Norman Harris’s career as a guitar dealer went stratospheric one day in 1973, when he received a phone call from a friend. “He said he was with someo
Norman Harris’s career as a guitar dealer went stratospheric one day in 1973, when he received a phone call from a friend. “He said he was with someone who needed a Les Paul,” recalls the man who runs what is probably the world’s most renowned guitar shop. “But he wouldn’t tell me who it was. I went over to meet them and it was just my friend there. I said: ‘You made me ride all the way down here? You made it sound so important.’ And then in walked George Harrison with Mal Evans.” Evans was the Beatles’ former road manager. They had been next door getting pizza.
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The business founded in 1975 by Harris – or Norm as he is known to his starry regulars, awestruck window-shoppers and legions of viewers of his YouTube channel – has grown exponentially. It is located on a strip mall in the Tarzana neighbourhood of Los Angeles, alongside a McDonald’s and a nail bar. It would be simple to blink and miss Norman’s Rare Guitars, unaware of a clientele that includes Slash, Billy Corgan, Dave Grohl, Kiefer Sutherland, Melissa Etheridge and Beck dropping by to check out the high-end stock, alongside parents buying instruments for their kids – where else would Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow go when their son Moses wanted a guitar for his 16th birthday? The store – and with it Harris’s life and career – is now the subject of a documentary of the same name.
Virtuoso blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa may be Harris’s most valuable customer. He has one of the world’s finest collections of Fender and Gibson guitars, many bought from the proprietor’s prized stash. He says Harris is every bit as much of a draw as the instruments he sells, like “an electromagnet” attracting people from all over the world, yet Harris doesn’t seem to realise he is the star of the show.
It all began with a secondhand bass guitar. Fifty years ago, Harris was playing keyboards in a Miami band when his bandmates asked him to fill in on bass. He scoured the local paper for a used instrument and landed on an early Fender Jazz bass. “Everyone went gaga over that Fender Jazz,” he says. This included his friend Jaco Pastorius, considered by many to be the greatest bass player of all time. “I was offered more money for it than I paid for it, so I noticed that there was a market and thought maybe I could make a few dollars chasing down instruments like that and selling them on. And it just kind of rapidly built.”
Things were also taking off with Harris’s band, Katmandu – Bobby Caldwell was the singer, Little Richard and his brother Peyton Penniman were their managers and they had supported the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Canned Heat – and were urged to relocate from Florida to California, so that’s what Harris and his wife, Marlene, did. The decision was made easier by the availability of instruments on the west coast, which inadvertently contributed to the end of Harris’s career as a pro musician – business grew so quickly that he had no time for much else.
“It was kind of a smorgasbord in LA,” he says. “There was every instrument I had ever heard about but never actually seen, all right there.” Before long, there were 50 or 60 used guitars in the couple’s apartment, bought after scouring local newspapers and visiting pawn shops.
“A lot of the music stores didn’t want to touch used instruments back then. And they would laugh at me and say things like: ‘You’re paying more for this old guitar than I am for this new guitar.’ I just used to think: ‘OK, keep laughing, and just keep selling them to me.’”
Harris says he knew in his gut that American-made guitars from the mid-1950s to early 60s would one day be hugely desirable – “future antiques” he calls them – and he was right. While you couldn’t argue that he single-handedly created the vintage guitar market, he certainly shaped it, and there is no one else who was as ahead of the curve as Harris or as knowledgable about the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of each model. He also knew when to say no to a guitar and walk away.
‘Future antiques’ … Harris in his store. Photograph: Jeremy Danger
“I was never interested in just amassing guitars, or having multiples of the same guitar. I wanted guitars that were hardly played and all original – just prime examples, really.”
The strategy paid off that day in 1973 when Harrison came calling. Harrison was seeking a replacement for Lucy, his one-of-a-kind Gibson Les Paul that had been stolen earlier in the year. It was a 1957 Goldtop refinished in red that had formerly been owned by John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful and Rick Derringer of the McCoys, before being bought by Eric Clapton and given to Harrison. Clapton used the instrument on the Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
After the theft, Lucy was sold to a musician in LA. Once Harrison had tracked down the guitar, the guitar’s recent owner argued that he had purchased Lucy in good faith but said he would return it to Harrison if he got him another 1950s Les Paul and a Fender Precision bass in exchange.
This is when a mutual friend became involved, who knew that Harris had three 1950s Les Pauls at his apartment. When Harrison visited, he bought two 1958 Les Paul Standards – one for the trade, one for himself that he fell in love with. Today, each of those guitars, even without the Harrison connection, would sell for more than £250,000.
