Johnny's Records

Johnny's Records Catering to all music lovers out there! Used and New Vinyl for any age! Decals, patches, pins and t shirts...Oh My!

Johnny's Records is a classic rock memorabilia store that opened it's doors in 1975 and still very much alive. Due to the stores elected taste, this store tends to satisfy customers at any age range who enjoys a broad taste of music. Johnny's has everything from pins to jewelry as well as rock band t shirts and unique accessories. We also supply collectors with rare rock and roll posters and print

s that vary from Ronnie Wood to Jerry Garcia. For the customers that come in looking for new tunes we have cassette tapes, CD's and LPs (that are both new and used). Due to the new demand for LP's, we are apart of National Record Store day which supplies re-releases of life changing albums, as well as rare out takes of different artists. We are very friendly and tend to supply your child from infant to old age with rock and roll onsies, such as The Grateful Dead, Bob Marley, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Red Hot CHilli Peppers, Led Zeppelin, Guns and Roses, Johnny Cash and much more.

Are you feeling that dark star in your life? You know, the one that crashes, pouring its light into ashes. When it com...
06/23/2026

Are you feeling that dark star in your life? You know, the one that crashes, pouring its light into ashes. When it comes to you, yes, your reason tatters, forces break loose of the axis. You know then for sure that you are on a long strange trip.
Robert Hunter was one such voyager. Do you know of whom I speak? It was Mr. Hunter who created much of the lyrical content of the Grateful Dead songs we all cherish and sing as Bobo passes around the pipe.
Robert was born Robert Burns on June 3, 1941 in Arroyo Grande, California. His great-great grandfather was the poet Robert Burns. His dad was an alcoholic who deserted the family when Robert was seven. Unable to support her son, his mom gave Robert up to foster care. He spent a part of his childhood being shipped around to foster homes. During this time, feeling shell shocked and alone, Robert retreated into a world of reading and fantasy. Before his eleventh birthday he had created a fifty page fairy tale.
His mother remarried Norman Hunter and Robert took on his step dad's last name. Norman was a publisher and schooled Robert in writing. The family moved to Connecticut and Robert went to UConn. But after a year he decided he needed to go back to the climate of his youth and returned to Palo Alto. He enlisted in the National Guard. Ah, but other things were waiting in the wings for young Robert.
In 1961 he was introduced to one Jerome Garcia by Jerry's then girlfriend who just happed to be an old girl friend of Roberts. Robert was one year older than Jerry. The two shared an interest in folk music and began playing out as Bob and Jerry. But Jerry was too adventurist, too curious of a guitar player and quickly outclassed Robert. For his part Mr. Hunter was interested in writing stories and lyrics.
In 1962 Robert volunteered for the psychedelic chemical experiments being conducted by the CIA at Stanford University. Of course no one knew the CIA was behind this program. Other participants included Ken Kesey (who was working on his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and famed beat poet Allen Ginsberg. They were given L*D, psilocybin and mescaline and told to write notes on their experiences. Robert not only wrote notes, he wrote songs based on his visions.
Uh oh, Robert developed a problem with methamphetamines. I don't know why this is. A lot of these early voyagers on the L*D ship ended up with a nasty speed habit. It happened to many of the Merry Pranksters. It was as if they liked all the messages they were receiving from their brains and so wanted to stay up as long as possible so as not to miss any part of the dance.
Sensing he needed a change of scene, Robert went to New Mexico. It was there that Robert wrote the lyrics for what became Grateful Dead staples: China Cat Sunflower, Saint Stephen and Alligator.
Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, Jerry and the boys were forming a band. You know, the Warlocks--soon to be the Grateful Dead. At first they were a kind of psychedelic cover band doing strange versions of Dancing in the Street and blues covers that Pig Pen thought hit the spot. But soon they were searching for their own sounds. They got hold of Robert's lyrics for Alligator and began writing the music. Before long they invited Robert to come join them. He went to a show in Rio Nido. It was there Robert wrote the lyrics for Dark Star, a song that up until then had been a Jerry noodle.
Robert didn't have much input on the Dead's second LP, Anthem of the Sun. But when it came to album three, Aoxomoxoa, Bob and Jerry were reunited. They worked on every song. Robert had moved into the house where Jerry and his wife and step daughter were living. Soon he became an official non-performing member of the band.
After Aoxomoxoa the Dead shifted from their experimental sounds to a more structured song cycle of Americana and Country. This was an area where Hunter excelled. He worked with Bob Weir on Sugar Magnolia, Phil Lesh on Box of Rain and Pigpen on Easy Wind. But he discovered he didn't enjoy trying to fit in with every band member's whims. He preferred to restrict his talents to writing with Jerry. For the next twenty-five years they wrote together. This though Robert often felt challenged by Jerry's heavy drug use. He became something of the band's scold trying to get them to forsake their use of co***ne in the 1970s and putting his foot down when it was suggested some of their songs might be used for commercials.
After Jerry's death, when the Dead dissolved, Robert worked with Jim Lauderdale, Elvis Costello, and Bruce Hornsby. According to Mr. Hornsby:
"Well, I've always loved [Robert Hunter's] writing. I've loved so many of the Garcia/Hunter songs. They're just timeless sounding to me, could have been written hundreds of years ago."
Robert also worked with Bob Dylan on Down in the Groove, Together Through Life and Tempest. Like Dylan, Robert was always writing. He couldn't write enough. Bob said this of their collaboration: "We could probably write a hundred songs together if we thought it was important or the right reasons were there."
When the Grateful Dead were inducted into the Rock and roll Hall of Fame, Hunter was inducted along with them. He was the only non-performer to be so so honored.
Robert received a life time achievement award from The Americana Music Association. Asked to perform he played his composition Ripple. He and Garcia were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Again Robert played Ripple. He said of this choice: "pretty much" favorite line he wrote was in "Ripple": Let it be known there is a fountain that was not made by the hands of men. "And I believe it, you know?" he told Rolling Stone in 2015.
When asked about Robert, Dennis McNally, long time band manager said that up until the Dead brought on Robert, they were just another band. The Dead "developed their potential for greatness" after they made Hunter their main lyricist. McNally writes that while Garcia was one of the "outstanding guitar players and songwriters of his generation", his lyrical abilities were minor. Many of the Grateful Dead's early lyrics were "superficial" and simple. From Hunter and Garcia's collaboration came many of the songs McNally calls the band's masterpieces, including "Ripple", "Brokedown Palace", and "Attics of My Life".
It was written in Rolling Stone that "[considered] one of rock's most ambitious and dazzling lyricists, Hunter was the literary counterpoint to the band's musical experimentation", and his lyrics were "as much a part of the band as Jerry Garcia's singing and guitar."
There are miracles everyday. We all need one. Robert found his when his old girlfriend, now Jerry's girlfriend, introduced the two young men. After that, it was just one miracle after another:

