# America's first full-time karaoke restaurant — the claim

URL: https://www.grahamnicholson.com/karaoke

Last updated: 2026-10-15T22:45:13.139Z

> Graham Nicholson saw karaoke in Kyoto in 1982 and opened America's first full-time karaoke restaurant in Plainville, Connecticut. The dates and the sources.

## The karaoke claim

## Who brought karaoke to America?

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.

## 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.

## This is what he sold America