The beat goes on for Joey Harris, who recalls ‘heaven on earth’ youth in Coronado
By David L. Coddon
Like countless musicians, Joey Harris realized he wanted to be one when, as a kid in 1964, he watched The Beatles perform on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
“I was hooked after that. That was all I wanted to be. I wanted to be a Beatle,” said Harris, a Coronado-raised San Diego music fixture.
While Harris, now 66, has never attained Fab Four fame – who has? – he’s enjoyed a long and, he’ll tell you, immensely satisfying career as a man of many bands. He’s best known for his years as vocalist/guitarist for legendary local band the Beat Farmers. Harris has also fronted the SoCal bands the Fingers and the Speedsters and has been part of Beat Farmers cohort Jerry Raney’s Powerthud as well as Country Dick Montana’s Snuggle Bunnies.
He’s played everywhere from Hollywood clubs to dives in San Diego that no longer exist. And he played at the very first Street Scene in 1990. In fact, he married his wife, Vicki, onstage there.
Today he’s busy with his trio Joey Harris and The Mentals (with bassist Jeff Kmak and drummer Tim Peterson). “Years ago, I decided never to rehearse again,” Harris said. “What we do now is we have a set of songs that we play, and I ask and expect the band to improvise during every song. It’s really fun for me.”
Among Harris’ other side projects is playing with The Tighten Ups, a rock and soul outfit featuring vocalist Laura Jane Wilcock.
Harris’ lengthy and colorful musical history is populated by figures like Dave (the Blasters) Alvin, Tina Turner’s manager Roger Davies and the inimitable Mojo Nixon. With the help of Harris, Nixon recorded his first album in a makeshift studio in Harris’ mother’s house on Star Park Circle.

That house — also known as the summer house of L. Frank Baum — looms large in Harris’ adolescent years. His family had moved from Coronado to a ranch in Alpine, then back to the island when Harris was about 9 years old.
“All through the second half of the ’60s and right up until ’75 when I moved away, that house was the center of activity for all sorts of surfing kids,” recalled Harris, a 1975 Coronado High School graduate. “For a while it turned into almost a boarding house, mostly boys. The house became this wonderful, crazy sort of commune. People were climbing in and out of windows at all hours of the night.
“It was just heaven on earth. When the hippie kids arrived, that just made everything better.”
His mother owned the Chowder House restaurant, on the site of what is now Chez Loma. His stepfather, Pike Meade, was a teacher at Coronado High School.
“My family had a stature in town,” Harris said. “I loved being from Coronado. The wonderful thing about it is we were raised in paradise, in a destination for people to come and have fun.
“My folks’ house faced the park. They agreed to start having parties after the Fourth of July parade on the porch. It became a tradition.”

Harris’ uncle Nick Reynolds was a founding member of the iconic pop-folk group Kingston Trio. Early in his own career, Harris played lead guitar for another San Diego member of the trio, John Stewart.
“One year, John Stewart came down and played with us,” Harris said of the traditional Star Park Circle porch parties. It looked like Woodstock there: the crowd all the way up Flora Avenue, all the way up Loma Avenue, completely packed with people.”
Yet Harris reserves his most thoughtful moments of nostalgia for years spent with the Beat Farmers and particularly with the late Dan McLain, aka Country Dick Montana.
He remembers first seeing McLain with his band the Penetrators: “He’d come out from behind his drum set and do a couple of numbers as a character that he invented. He was tall and thin, and he’d be in Ray Ban glasses and a gold lamé jacket. There’d be a bodyguard with a tommy gun standing on each side of the stage. It was the beginning of his idea of a Las Vegas sort of entertainer character.
“Everybody just fell in love with that ‘bass, bass bass-y voice.’ I immediately thought ‘I need to be a part of this.’”
The Beat Farmers disbanded shortly after McLain died playing drums during a show in Whistler, British Columbia, in 1995. “He was really a calculating and effective promoter for himself and for the Beat Farmers,” Harris said. “I also lost probably my best friend.”
In retrospect, Harris said, “I will to my grave say to anybody who cares or listens that the 10 years I spent with Dan and the Beat Farmers was just the best time I’ve ever had in my life — aside from raising my boy (Will, now 21), who’s turned out to be a stellar individual.”
Those memories of Fourth of July at Star Park haven’t faded either.
Harris recounted flying from San Diego to New York sometime in the ’90s seated next to a man who, during the course of conversation, told him that he’d partied outside the Harris house on one of those Independence Days.
“I’m famous,” Harris said with a chuckle, “for being the kid who was on the porch at those parties.”
David Coddon is a Southern California-based freelance writer.
Great story, Dave