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
Would you hear my voice come through the music?
Would you hold it near as it were your own?
It's a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken
Perhaps they're better left unsung
I don't know, don't really care
Let there be songs to fill the air

Friday I wrote about celebrating Paul McCartney. Saturday, June 20th, was Brian Wilson’s birthday. Hey, Brian and I sh...
06/21/2026

Friday I wrote about celebrating Paul McCartney. Saturday, June 20th, was Brian Wilson’s birthday. Hey, Brian and I share the same birthday. Imagine that.
I spent some time reading about Brian’s life and came to the conclusion it’s almost impossible to do it justice. The swells of creativity, the depths of depression and self loathing, it’s dizzying. You hear these hare brained notions about genius being inspired by drugs and alcohol and are left to wonder. Why is it so difficult to ride the lightning of invention? What is it about the pressure we put upon ourselves to come up with something new? Why does it break us into pieces? How do we balance our desire to make the moon dance with our need to keep our feet on the ground? Are all geniuses fated to crack? Maybe cracking is part of the gig. Maybe the world puts cracks in all of us. Perhaps this is God’s way of letting some light shine in. Or is it that the light is trapped inside of us, searching for a way to come out?
Brian was one of those rare people who had perfect pitch. His parents reported that at the age of two, if his dad hit a key on the piano, Brian could identify what note it was. He had an interest in the way sounds worked together. As a teenager, he would listen to the harmonies of the Four Freshmen and transcribe them on the piano. Music was his playground.
At the same time, Brian was always nervous. He couldn’t escape a feeling that he was on the verge of failure. At times he didn’t know what to do with himself. Being on stage made him nervous. Playing music with his brothers could cause him anxiety. Poor sales of his newest efforts made him depressed. Other people challenging his right to produce made him uneasy.
When Brian had a sound in his head, he would work in the studio for literally hundreds of hours until he felt he and his fellow musicians had merged this inner sense of purity with the capacity of the instruments and the acoustic limits of the surroundings. He was dedicated to the validity of his own investigations of music.
His father was hard on him. Some say his father was emotionally and physically abusive. Brian acknowledged this but said people exaggerated his father’s brutality. His father recognized Brian’s gift and worked to help him put it into the world. When times got financially rough in 1969, the Beach Boys and Brian’s dad sold the publishing rights to Brian's music for $700,000. Though Brian signed the contract for the sale, it caused a violent emotional reaction in him.
Something about Brian’s gifts, they tortured him. Articles I’ve read said he had problems with mental illness from an early age. This is inexact and leads me to wonder. What was the definition of his illness? How did it manifest? Did it drive him? Was his condition what guided him to write? Was he trying to write himself into a better life?
You listen to those songs, In My Room, Don’t Worry Baby, The Warmth of the Sun: there is something so vibrant, so frail, so precious in these lyrics. “My love is like the warmth of the sun. It won’t ever die.” (This song was written in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination.) “There’s a place where I can go to tell my secrets to.” “When I grow up to be a man will I dig the same things that turn me on as a kid?” There is a way a simple lyric can make you feel as if your life has been understood, your experience affirmed. What more could you ask for?
You get into the songs of the mid to late sixties, and you can feel the fire at full blast. It’s almost hard to stand near them. Good Vibrations. I would hear this song every night as I waited at the train station for my father to come home from the city. We’d made a deal that I could have the car if I drove him to and fro work every day. Yes, I did this. It was perhaps the first contract of my life. And Brian’s song was there with me every night as i watched the commuters filing out of the train cars. That song was like a small lozenge from heaven, a solution of the Godhead. Astonishingly beautiful, it seemed to emanate from a distance chamber of the soul, a call to the heavens to remember we are all down here trying to gather to us the message.
Brian has said that the inspiration for the song came from a conversation he had had with his mom while he was young. The two were out walking and, hearing a dog bark, Brian asked his mom why it was that dogs did that. She responded that dogs sensed vibrations from people and that if they weren’t good, the dogs would bark.
We all have Beach Boy moments in our lives. This was an early goal of Brian’s. His senior year in high school, for his Senior Problems course project, he submitted an essay entitled My Philosophy. In it he stated his goal was to make a name for himself in music. He started out writing surf and car songs. He had called the group he put together with his brothers and Mike Love and Al Jardine the Pendletons. It was the record label, Candix Records, that changed their name to The Beach Boys.
Brian liked to write with other people. He wrote with a gentleman named Gary Usher, then Roger Christian, then with Jan and Dean. His father and the folks at Capitol Records didn’t want him to collaborate. They wanted to keep him tight on the leash. When he finally broke away from the family, the corralling influence of his father and brothers, he found himself with people who encouraged Brian to use drugs. Drugs didn’t work well with his fragile ego. By 1968 he was in a hospital for mental disorientation and fatigue. He may or may not have committed himself. He began retreating from producing the music he loved.
For the rest of his life he had trouble with drugs. He had trouble with alcohol, He had trouble with food. He was messing with he**in. He ballooned to over three hundred pounds. Under supervision, by basketball player Stan Love, by therapist Eugene Landy, Brian was able to get himself clean. Ah, but then he relapsed. His second bout with Landry got a little messy. It wasn’t just that the therapist charged Brian an incredible amount of money for his around the clock care, Landy also wanted credit for writing and producing with Brian. Landy lost his license to practice therapy. Eventually Brian and he parted ways. Brian got a restraining order.
You get the picture I’m painting. Music as beautiful as a crystal mountain lake, a life filled with enough troubles to drown an army of cats.
Is any of this story important? Can you just enjoy the music and not worry about the messiness of the life of the man who created it? Or is this a package deal? Do you have to pay the dues to sing the blues? Is Brian the emblem of America? Are we people with an open spirit but haunted minds?

