photo by: Contributed

Jeffrey "Chubby" Smith is pictured in the KPR Live Performance Studio

Jeffrey “Chubby” Smith loved to perform – in so many different bands that his partner, Julie Mulvihill, can’t remember them all.

He loved to create, building wild “Frankenstein” guitars with names like “Steakhouse Firebird.”

And, he really loved to hear other musicians play them.

In his studio, an outbuilding on their property that used to be a machine shed, Mulvihill remembers him awing their guests with “just this sea of guitars” ready to play, not one of them hidden away in a case.

“And it would take your breath away,” she says. “And he would play every single one of them, and he would encourage guests and others to just sit down and play, choose one.”

Last fall, Smith was diagnosed with an incurable lung disease, and he died in May of this year.

“It happened really quickly,” Mulvihill says.

And, suddenly, she had to start thinking about Chubby Smith’s legacy.

She had forgotten that he’d signed up to be an organ donor, which she says was an “amazing” decision. And she began to worry about his studio, where the instruments he poured so much love and time into weren’t safe from the elements: “There were things that were going to happen, and it would break my heart again if these instruments somehow eroded or whatever it might be.

“And I thought, ‘How do we make his music legacy help as many people as possible, kind of like being an organ donor?'”

Her answer was to reach out to Kansas Public Radio and Audio-Reader, where Smith worked, and find a way to get those instruments in the hands of local musicians who will play them and appreciate them.

And so, this weekend, the Lawrence Arts Center will be hosting the Chubby Smith Collection Guitar & Audio Sale. Nearly 100 of his handmade instruments will be on display all day Friday and Saturday, turning the Arts Center into something like his old studio, and starting at 5 p.m. Saturday, they’ll be available for purchase. The proceeds will benefit the Smith-Mulvihill family and Audio-Reader, which provides accessible audio versions of print media for those with disabilities.

“He spent so much time building this collection, building the custom-made guitars, taking care of them, making music with other people,” says Feloniz Lovato-Winston, director of KPR and Audio-Reader. “So, I think there’s an opportunity here to be inspired by the way he lived his life.”

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photo by: Contributed

This custom-made guitar by Jeffrey “Chubby” Smith will be on sale Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026, at the Lawrence Arts Center.

photo by: Contributed

This custom-made guitar by Jeffrey “Chubby” Smith will be on sale Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026, at the Lawrence Arts Center.

Smith was a longtime fixture in Lawrence’s music scene, Lovato-Winston says, and was a production engineer at KPR and Audio-Reader for about 25 years. He was kind of a music industry Renaissance man, knowing many different parts of the industry and how they worked.

“He’s somebody who understood audio equipment, instruments, and he was passionate about it and really curious, and spent a lot of time just kind of following this passion, collecting instruments, building instruments, helping to develop the careers of other local musicians,” Lovato-Winston says.

He was also someone with connections all over the Lawrence music scene. Lovato-Winston has a friend whose husband played drums in Smith’s last band. Her own husband, also a musician, knew about Smith, too. “There’s the Chubby that knew so many people just as a local musician,” Lovato-Winston says, “and all the connections he made working here for over two decades.”

Mulvihill says his ubiquity in the music scene was actually how their relationship began.

“That’s how we fell in love, is I was just out and about watching live music all the time in the mid-’90s, and you couldn’t help but meet and listen to Chubby Smith.”

She doesn’t consider herself a musician or a performer, though she can read music and play the piano. (“That is exactly opposite of what Chubby could do,” she says. “He did not read music; he never could.”)

But she loves going to all kinds of shows, so “when Chub would invite me to anything KPR-related, I’d be like, ‘Sure, let’s go!'”

She always jokes that when they started dating, he was in five or six different bands. There were some that were more of his own bands, like Big Toe or Chubby Smith and His Orchestra, she says, but she’s not sure of the total number of bands he was ever in. “Conservatively, I would say 10 or 15, but that’s probably very conservative,” because people changed bands all the time in the ’90s and early 2000s.

“He just played in a lot of bands, with friends and with people he didn’t know,” she says. “The list just goes on, and I know there’s probably some that he was in before I even knew him.”

