AUBURN — By night, in the summer of 1967, The Innkeepers rocked stages up and down the East Coast and Canada.

By day, guitarist Roger Blais poked inside his host city’s barbershops asking for pointers.

How better to be a better barber?

“I would go into salons and pick their brains,” Blais, 62, said. “I just hung around and bugged them until I learned a little bit.”

It worked.

Blais said he quit the band and got serious about hair. That next year, he opened a shop with his grandfather, a master barber, next to the Blue Goose in Lewiston. In 1975, he bought a brick building on Main Street in Auburn, where Roger’s Haircutters has been ever since.The nine-chair shop is in the middle of downtown.

On Jan. 1, he’ll celebrate selling the business to two of his longtime stylists, Lisa Morin and Debbie Jacques, while keeping his scissors.

“I never knew how to exit this without not cutting hair. They approached me, ‘We’ll buy the business,’” Blais said. “All these girls have run this place for a long time — now it’s legal.”

In four-plus decades, Blais has seen every fad imaginable. Crew cuts. Women’s shags. Wedges. Dorothy Hamills. In the early 1970s, he said his was the first local salon to cater to men and women, a line that hadn’t been crossed. He raised a few more eyebrows hiring a lady barber. But, he said, it was all good for business.

Men, Blais said, have a harder style, women, a softer one. When it comes to banter, “You really have to have a man mode and a women mode.”

For instance, watch your language around the women, he said.

If Blais hadn’t hit it big with the Innkeepers, he’d originally thought about going to art college after high school. His father and grandfather had encouraged getting into hair.

“Cutting is an art form,” Blais said. “It took me a while to learn that.”

Jacques, a stylist at Roger’s Haircutters for 19 years, said neither she nor Morin plan big changes. Morin has been with the shop 24 years.

“We wanted to be business owners but we just couldn’t leave here,” Jacques said. And at 43, “We thought it was a good time in our lives to be entrepreneurs.”

The name and location will stay the same, but, she said, they may add a few feminine touches: “We’re ready to rock and roll.”

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