Okay, I didn’t post this yesterday. June 18th is Paul McCartney’s birthday. He was eighty-four. Part of the reason I d...
06/19/2026

Okay, I didn’t post this yesterday. June 18th is Paul McCartney’s birthday. He was eighty-four.
Part of the reason I didn’t write anything is, well, I didn’t feel comfortable telling the story. It’s a familiar story. And I know. Some familiar stories need retelling. People like to hear their favorite stories over and over again. And the Beatles are a story that we all hope will never end. Like Elvis, like Santa Claus, the ‘Beatles are figures that are elemental. They seem to be built into the fabric of our life cycles. Like the wind, the snow, the falling of autumn leaves, there is something about a Beatles song that moves us in ways that are hard to describe, ways that make us feel a part of the dance of the world.
I could tell you I saw the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1966 with my then girlfriend Nina and that would be true. No, we weren’t able to hear them. But what we did hear was the screaming of fifty thousand people who were in an ecstatic trance. It was as if John and Paul and Ringo and George were the founders of some ancient chthonic religion and we had come to be initiated. It wasn’t anything that we could name. It was more a feeling. We were all being transported from the smallness of our day to day burdens into something grand and ineluctable. Can you recall how many musicians who have said they decided to form a band after seeing the movie A Hard Day’s Night?
What I remember was the ride on the train, the subsequent ride on the subway. The aisles were filled with young people beaming. We were all expecting to be lifted. There was no way we could have understood that this energy we were seeking, this raising up we needed, it was lying latent within us. The Beatles were the spark that allowed us to catch fire.
Growing up we all had our favorite Beatle. We believed these guys were simple and containable. John was clever. Paul was cute. George was a silent master. Ringo was the drummer. When it turned out they were so much more complex, filled with wishes and desires and conflicts just like you and me, oh, we weren’t so happy. We blamed Yoko for breaking the group apart. We thought that John had maybe gone around the bend in falling for her. Who knew George had so much to say? Why did we actually buy a whole album of Ringo singing? The Beatles, like all of us, were growing up. They found the world as complex and frustrating as you and I. We were angry about this.
But anger isn’t what the Beatles mean to us now. Those days of disillusionment and upset have passed. We have come to see this group as something beyond the sum of the parts. They are to us a symbol of hope, of joy, of what the world has hidden in some treasure chest buried somewhere on an island. They are a reminder of life’s untiring energy to recreate itself. I am he and you are he as you are me and we are all together.
Happy Birthday Paul. Thanks for more than we can ever know.

You know what day it is! That's Right New Goodies! Honorable Mentions That are not new this week but new to the store:Th...
06/18/2026

You know what day it is! That's Right New Goodies!
Honorable Mentions That are not new this week but new to the store:
The Mountain Goats- All Eternals Deck
The Mountain Goats- All Hail West Texas
The Mountain Goats- Getting Into Knives

Okay, yesterday I told the sad story of Tupac. I mean sad in that he died so young, caught up in a gangster culture tha...
06/17/2026

