If you've watched the 2024 documentary Norman's Rare Guitars on Netflix, you know Norman Harris is one of the world's pre-eminent dealers of vintage guitars. The movie features generations of music legends, from Slash to Robbie Robertson to Post Malone, testifying that there's nowhere like his Southern California storefront to find rare and unique six-strings. While most of the doc is shot at Norman's Rare Guitars on Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana, Miami New Times readers might want to zero in on a few minutes at the outset, wherein Harris holds forth regarding his formative years in South Florida.

"I used to wake up at 6 a.m. and get the Miami Herald, the Sun-Sentinel, and the Hollywood (Florida) Sun-Tattler and go through all the classifieds so I could be the first person to buy an instrument for sale," Harris tells New Times over the phone.

Even before Harris was a seller of instruments, he was a player on any 1960s South Florida stage that would have him.

"When I was 7 or 8, I started taking piano lessons," he recounts. "My dad was very supportive he got me three or four lessons a week." At 13, he joined his first band, playing piano for an outfit called the Amazing Aztecs. "Someone saw us play in Miami and they booked us to play in upstate New York for two summers," he says

Harris was back in Miami for the Magic City's brief psychedelic rock heyday in 1968 and 1969, when Thee Image Club in Sunny Isles was pulling in the biggest names in rock. He played keyboards on the same bills as Eric Clapton and Frank Zappa. "I was in three different local bands that played there: Glass Menagerie, the Bangles (not to be confused with the 1980s band of 'Walk Like an Egyptian' fame), and Katmandu." Katmandu must've been something to behold; it was eventually managed by Little Richard and featured blue-eyed-soul artist Bobby Caldwell on bass. Unfortunately, you can't find Katmandu's music on streaming platforms, but copies of the band's first and only album, 1971's eponymous Katmandu pop up online.

"Katmandu recorded that album in one day at Criterion," Harris says. "They had a 16-track recording unit, and we played a kind of R&B rock."

But Harris found he was too much of a perfectionist to stay with being a performer. "I was always my biggest critic as a musician."

It was Katmandu that led him to his life's work. "Bobby Caldwell and our other Bob, Jabo, were both guitarists. Neither had a bass. So I bought one I saw for sale in the Miami Herald. All the bass players in town wanted it. People were offering $400 for it, and I only paid $125 to get it."

As a young, married man who foresaw starting a family, Harris saw selling vintage guitars as a more reliable source of income than booking gigs. Though he was trained on piano, guitars offered far more promise as a specialty, not least because of their portability advantage. "I learned about guitars as I got into it," Harris says. "There was no internet. There were no reference books. There were no stores that specialized in vintage instruments. I learned from some old geezers in Miami when I was a teenager." G.L. Styles and John Black. They did guitar repairs, and I would milk them for info."

By the early 1970s, Harris and the rest of Katmandu had moved to LA. The band fizzled, but the side hustle blew up. At first, he based his business out of the apartment he shared with his wife, selling guitars to the likes of George Harrison and Bob Dylan. Starting in 1975, Norman's Rare Guitars was a brick-and-mortar destination, where Eddie Van Halen, Tom Petty, were frequent customers, as was the film industry, to which he provided vintage instruments for films like Back to the Future and This Is Spinal Tap.

Fifty years later, Norman and his vintage guitars are a California institution. But the proprietor's mind is often in Miami. "My roots are down there," he says. "There was a real scene in Miami."