Kyoto

After the badge came a business card. Graham Nicholson became vice president of sales for the Northeast for Kyocera, the Japanese ceramics company, and that was the job that put him on a plane.

Kyocera came looking for him. The company recognised the cutting-tool experience he had built up working with Mersick Super Supply, and hired him as sales manager. Several years in he formed his own corporation, High Performance Tools, LLC.

Then he won Kyocera's Salesman of the Year award — in 1982, and again in 1983. The prize was the trip: they sent him to Japan to see the manufacturing plant. That is the plaque in the photograph on this page, and it is the reason for everything that follows.

He visited Kyocera's headquarters in Kyoto and its customers' factories in Tokyo and Osaka. In the evenings he did what visiting salesmen do — dinner, and then the local karaoke clubs, small lounges holding about fifty people each. He estimates he got to about thirty nightclubs across those trips.

Every one of them had karaoke.

In 1982, standing in a room in Japan watching ordinary people take turns singing to a backing track, a working guitarist understood what he was looking at faster than a machine salesman would have. "All my years of being in music," he told the Courant a decade later, "everybody wanted to sit in with the band." Karaoke, kara okesutora, empty orchestra, was not a novelty. It was the thing every crowd he had ever played to already wanted, finally engineered — and the room was small enough that everybody in it got a turn.

He came home and described it to Bonnie.

"Shall we re-mortgage the house?" he asked.

"Let's do it," she said.

She kept her job doing assembly work at The Stanley Works. He kept the Kyocera job. And in their spare time, with the house on the line, they went into the empty-orchestra business.