Okay, yesterday I told the sad story of Tupac. I mean sad in that he died so young, caught up in a gangster culture that, despite his brilliant mind, reached up and snatched him into the grave.
Today I'm honoring another rapper, Kendrick Lamar, who has managed to overcome great personal difficulties to become one of today's most important voices. And I'm not saying Kendrick is better than Tupac. They are both beacons in this world. Maybe it's about the winds of fate. Who can say?
Kendrick Lamar Duckworth was born June 17. 1987, in Compton California. His father Kenneth"Kenny" Duckworth was a ganster. His mom, Paula Oliver was a hairdresser. Both his parents were from the South Side of Chicago.
Kendrick was named after Eddie Kendricks of the Temptations. He was bought up in poverty, living in Section 8 housing and dependent on welfare and food stamps. At times he was homeless. He saw police brutality up close starting with the first day of the 1992 LA riots. At the age of five he witnessed a murder while sitting outside his apartment complex. A teenage drug dealer was killed in the street by a drive by.
To quote Kendrick: "It done something to me right then and there. It let me know that this is not only something that I'm looking at, but it's something that maybe I have to get used to."
During his teenage years he began suffering from depression.
Kendrick's first grade teacher encouraged him to become a writer after she heard him correctly use the word Audacity. Always a good student, he was quiet and observant. His seventh grade English teacher Regis Inge introduced him to poetry. Inge was using poetry in an effort to help his students work through the racial tension that had infected the school. Lamar connected poetry to hip hop songs and began studying rhymes, metaphors and double entendres. He used his song writing to help him deal with psychological trauma and depression.
He graduated high school as a straight A student. Many fields were open for him but he decided he wanted to be a rapper.
In high school he had taken the stage name of K.Dot. He made friends with a fellow student Dave Free. Young Free had a poor boy garage studio. Kendrick began making mixed tapes in this garage . (Mixed taps involve freestyle rapping over popular songs.)
Mr. Free had a knack with computers. When producer Anthony "Top Dawg" Tiffith asked him to fix his computer, Free brought one of Kendrick's mixed tapes to present Tiffith. Liking what he heard, Top Dawg offer Kendrick an audition. The young man came and performed freestyle rap for two hours straight. Okay. He got a contract. Smart from the get go, Kendrick bought a minority position in the company Top Dawg Entertainment.
Over the next few years Kendrick made four mixed tape albums. He appeared on several compilations and backed other rappers on their records.
His first LP distributed by a major label was Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City. It was instantly a big hit and debuted at #2 on Billboard's top 200 albums chart. It was the first hip hop album to spend ten consecutive weeks on the charts.
What made this new master of hip hop so popular? He was smart, he was quick, he was funny, he was introspective. Listeners got the feeling they were being invited into the life of a man who was literate and witty. His music has been described as anti-flamboyant, interior and complex. Pharrell Williams says of Kendrick: "He knows how to be very disciplined with a subject matter, he knows that stickiness is important, and he knows that it has to be great." American songwriter said of Mr. Lamar: "He's a playwright, a novelist, a short story author. He's literary within the art form of music."
Mr. Lamar's second major album was To Pimp a Butterfly. This is the album I sell at my store almost every day of the week. This is the album that debuted at number one in Billboard. Did you know that as he began recording this album Kendrick was suffered from severe depression and suicidal ideation? Yikes.
Here's another heavy duty truth. Kendrick's favorite artist, the one who most influenced him professionally and personally was Tupac. This is the man whose work, whose movie appearances and videos, originally inspired Kendrick. Two stories. Two bright lights. Both moving in this world with heavy baggage. Both finding music as a way to tell their story, to give their life meaning.

The song says it's been a long time coming, but a change has got to come. I don't know. I want to believe this. But t...
06/16/2026

