The Wall.(musicians gather to honor Manny's Music store which will be closing down)

Manny's Music, one of the largest of the West Forty-eighth Street musical-instrument stores, is closing soon, and among the matters yet to be resolved between Manny's owner, Sam Ash Music, and Manny's founding family, the descendants of Manny Goldrich, is the fate of the hundreds of publicity photographs of musicians that line the store's walls. Many of them are inscribed with personal notes to Manny, who died in 1968, and to his son Henry, who is seventy-six and retired.

It was Holly Goldrich, Henry's daughter, who, together with a filmmaker named Sandi Bachom, had the idea for Manny's Virtual Wall, a social-networking site. Holly and Sandi are working with Kodak to scan the photos and to get camcorders into the hands of longtime Manny's customers, who include many of the world's best-known rock musicians. Their idea was that those musicians who couldn't make it into the store for interviews could film themselves talking about their memories. The images and the interviews will be posted on Manny's Virtual Wall.

One afternoon last week, three musicians gathered in the electric-guitar showroom at the back of the store to help build the Virtual Wall. John Sebastian, a founder of the Lovin' Spoonful, arrived first, and was soon joined by Tom Chapin and Leslie West, the guitar player from the Vagrants and, later, Mountain. Sebastian, who was wearing a fedora, and Chapin, who had on a blue work shirt, played some country blues, while West, in a black shirt with a samurai sword embroidered on the back, tried out guitar effects. All three have been coming to Manny's since they were teen-agers, fifty years ago.

Bachom asked Sebastian, who wrote "Do You Believe in Magic" on a Gibson J-45 that he bought from Henry, what made Manny's special. "Other stores, they wouldn't be as rude. It was more fun to call up Henry and then insult him, and then he'd insult you, than 'Hello, Guitar Center,' " Sebastian said, in a simpering voice.

Soon Henry turned up, and he sat at the center of the group. West moved in closer to him.

"Get out of my face," Goldrich said. "Seriously. You're bothering me." West retreated.

Manny's is a vestige of a vital cultural industry that once flourished just north of Times Square--session musicians and band members used instruments purchased at Manny's to perform songs written in the Brill Building, on ...