Michele StuevenGuitarist Slash calls it a place of legend, a 10 on the orgasmic music scale. Actor Jeff Daniels says it’s a pilgrimage and a Shangri-La oasis for guitar players. Actor and musician Kiefer Sutherland says it’s been a revolving door in his life for 25 years. But for the owner of Norman’s Rare Guitars, it was just a side hustle to support his family.
Former Miami musician Norman Harris turned a small Tarzana shop into a global destination for guitar collectors and rock royalty alike.
From the giant 1970s brown leather coach that anchors the store, the walls have echoed with the sounds of Tom Petty, Machine Gun Kelly, Taylor Hawkins, Dave Grohl, Melissa Etheridge, Joe Bonamassa, and a teenage Post Malone before he had any tattoos. His customers, who casually come and go to try out the instruments, have included Bruce Springsteen, Keith Urban, Adam Levine, and Beck. Eddie Van Halen bought his first guitar from Harris.
Norm Harris, left, with Eddie Van Halen (Courtesy Norman Harris)
“I’ve been playing in bands since junior high school in Miami,” Harris tells LA Weekly from the brown couch of the store celebrating 50 years. “We were playing in Miami and recording in Criteria studios in a band called Katmandu, and Little Richard and his brother heard the band and brought us out to California to play for the president of warner bros records, Mo Ostin. They found us in about 1969, and we came out in 1970, hoping to make it big. I was already buying and selling some guitars in Miami as a side hustle. I wanted to raise and support a family, which you can’t always rely on being a musician.”
He’d go to musicians’ unions looking for old guitars and put ads in the Valley Green Sheet, now the LA Daily News. He’d cruise pawn shops and thrift stores. Then one day, he got a call from his buddy, who owned the University Music store in West LA.
“George Harrison had a guitar stolen from him in a rehearsal studio, which ended up being sold in a store in Hollywood,” says Harris. “They tracked down the guy who bought it at that store in good faith. He said sure, he’d love to give it back to George if he could get the same type of guitar in return. It was a rare, late 1950s Les Paul Standard, a guitar that Eric Clapton gave him as a gift. He went to my friend’s music store, who knew I had three of them. He called me up and I ran over there. So I brought George Harrison back to my small apartment in Sherman Oaks, and my wife almost fainted. The Beatles were a big deal at the time, sort of like Beyonce and the pope now.”
Norman Harris, left, and George Harrison (Courtesy Norman Harris)
One of the respondents to the Green Sheet ads was a guy named Robbie, who wanted to come over and see what Harris had (which was a three-bedroom valley apartment filled to the ceiling with guitars).
“He came over and introduced himself, and it turned out he was Robbie Robertson from The Band,” says Harris, whose life story has been beautifully documented in the Netflix film Norman’s Rare Guitars by Executive Producer Sutherland. “I was a big fan, but didn’t know what he looked like. He asked if he could bring a friend over. So he comes over with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell in tow. That pretty much put us on the map, and we had to open a store.”
The very first shop was a little less than 500 square feet. Soon it expanded to an 1800 square foot space on Tampa and Van Owen, and then moved to the current store in Tarzana, which is just shy of 6000 square feet.
Between the showroom, a secret hidden room, and the warehouse, Harris doesn’t even know how many guitars he has. Some have been worth as much as $35,000 a piece. At one point, he had 800 guitars in a personal collection. Also a dealer for Gibson, Fender, and others, it’s about 1,500 in total.
Replica and reproduction of the guitar Norm provided Joni Mitche in The Last Waltz (Michele Stueven)
He’s rented out instruments for countless films, including Bound For Glory with David Carradine, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, and the iconic red guitar played by Michael J. Fox in Back To The Future.
“Now Gibson is trying to do a documentary about finding that guitar from Back To The Future,” he says. “ I had originally sold it to a friend of mine that I went to school with in Miami. He passed away, and his wife sold it, and now they’re looking for it. Three years later, they did Back To The Future 2, and they wanted to duplicate the guitar, and I didn’t have it anymore. We found something very similar, which worked for the movie, but there’s one little distinguishing difference. On the 12th fret of the guitar, the mother-of-pearl inlay was a solid block on the original. On the Back to the Future 2 guitar, the inlay was split in half. We found that one, but we are still looking for the original.”
During the filming of the documentary, which was written and co-produced by his daughter Sarah Edwards, Harris was diagnosed with appendiceal neoplasm cancer in 2022, which was followed by two heart attacks. It put the future of Norman’s Rare Guitars in limbo. One possible heir apparent is loyal customer and legendary blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa.
Norman’s Rare Guitars in Tarzana (Michele Stueven)
“The instruments that he’s sold to these A-list people have been used to make music that has changed the landscape of Rock & Roll,” Bonamassa says in the documentary of the LA staple who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for causes including The Midnight Mission, disaster relief, and music education. “The songs they come up with on these instruments live forever.”
“Different guitars do different things,” says Harris. “I call them functional art. Some art you point at on the wall and look at for five minutes, but this makes music and sounds and plays differently in a million different applications. Every time you think you know what that application is, somebody shows up with a guitar doing something not even intended, and it just seems to work.”
Visit Norman’s Rare Guitars at 18969 Ventura Blvd, Tarzana, or online at normansrareguitars.com.
Norman Harris on the August 22, 2025 cover of LA Weekly (Photo: Jen Angkahan)