The song says it's been a long time coming, but a change has got to come. I don't know. I want to believe this. But the story goes on and the road is so hard.
Here's a story that will break your heart.
Tupac Amaru Shakur was born on June 16, 1971 in East Harlem to Afeni Shakur and Billy Garland. At birth his given name was Lesane Parish Crooks but then his mother changed her son's name. Tupac Amaru was in honor of Tupac Amaru II, a descendent of the last Inca ruler. This Tupac had been executed in 1781 after his revolt against Spanish rule. His mother explained: "I wanted him to have the name of revolutionary, indigenous people in the world. I wanted him to know he was part of a world culture and not just from a neighborhood."
His surname came from Lumumba Shakur, a Sunni Muslim his mother married in November 1968. This marriage fell apart when Lumumba learned he wasn't the biological father of Tupac.
Tupac's history is thick. His parents had been active members of the Black Panther Party in New York in the late 1960s and the 1970s. A month before Shakur's birth his mom was tried in NYC as part of the Panther 21 trial. She was acquitted of more than 150 charges.
Other family members who were in the Panthers didn't fare so well.
Shakur's step dad, Mutula Shakur, spent four years as one of the FBI's most wanted fugitives. He was apprehended in 1986 and convicted of a 1981 robbery of a Brink's armored truck in which both a cop and a Brink's guard had been killed.
Shakur's Godfather, Elmer Geronimo Pratt was wrongly convicted of murdering a school teacher during a 1968 robbery. He spent 27 years in prison before his conviction was overturned. It was revealed that the prosecutor had withheld information that would have established the man's innocence.
Shakur's Godmother Essata Shakur was convicted of first degree murder in the shooting of a New Jersey State Trooper. She escaped prison in 1979 and remained a fugitive until her death in 2025.
Shakur's mom had trouble finding work and developed a drug habit in the 1980s. They moved to Maryland where in high school Tupac took to acting in school plays. He also pursued poetry, ballet and studies in jazz. He won a high school competition for best rapper and was liked by all his classmates. The music he enjoyed at the time was the songs of Kate Bush, Culture Club and Sinead O'Connor.
Tupac was taking poetry classes given by Leila Steinberg. Moved by his work, she decided to promote the young man. She managed to get him the guidance of Altron Gregory, the manager of Digital Underground. In 1990, Tupac became a roadie and back up dancer for the band. Steinberg convinced Digital Underground cofounder Jimi Choirmaster J Dright to work with Shakur and his group Strictly Dope. Dright saw right away that Gupac was going to go in another direction: "this guy was on a mission. From day one. Maybe he knew he wasn't going to be around seven years later."
Shakur's first album was 2Pacalypse Now. It was a play on the 1979 film Apocalypse Now. Released in 1991, it was unique in its exploration of social themes such as racism, police brutality, poverty, gang violence, and drug abuse. Controversy soon found its way to Tupac's door. Ronald Ray Howard had murdered a Texas Highway Patrol Trooper. His defense attorney stated that Howard had been influenced by Tupac's album. Never one to shy from sticking his head into a potato, Vice President Quayle criticized the album:
"There's no reason for a record like this to be released. It has no place in our society."
Tupac's response:
I just wanted to rap about things that affected young black males. When I said that, I didn't know that I was gonna tie myself down to just take all the blunts and hits for all the young black males, to be the media's kicking post for young black males.
2Pacalypse Now was certified gold and reached #64 on Billboard's top 200.
Starting in 1992 Tupac had a number of acting roles. His first appearance was in the movie Juice. Then in 1993 he appeared with Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice. In 1994 he played a gangster in Above the Rim. Other roles presented themselves to him but trouble got in the way.
In February 1993 Tupac released 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z...It debuted at #24 on Billboard's Hot 200.
He followed this album with what is considered one of the most influential rap LPs of all time: Me Against the World. It debuted at #1 on the Billboard top 200 and sole a quarter of a million copies in the first week. Tupac was in jail when it was released.
All Eyez on Me was his fourth LP. It came out nn February 13, 1996 and was rap's first double album. It sold over a half million copies in the first week of release.
By the time Tupac's fifth album was released--The 7 Day Theory--Tupac was dead.
Okay, you who are reading this, you who are interested in this side of the music world, you know the story. You are aware of the trouble in the hip hop community during the 1990s, the East Coast/West Coast thing, the posing, the infighting, the inability to find a resting place other than the grave. You've no doubt heard of the many times Tupac was arrested, assaulted, robbed. You try to untangle these stories and they're just so messy, so imbued with the craziness of our culture: the poverty, the struggles for equality, class warfare, race warfare, people unable to live in accordance with human values. Here's a brilliant young man, a poet, a dancer, an innovator, dead before the age of thirty. I know, the world is overwhelmed with sad stories. These times of injustice, they have been going on for all time. It's been a long time coming.

Ever know a famous artist who didn't tour? The Beatles stopped in August of 1966. The Stones are as old as me and they...
06/15/2026

