The karaoke claim
Star Struck Studios — where Graham first ran karaoke in America, out of a 35-foot Airstream that once belonged to Elvis Presley.
Who brought karaoke to America?
The careful answer: a Connecticut guitarist and ceramics salesman named Angus Graham Nicholson, who saw it in Kyoto in 1982 and spent the next six years getting it into American rooms. What he was actually first at is set out precisely below.
- 1982
- Kyocera Salesman of the Year, and again in 1983. The prize was Japan, and Japan was karaoke — about thirty lounges, fifty people in each
- 1984
- Lake Compounce. The first American karaoke he ran, out of an Airstream, on cassette with paper lyric sheets
- 1988
- First distributor of laser karaoke in the United States, the year Pioneer launched it
- 3
- Starstruck rooms trading — Plainville, Southington, Simsbury — plus about sixty road shows a week
Karaoke is a Japanese compound: kara, empty, and okesutora, orchestra. An empty orchestra. The band without the singer, waiting for you.
Graham Nicholson was vice president of Northeast sales for Kyocera, the Japanese ceramics company, and in 1982 he won the company's Salesman of the Year award — he would win it again in 1983. The prize was the thing that changed his life: they sent him to Japan to visit the manufacturing plant. He saw the headquarters in Kyoto and customers' factories in Tokyo and Osaka, and in the evenings he did what visiting salesmen do. The karaoke clubs were small lounges holding about fifty people each, and he counted about thirty of them across those trips. Every single one was singing.
He had been playing lead guitar since 1959 — the Chevrons first, then the Dynamics and the Roadrunners out of Waterbury — and he recognised what he was looking at faster than a machine salesman would have. "All my years of being in music," he told the Hartford Courant in 1992, "everybody wanted to sit in with the band." Not a novelty, then. The thing every crowd he had ever played to already wanted, finally engineered.
He came home, re-mortgaged the house with Bonnie, and in 1984 bought a 35-foot Airstream that Elvis Presley had converted into a recording studio. It came out of a Memphis amusement park — not, as has been printed, out of Graceland. The trailer's own flank read MOBILE RECORDING STUDIO, and at Lake Compounce it opened as Star Struck Studios: a recording booth, where you went in and cut something and came out holding a cassette of your performance, rather than a karaoke booth.
The karaoke travelled with them. Hauled out to county fairs at Goshen and Berlin and Terryville, it is where a great many people in Connecticut sang to a backing track for the first time. The technology was cassette tapes and printed lyric sheets.
When Pioneer launched laser karaoke in 1988, with the words on a television screen lighting up as you sing them, Pioneer gave Graham the American distribution rights — he was its first distributor in the United States. He sold the cutting tool company to go at it full time, and opened the country's first full-time karaoke restaurant in Plainville. A year later came Southington, and soon after Simsbury; a fourth was planned for New Britain and never opened. By December 1992 the Plainville and Southington rooms were grossing $1.2 million a year, while the road shows ran about sixty nights a week on top.
I thought it was the greatest idea to ever come down the pike. Red hot.
Graham Nicholson, Hartford Courant, 8 December 1992
What the claim is, and is not
Karaoke reached the United States before Graham Nicholson did anything with it. Dimples, in Los Angeles, is generally recorded as the first karaoke bar in North America and opened in 1982, the same year he was in Kyoto. Any honest account of this has to say so, and this one does.
What is claimed here is narrower and better documented. Starstruck is billed as America's first full-time karaoke restaurant: not a bar with a machine in the corner on a Tuesday, but a room built around the idea and open on it every night. Starstruck was also the first distributor of Pioneer's laser karaoke in the United States, which is the format that actually put karaoke into American nightlife. Lyrics on a screen, filling as you sing, no lyric sheet in your hand.
And there is a first that nobody disputes. He was doing it in Connecticut, out of Elvis Presley's Airstream, before almost anyone in the country had seen it.
One date used to be unsettled on this page and is not any more. The Cadillac Ranch Restaurant's own history put the Lake Compounce studio at 1984 and a Connecticut music-community account said 1986; rather than pick the flattering one, this site showed you both. Graham has since given his own written account, and it says 1984. That is now what the site says.
The year the Plainville room itself opened is still open: the Ranch's history says 1988, the Courant says the first full-time restaurant opened in 1989, and his notes give the order without the year.
Every figure on this page is sourced. The register is at /sources. The Hartford Courant's 1992 profile is the primary contemporaneous document, and it is the only one that puts the revenue, the Airstream and the Kyocera job in one place — but where Graham's own account contradicts it, as it does on the Airstream's provenance and on the number of rooms, his is the one followed.
This is what he sold America
Words on a screen, filling up as you sing them. In 1982 you had to fly to Japan to see this.
Old Time Rock and Roll
Bob Seger · 1978
Just take those old records off the shelf
I'll sit and listen to 'em by myself
Today's music ain't got the same soul
I like that old time rock and roll
Starstruck karaoke still runs at the Cadillac Ranch Restaurant every Wednesday and Thursday, on a digital system holding more than 220,000 songs.