Gongs in the Wall Street Journal

This article was written by Barry Newman and originally published by The Wall Street Journal Online.

"LINCOLN, Neb.—Andrew Borakove didn't know it seven years ago when he started an Internet gong store, but gongs are economic indicators.

When the economy was going gangbusters, salesmen were piling into gongs. Sales people seem to like making customers bang gongs to ease the pain of buying something they might not be able to afford.

"But as soon as the recession hit, bam! It stopped," says Mr. Borakove. Gong sales shifted over to the meditation market. "Because when people go broke," he says, "they get spiritual."

No joke—not to Mr. Borakove. He's a fed-up Hollywood comedy writer, raised in Manhattan, who went west in 1986 to seek his fortune in sitcoms. He broke in with "The Munsters Today," advanced to "South Park" and "Sabrina the Teenage Witch." And then he went bust trying to develop a show about a talking dog.

He was walking on the beach, in 2005, when the idea hit him: He would start an Internet business. It would be based someplace cheap and noncoastal. It would be called "Gongs Unlimited."

Lincoln was the someplace. In his warehouse at the edge of town one Tuesday, Mr. Borakove, 50 years old, sat at a computer, handling an order from a Florida alligator farm and a complaint from a Hmong shaman in California. "More people need gongs than you'd think," he said.

Barry Newman/The Wall Street JournalAndrew Borakove, former comedy writer, now sells gongs in Nebraska.

He recently dispatched a set of tuned gongs to the Warsaw Philharmonic, sold a seven-foot-wide gong to a Singaporean casino and rented a gong for a knockoff of the old "Gong Show" put on by gastroenterologists in Memphis. They wrote in gratitude, "If you are ever in the Memphis area and feel the need for a colonoscopy, please give us a call."

When Internet gong shoppers type "gongs for sale" into a search box, Gongs Unlimited comes up high. Others sell gongs; few sell nothing but gongs. Mr. Borakove has sold 15,000 gongs so far—for $350,000 a year and rising. His prices—from $29.99 to a few thousand dollars—may not be the cheapest, but his help desk is free.

"People ask a lot of questions," he said. "How many times in your life are you going to buy a gong?"

Not many, but for Mr. Borakove the gong game has proved to be a better defense against unemployment than gag writing.

Before the crash of '08, some of his biggest customers were car dealers. "Big Bob" Ladendorf of Victory Motors in Royal Oak, Mich., bought two. "Everybody that buys a car, they have to bang the gong," he says.

Subprime borrowers banged, too. "I supplied Countrywide Financial," said Mr. Borakove. His wife, Mary, who was busy staining mallet handles, said, "Wouldn't that come up in a congressional review? What were all these gongs for?" Mr. Borakove riposted with a hapless-banker line: "They had to bang it, Senator!"

After the crash, Mr. Borakove said, "suddenly I was selling to a whole lot of yoga teachers." Among them is Mehtab Benton, 61, a Texan with a yoga operation in Austin. "Hard times are good times in the yoga business, and that's good for gongs," he says.

Mr. Benton, author of the book, "Gong Yoga," says he once tried learning the clarinet, but "it took too much time. A gong, you play right away." He has five studios and eight gongs, mostly 32-inchers, which are "standard for meditation," he says. "We have one 38-incher. Anything bigger—that's an outdoor gong."

Outdoor and indoor gongs are shelved like library books in Mr. Borakove's warehouse, alongside opera, wind and nipple gongs (played not worn). "It's about the vibrations," he said, sliding one marked "Sedna" from a box. He hung it up, then stroked it with a plastic ball. It emitted a wail that a whale might understand.

A Paiste gong

Sedna is a minor planet in orbit beyond Neptune. The gong is tuned to its cosmic frequency at the Paiste company, Mr. Borakove's highest-end supplier. Paiste's gong makers make gongs by pounding sheets of nickel-silver against tree stumps in northern Germany.

Paiste gongs make beautiful music, but among musicians, gong demand isn't elastic. One gong goes a long way. Planet gongs, on the other hand, are "crazy in demand right now," says Paiste's chief executive, Erik Paiste. "That has to do with the fact that the world is going to end on Dec. 21, 2012." Mr. Paiste has "no idea" if the end really is near, or if "sound energy" will hold it off, but he's happy because "it's keeping people interested in gongs."

(Click here to listen to an episode of Spirit Voyage Radio with Ramdesh all about gongs!)

For mass-market gongs, Mr. Borakove relies on Wuhan, China's machine-made-gong center. "I didn't want to import stuff that used to be made in America," he said, sliding Sedna back into its box. He handles only one American gong maker, Aaron Dauner, a drummer in Tennessee who goes by the name Zeke.

"I needed a gong," says Mr. Dauner. "I went into a music store. They wanted $3,000. I said, hell, I can make one of those." He hand hammers his gongs out of steel. They sell for $350. "In America, you don't want something Chinese-made unless you want the cheapest," he says. "If there's an exception to the rule, gongs would be it."

Though Mr. Borakove has no choice but to import gong bags from China (for itinerant sound healers), he has visions of gong production in Nebraska and has hired a local woodworker to build Nebraskan gong stands.

(Click here to continue reading the article on The Wall Street Journal Online.)

Write to Barry Newman at barry.newman@wsj.com"