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 famous 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.
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 easy 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.
