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Charlie ‘Chuck’ Barbera: While the Band Played On

Charlie “Chuck” Barbera is no stranger to challenges, and he’s certainly had his share. Through all of it, however, he has had his music.

In what Chuck calls his “band life,” he goes by the name Chuck Love. For the day job at Goody’s Hardware & Paint on Main Street in East Haven, Chuck is known as Charlie, where he’s been employed since August of 2018.

“It’s kinda almost like working for the town,” notes Chuck of working at Goody’s, thanks to the store’s loyal customer base and connections within the close-knit East Haven community. The family-owned store, founded in 1933, is now under the control of its fourth generation.

The tasks Chuck completes for the hardware store run the gamut, from making deliveries to overseeing the electrical and the hand-tools departments. He also loads and unloads orders and deliveries, making his work diverse but vital to help the store run smoothly and professionally.

“We do a lot of commercial business,” notes Chuck, like providing needed hardware products to nearby Yale University “and numerous property managers in the area. It’s a lot of physical labor, lugging stuff,” he says of his role at the store.

Chuck says that Goody’s has a special niche in the hardware supply business when compared to the nearby big-box corporate competitors. “We’re more the hardcore hardware store for contractors, plumbers, and painters,” he says. “They all come to Goody’s.”

While Chuck now calls East Haven home, he was born in Hartford and has lived in many other places in New England.

“When I was a little kid, my parents divorced and I moved to Enfield in the first grade,” recalls Chuck. “Then my mother moved me up to Lowell, Massachusetts, to my grandparents, and then in my junior year of high school we moved to Nashua, New Hampshire, right over the line, and I lived there up until 2010.”

It was during his teenage years in New Hampshire that Chuck’s interest in music developed further and he started playing in bands. His instrument of choice was the drums.

“When I was in the second grade and moved into my grandparent’s house [in Massachusetts], my grandfather was a huge Big Band audiophile,” recalls Chuck. “He wasn’t a musician, but he loved music so much and he had a friend who was a drum teacher, so I started drum lessons in the second grade.”

As a result of that early musical influence, Chuck also became a fan of Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, and other leaders of the Big Band Era, while also developing a taste for and appreciation of most other kinds of music. “I like the change of pace and not playing the same kind of thing,” Chuck says of the variety of musical styles that makes music such a broad form of artistic expression.

It was also during those teenage years in New Hampshire—after moving there from Massachusetts—that Chuck started an original metal band, which lasted ten years, the group playing gigs not just in New Hampshire, but in areas around Boston and Worcester, Massachusetts.

“I’ve also played in different tribute bands [like] Cream, Iron Maiden, and Radiohead,” recalls Chuck, but the groups did not last very long “because the band members didn’t agree with each other, and they fizzled out.”

Then, in 1999, when Chuck was working as an electrical apprentice, he hurt his back, damaging a few disks in his spine.

“I couldn’t play [drums] for a while, so I picked up [electronic] keyboards, synthesizers, and drum machines, and got a feel for those. I don’t play them well,” he says in modesty, “but I can make noise on them and it’s fun. Drums are so easy for me, so I like the challenge of remembering what notes to play on a keyboard.”

By the time the music scene was changing for Chuck up in New Hampshire and he was no longer in a band, “that’s when the opportunity to be in East Haven arose,” he says.

His father was taking care of his paternal grandmother in New Haven, “and we hadn’t really been in touch much in 35 years,” says Chuck of his lean relationship with his father. “So, I had an opportunity to come down [to East Haven] and rekindle and get to know each other.”

It was also in East Haven that Chuck met a new group of musicians, the 509ers, and began playing with them.

“It was a nice little tight community of punk band [musicians] that I happened to fall into through a Craigslist ad after being here for six months,” explains Chuck. “I ended up joining them and I’ve been with them ever since.”

Before COVID-19, the band played numerous gigs each year at venues from New Haven to Hartford.

“It’s fun stuff and we love it,” Chuck says.

It was also during his time back in Connecticut that Chuck worked in North Haven in banking. But that career was not all that fulfilling or fitting for the mind and heart of an artist or musician.

“I got burned out, it was so corporate,” Chuck recalls, adding, “We called ourselves the limping gazelles. A ragtag crew running a half-billion-dollar investment company on Washington Street in a strip mall [that contained] a Chinese massage parlor and an Indian restaurant.”

Looking back to that time, Chuck says he considers the whole affair, “Unique.”

When Chuck left the dog-eat-dog work of investments and banking, he found Goody’s Hardware & Paint and reinvented himself once again.

“I walked into Goody’s with three dollars left in my account and they hired me. I’ve been there ever since,’ says Chuck, thankful for the new opportunity provided to him. “Goody’s is a family-run business and they’ve helped me out with my family,” Chuck says, adding with a laugh, “Plus, I get a lot of exercise.”

Today, Chuck has the love of his music—which has never left him, even in the leanest of times—and his beloved sons.

“My boys Calib and Cyler are 10 years apart,” says Chuck. “Calib was very involved with the East Haven marching band and pit crew and was an integral part of the band. He was also in lead roles for several of the high school plays. Cyler is starting middle school and sings and dabbles on the piano. Both boys are very creative and funny individuals. And I have a stepdaughter, Alizsa, from my late wife, Nikki. We were happily married for 20 years before Nikki passed away in 2017. Alizsa is expecting a baby girl any day now.”

And Chuck has a new love interest in his life, a woman who harks from his past. “My girlfriend Cathy is also from New Hampshire and lives with us and my dad. We were together for about a year or so, 30 years ago, and we got back together two plus years ago. She spoils all of us.”

Of the rekindle romance—like something out of a romance novel or a British romantic sitcom about lost loves found—Chuck says, “Cathy says now that since she always said, ‘I should’ve married Charlie,’ it’s insane that we found each other again.”