fire.

Photo courtesy of Doug Armitage and Barbara Hardt

Armitage subsequently hit the road, settling in Boulder for a time while employed at OME Banjos before traveling to Port Angelis, Washington, where he worked in a local music store before heading back to New Jersey and embarking on a career as a professional luthier.

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“I’ve got a lot of knowledge from having been in woodworking for many, many, many, many years,” he allows. “I also have a lot of experience repairing a lot of different instruments. For a long time, I didn’t play any music myself. I gave it up while I was in the woodworking business. Then I got back to repairing instruments, and I’d been doing that for a good fifteen years before I moved back to Nederland.”

Upon his return to Colorado, Armitage launched Brightwood Music (the name is a lighter version of Darkwood Music, a store he worked at while living in Florida) out of his home and began giving lessons to folks who wanted to try their hand at a stringed instrument. One such person was Hardt, who owned The Mountain-Ear at the time.

“We had covered Brightwood Music — not me, but other people on staff — when it opened, and I went in to take a couple of mandolin lessons,” Hardt says. “Then I bought a mandolin and continued the lessons, and Doug and I kept running into each other. We’d play pool, and eventually, we started hanging out.”

Little by little, mastering the mandolin became less important to Hardt, to Armitage’s delight. “After a couple of lessons, she decided she had more interest in me,” he maintains. “I responded by absolutely falling in love with her.”

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Some of the Brightwood Music stock lost in the fire.

Photo courtesy of Doug Armitage and Barbara Hardt

The couple married in 2010 and set up housekeeping in what Armitage describes as “the Town of Cardinal, this tiny little ghost town that my sister owns up Caribou Road.” Five years later, they moved to another home in Gilpin County, and set up their business in Nederland.

Their second space there, in the Caribou Village Shopping Center, allowed Brightwood Music to expand substantially. The store catered to Nederland’s large and exuberant acoustic-music scene by way of instruments and associated products suited for beginners and experts alike. “One of the great things about being the only guy in a town with a bunch of musicians who happens to have a music store is that most of the time, people would at least buy strings from us,” he says. “It was nice being part of that crew.”

The camaraderie naturally led to Armitage’s membership in Windy Pines, a group formed in 2023 that blends bluegrass, jazz and blues. “It’s a good band,” stresses Armitage, who plucks the mandolin alongside multi-instrumentalist C.P. Meyer, guitarist Adam Thompson and bassist Andy Blaylock, “and since everybody has good, honest day jobs, we don’t have to worry about making money.” Windy Pines’ debut album, Under the Mountain, is available on the cheekily monikered Mystery Moose Records; its record-release party at Rollinsville’s Howlin Wind Brewing & Blending took place on September 13, less than a month before the fire.

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The inferno didn’t just wipe out Armitage’s axes. A number of other folks had instruments on consignment, including his old OME Banjos pal Chuck Ogsbury. “Unfortunately, Chuck had a bunch of banjos in the store when it burned down,” he reveals. “I fully intend to pay him back for those instruments, along with anyone else who had instruments on consignment with us.”

Working out those particulars will take a while, since Armitage and Hardt are currently in the midst of navigating the thorny world of insurance. Brightwood Music was fully covered, and thus far, Hardt says that the process is going well. She’s hopeful that everyone will eventually be made whole, but the future remains hazy.

The remains of the Caribou Village Shopping Center after the flames were extinguished.

Photo courtesy of Doug Armitage and Barbara Hardt

“Right now, we can’t determine what our next steps are — if we want to open up again pretty quickly [in another location] or what exactly we want to do,” she concedes. “Whatever the capacity is, we have options. But we can’t make any decisions until we know more. We’re in the first step of a thousand.”

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In the meantime, Armitage and Hardt have been floored by the outpouring of compassion and concern that’s been coming their way. “Everywhere we go, whether it’s a meeting about this with other tenants of the shopping center or going out to dinner or to a bluegrass pick, everybody has been so incredibly supportive,” Hardt says. “We’ve heard from people we’ve never met before, people all over the country.”

“To me, it’s awesome, and it’s flabbergasting that we’ve affected so many people,” Armitage adds. “It’s absolutely amazing.”

Such kindness helps offset Armitage’s melancholy over the loss of items that can’t be replaced, including “a violin that belonged to my great-grand uncle. He was with the Berlin Philharmonic, and he left Germany when Hitler came to power — and when he died, he left that instrument to me,” he notes.

Another story of loss has a happier ending. “A very, very good customer of mine who’s been a customer for many years — Dave Barry, just like the writer — has bought many mandolins from me over the years. Years ago, when I got the Eastman line of mandolins and guitars, I got two of these wonderful mandolins. One was for me, and after I played it for Dave, he got the other one. I played that mandolin professionally for the last ten years, but it went up in the fire. After that, we went to the pick at the Howlin Wind, and he brought his instrument to me with the case and the pickup I recommended and gave it to me. I couldn’t believe it. I just showed up to say hi to my friends. It just shows how incredibly kind people have been since this happened.”

Click to access the GoFundMe page for Brightwood Music, as well as one for the Caribou Village Shopping Center.

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