Ever know a famous artist who didn't tour? The Beatles stopped in August of 1966. The Stones are as old as me and they're still on the road. Bob Dylan has me by a few years and he's on the never ending tour. Although he didn't make it that far, the comedian George Burns had a booking to play the day of his one hundredth birthday. Interacting with audiences, getting fresh ideas, having a big time party with lots of groupies, these are all reasons to get on the road again.
Harry Nilsson, he didn't tour. He didn't like it. He had other things on his mind. Today is his birthday so let's give him a nod.
Harry Edward Nelson was born June 15, 1941 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. His father abandoned the family when he was three. Harry grew up with a half brother and a half sister from his mom, and three half sisters and one half brother from his dad. He left school at an early age and did his best to support himself and his mom. He worked at the Paramount theatre in LA until it closed in 1960. After that he got a job at a bank. At this early date he showed an aptitude for computers. I mean, he knew how to work it. He became so valuable to the bank that they didn't fire him after learning he had lied on his application about being a high school graduate. They allowed him to do computer work at night and in the day Harry pursued a singing career.
Since 1958 Harry had started singing at the Paramount. He and his friend Jerry Smith had a duo. Early on Harry learned to play a plastic ukulele. Then he moved unto the guitar and piano. Because he was poor at remembering lyrics, when singing popular songs he began creating his own phrases, including the bridge.
In 1962 Harry got a job singing demos for Scott Turner. He would pay him five dollars a demo. (Later, when Harry was famous, Scott Turner released an album of Harry's demos. Scott offered Harry some royalties. Harry responded he'd already paid him the requisite five dollars a song.)
John Marascako, a producer, had Harry sing a demo for a song meant for Little Richard. When Little Richard heard it he said,
"My! You sing good for a white boy!" And Harry did sing well.
In 1964 Harry worked with Phil Specter. He made friends with publisher Perry Botkin Jr who looked to market his songs. He also met George Tipton who spent his life savings--$2500--to finance the recording of four songs. Tipton sold them to Tower label--a subsidy of Capitol. No, they didn't sell but other artists liked what they heard and recorded them: Fred Astaire,
Glen Campbell, and the Yardbirds were among these.
In 1966 Harry signed with RCA and a year later released his first album Pandemonium Shadow Show. Man, people liked this. Not so much the public. It didn't get a lot of airplay. But music industry people love it. They thought it was fabulous. They loved his several octave vocal range and the cleverness of his lyrics.
Among the people who loved this record was Derek Taylor, the press officer for the Beatles. He loved the record so much he bought a case of it and passed it out to his friends. Guess who he gave it to? Can you say John and Paul? On this album Harry had done a tribute to the Beatles. He covered the John written You Can't Do That. He managed to weave into this melody references to seventeen other Beatles songs. Wow, John and Paul were impressed. At a press conference held to announce the formation of the Apple corporation, both John and Paul were asked to name their favorite American singer. They both named Harry Nilsson. They wanted Harry to sign with the Apple label.
Harry's next album was Aerial Ballet. On it he covered Fred Neil's
Everybody Talking. At first it was a small hit. But after it was used in the movie Midnight Cowboy, yes, sir, people began to know of Harry Nilsson. Also on the album was a Nilsson composition One. You know it because Three Dog Night covered and made it a hit. Also, and this is strange, Aerosmith was inspired to name themselves Aerosmith on account of this album. Drummer Joey Kramer said:
"I was listening to an album at the time, by Harry Nilsson, called Aerial Ballet. We were listening to this record and I started really getting off on the lyrics. We started kicking around this word 'aerial,' and 'aerial' eventually came into 'aero' – I don't know how that happened." He continued, “And it was like Aeromind, Aerostar, Aero-this, Aero-that; and somebody said 'smith' – Aerosmith? Wow!"
Also on this album, Nilsson covered a song by little known artist Randy Newman, Simon Smith and the amazing Dancing Bear.
Okay, this was the start of what makes Nilsson so special. He wasn't a trend follower. He didn't like to repeat himself. He liked to adventure out into new areas. For his next project, he did an entire album of Randy Newman songs: Nilsson sings Newman. It didn't sell. But man, it was great. Great? it's beautiful
And that's Nilsson's career: great, beautiful, but not a lot of record sales. Yes, he sold some. Everyone likes the Coconut Song. Without You, his remake of a Badfinger song--beautiful. (Mr Nilsson claimed that when he hit the high note in that song he busted a hemorrhoid. ) Everyone knows at least one Nilsson song. But what I'm saying is, those first two albums, Pandemonium Shadow Show and Aerial Ballet, you need to own these. They are incredible.
Here's a link to a song from his first album:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqDB4-mJpx0

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Darien, CT
06820

Opening Hours

Monday 10am - 6pm
Tuesday 10am - 6pm
Wednesday 10am - 6pm
Thursday 10am - 6pm
Friday 10am - 6pm
Saturday 10:30am - 6pm
Sunday 12pm - 4:30pm

Telephone

+12036550157

Website

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