Even if you didn’t see Smith play live, you might have heard his behind-the-scenes work on KPR.

During live performances, he would often be the one mixing the sound, and for Audio-Reader he would prepare the closed-circuit radios that were sent to listeners, Lovato-Winston says. And he would also go to live events like the Sunflower Music Festival in Topeka and record pieces there for broadcast on KPR later.

Mulvihill remembers how dedicated he was to that job, sometimes working late into the night to get musicians’ audio produced and published. “If he had a group that came in for KPR and they were going to be doing a show or something the next day, he’s like, ‘I really want their music to be on the website and attainable for people before their big show, ’cause that’s the whole point, right?'”

“He would help make the musicians sound as good as they possibly could,” Lovato-Winston says.

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photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

A sparkly black cello made by Jeffrey “Chubby” Smith will be on sale Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026, at the Lawrence Arts Center.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

A sparkly black cello made by Jeffrey “Chubby” Smith will be on sale Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026, at the Lawrence Arts Center.

She and Mulvihill both remember Smith as someone who could connect with just about anyone – local band members, classical musicians, Audio-Reader volunteers. But Mulvihill says he was actually a bit of an introvert, and his art gave him a break from social interactions. His studio was his second home, she said, and he would be out there working almost every night.

And, while he did enjoy playing and listening to instruments, he really loved tinkering with them.

“He just had a mechanical mind,” Mulvihill says. “He liked to take things apart, put them back together … He was just always thinking about music and art and gears.”

The custom instruments he made, she describes as “Frankensteins.” “They’re different parts put together,” she says.

When asked about his style, she laughs – “I don’t know!”

He would draw inspiration from all kinds of places. Mulvihill sent a Facebook memory to a friend – from back when Smith got really into Facebook and documenting his creative process – of him working on a guitar he called the “Steakhouse Firebird.” It was made with the help of a child-sized toy tractor, which he would use to make tracks on the paint.

“He might kind of bedazzle it or whatever it might be,” Mulvihill says. “He’d just kind of go into this thing where ‘it’s not quite perfect, so I jimmied it with some toothpicks,’ you know, whatever, whatever.”

He made one called the “No. 2 Pencil” because of its color; two guitars named after his mother that used old linoleum. And he customized other instruments, too, like a cello that will be featured in the sale that looks black from a distance but sparkles and glitters under the right lighting.

“Who knows where the inspiration came from?” Mulvihill says. “His mind just worked that way. Something caught his attention and he would take a photo of it, he would jot down some notes, there were always notes everywhere, just a turn of phrase, things that were funny.”

And, once he’d created these instruments, he cherished them. “He would never have parted with them, ever, when he was alive,” Mulvihill says. “But there is nothing that he would have loved better than to see these go into the hands of people who love them and will play them.”

She can’t wait for those people to come to the Arts Center this weekend and find a guitar that they’ll cherish, too.

“That’s the thing I’m looking forward to the most,” Mulvihill says, “is just hearing kind of what I hope is this cacophony of people wandering through and picking up the guitars and just playing a few notes, putting it down, finding another one. That just takes my breath away.”

The Chubby Smith she loved would have been ecstatic to have essentially his own exhibit, where “everybody’s going to walk in and be like, ‘Holy cow!'” she says.

And, behind the shellac, she thinks they’ll catch a glimpse of a man who lived for music and for his craft.

“I think what they’ll see at the Arts Center is really a reflection of who he was,” she says, tearing up. “Someone who was talented and creative and thoughtful …

“He needed to play music. And he loved to talk about it and think about it and play it and make it. And I think anybody who knew him knew that, and I think anybody who doesn’t know him, if they walk into that show, they’ll know it immediately.

“I miss him,” she says. “He was one of a kind.”

The instruments in the Chubby Smith Collection Guitar & Audio Sale go on display on Friday at the Lawrence Arts Center, 940 New Hampshire St., and the sale is from 5 to 8 p.m. Saturday. Instruments will be priced between $100 and $500, and there will be live music and a cash bar. You can find more information on the Arts Center’s website, lawrenceartscenter.org.

photo by: Contributed

This custom-made guitar by Jeffrey “Chubby” Smith will be on sale Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026, at the Lawrence Arts Center.