Starstruck
Starstruck opened in Plainville, Connecticut. The people who built it, and the Connecticut music scene that grew up around it, bill it as America's first karaoke club.
When Pioneer introduced laser karaoke in 1988, with the words on a television screen lighting up as you sing, Pioneer gave Graham the American distribution rights to it — he was its first distributor in the United States. He formed a second company to handle it, High Performance Music, LLC, and sold the equipment while also running the shows.
By then the road shows, direct descendants of the Airstream, were running about sixty a week across New England, and he had noticed the thing that decided it: the venues that hired them were all making more money. So he sold the cutting tool company, High Performance Tools, and went at karaoke full time.
He rented a building in Plainville and opened the first laser karaoke restaurant. A year later he opened a second in Southington, and soon after a third in Simsbury. A fourth was planned for New Britain and never opened. All three that did were breaking attendance records.
By December 1992 the two Starstruck restaurants, in Plainville and Southington, were grossing $1.2 million a year. The road shows were grossing another $600,000 to $700,000 on top.
He also tried to sell karaoke to corporate Connecticut as a stress-management tool, and it worked. Aetna Life & Casualty hired Starstruck to bring a machine to managers' meetings. "The boss might sing a Motown tune instead of giving orders," Aetna's Pat Pettit told the Courant.
And on the wall there was a glass case marked Elvis Presley Museum: the King's red pajamas with white piping, his white belt with the American eagle, a bottle of his vitamins dated 1977, and his hairbrush with some of his hair still in the bristles.
The "first in America" claim is set out properly, with dates and the competing history, on the karaoke page.
The fastest pool stick in the world
The rooms were busy enough, and the crowds loose enough, to make the local paper for more than the singing. A Starstruck regular sank a record-breaking speed-pool shot on the club's table — fast enough to be written up as the fastest pool stick in the world and put forward for the Guinness Book of Records. The record was the customer's; the room was Graham's.
The hearse
The marketing was not subtle, and it was not meant to be. A black Cadillac hearse ran with AMERICAS 1ST lettered along the door under a gold star, an inflatable Starstruck banner strapped to the roof, and — at Halloween — a driver in a skull mask and top hat parked beside a sign advertising $5,000 in costume-party prizes.
"I'm back"
Around Halloween 1998, someone stole the near-life-size steel Elvis mannequin, white jumpsuit, five feet tall, $4,000, from the display outside the club. Town police teletyped every department in Hartford County asking for reports of Elvis sightings.
Days later a custodian arriving for work found him on the back steps, wrapped in plastic, a bag over his head, with a note scrawled on it: "I'm back."
"I think whoever took him didn't take him to sell him," Graham said. "They probably took him as a Halloween prank, then realized it was a crime and got scared."
Elvis went back inside, and this time onto the stage permanently.
The price
Meanwhile, in 1992, Bonnie had said what she wanted: her dream was to open a country bar.
And a real-estate agent had started asking whether Starstruck was for sale. He said no. She asked again. He refused several times. Finally she asked him what it would take — what would change his mind.
He gave her a price many times what the place was actually worth, which is the kind of number you name when you mean no and want the conversation to end.
Several weeks later, the buyer agreed.
He sold it. The new owners renamed it "The Country Lady", and it closed a few months later.
