Scatman John - Biography

Biography

Born in El Monte, California, Larkin suffered from a severe stutter since his beginning of speech which led to an emotionally traumatic childhood. Even at the peak of his success in 1995, journalists reported that during interviews he “hardly finishes a sentence without repeating the phrase at least six or seven times.” At age twelve he began to learn piano, and was introduced to the art of scat singing at the age of fourteen through records by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, amongst others. The piano provided him with a means of artistic expression to compensate for his speech difficulties. He remarked in a 1996 interview that “playing piano gave me a way to speak… I hid behind the piano when I was performing because I was scared of talking.”

Larkin became a professional jazz pianist in the 1970s and '80s, playing many gigs in jazz clubs around Los Angeles. In 1986, he released the self-titled album John Larkin on the Transition label, copies of which are now extremely rare. He claimed to have “hundreds of them lying around in closet at home.” Around this time, alcoholism and drug addiction were also beginning to take a hold of his life. When fellow musician and friend Joe Farrell, who also had a drug problem, died of bone cancer in 1986, Larkin decided to beat his habits. He eventually did so, largely with the help of his old friend Wilson McCutchan and his new wife Judy, also a recovering alcoholic. “You have talent,” she told him. “I’m going to make something out of you.”