“We actually spent the day together. I then went to this place he was renting in the Hollywood Hills. Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitarist, was there. To me, the Beatles were bigger than the pope or the president or whoever. I just kept looking at him – I couldn’t believe it was happening.”
Harrison offered Harris his Gretsch Country Gentleman, used in his Beatles days, in part payment. But Harris passed – the biggest mistake he ever made, he says now. “I’m not a huge Gretsch fan, and more importantly, I didn’t think anybody would ever believe that I’d spent the day with George and bought his Beatles guitar.”
He might not have made that deal, but they did smoke a lot of hash together that day. “It was like having a glass of wine with someone in those days and in those circles,” he says. “I did a lot to destroy a number of brain cells in the 60s and 70s. But I’m still mostly functioning, and I definitely still remember that day.”
Robbie Robertson – lead guitarist with the Band, who backed Bob Dylan – was a regular customer, having replied to an ad Harris placed in the LA Times looking for guitars and being drawn in by Harris’s warmth and unbeatable stock. Not that Harris recognised him when he saw him, having never seen the Band perform live, despite being a fan. “He was really impressed that I had a lot of the stuff he was looking for, so I told him to bring some friends. Not long after, he came back with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.”
Harris on the roof of Norman’s Rare Guitars in Los Angeles. Photograph: Jeremy Danger
Harris and Robertson’s friendship was cemented during the filming of The Last Waltz, the Band’s 1978 concert film, directed by Martin Scorsese: most of the instruments and amplifiers featured were loaned from Harris. Robertson had recently bought his 1954 Stratocaster from Harris, then dipped it in bronze. Robertson also makes an appearance in Norman’s Rare Guitars, in footage filmed just before his death in 2023. “He had cancer and didn’t have long left then,” says Harris. “But he said for me, he’d do it. He was such a great guy and a good friend.”
The Last Waltz wasn’t Harris’s first involvement with the film industry. Hal Ashby knew exactly who to ask to supply instruments for his 1976 Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory. Come 1984, there was only one person who could provide the required level of unicorn-like guitars to fill out Nigel Tufnel’s collection in This Is Spın̈al Tap.
Most famously, Harris loaned the producers of Back to the Future the red Gibson played by Marty McFly at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. As has been well documented, the guitar in question – a Gibson ES-345 – wasn’t released until 1958, three years after the film’s 1955 setting. Harris suggested a period-correct Fender Stratocaster or a Gibson ES-5 Switchmaster, but director Robert Zemeckis refused, insisting that a time traveller like McFly wouldn’t be constrained by such pettiness.
After it was returned, Harris sold the guitar. Decades later, a woman walked into his shop offering to sell it back to him for $1m. After he stopped laughing, he said no, although his shop manager at the time, Mark Agnesi, tried to twist his arm, saying that if he had the money, he would buy it himself. Agnesi is now director of Gibson, and in a position to spend large on such a storied instrument on behalf of the company. Except no one knows where it is. Agnesi launched Lost to the Future earlier this year, a global appeal for the guitar. The search goes on.
Regular viewers of Norman’s Rare Guitars’ YouTube channel will be familiar with Harris’s warehouse, where he has squirrelled away hundreds of museum-grade instruments for a rainy day. Its location is known to only a handful of people.
“There was this rumour for years about that stash,” says Bonamassa. “I’d known Norm for years – and spent plenty of money with him – before I was invited out there. It was like that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark – that long shot with all the crates. It was unbelievable.”
Joe Bonamassa in the documentary film Norman’s Rare Guitars. Photograph: Netflix
Bonamassa has been to the warehouse many times since, and says he always goes with a ponderous heart, knowing that he’s going to see some “holy grail guitars” that will certainly leave a dent in his wallet. “If Norm stashed it away, it meant it was a cut above – the cleanest, the straightest, the most original. I went there last year and bought five guitars, among them the last of Norm’s blond dot-neck Gibson 335s and a Fender Broadcaster.” (Guitar enthusiasts will drool at the very mention.)
A portion of the film is dedicated to Harris’s recent health scares. He had cancer, then had a heart attack while undergoing treatment. Mortality is clearly on his mind, not least what should happen to the business, and all those guitars, when he’s no longer around to shake the hand of the person buying them.
“I had to get things in order.” he says. “Just in case. So I’m going to try to leave as little a mess as I can.”
“He’s 75,” says Bonamassa. “For years, he’s been saying to me, ‘I want you to take over the store.’ But I have a job already. The problem is, if Norm’s not there to run it, then it’s just a namesake. It would just be a brand. When you take him away, you take away the heart and the soul. It wouldn’t be the same. There’s only one Norman Harris.”
Norman’s Rare Guitars is available to rent or buy here.
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