Scatman John rose from humble bar pianist to global fame in the mid-90s, but his addictions took their toll.
By: Gina Waggott / The Telegraph
Translation: Telegrafi.com
It was one of the strangest phenomena in music history. By the end of 1995, the biggest-selling male artist in Europe was not Michael Jackson, nor any of the arrogant new Britpop stars, but a 52-year-old American jazz pianist with a pronounced stutter. He had a history of heroin addiction and had no particular interest in fame. But he knew how to “run away” – to energize songs with a flood of “du-bi-du” improvisations and other riffs – at a speed never before heard of. His name was John Paul Larkin, but he was better known as Scatman John.
Born in El Monte, California, in 1942, Larkin grew up at a time when stuttering was widely seen not as a neurological condition but as a psychological deficiency: a sign of nervousness or weakness. The humiliation he experienced as a child never left him. Forced to read a news article in front of his classmates, Larkin couldn’t even get the first word out: “The.” He stood there, shaking, while the other kids laughed. Minutes passed, and the teacher still didn’t let him go. Later, he would recall that humiliation as endless—a moment that convinced him he was broken. He was able to recite that article word for word for the rest of his life.
John Paul Larkin performing on the piano in Amsterdam, circa 1993(Lee Newman)
If speech was a prison, music was his key. Larkin discovered the piano at age 12, inspired by watching Dave Brubeck on television; at the keyboard, stuttering—what Larkin called “the ever-present saboteur”—no longer hindered him. Listening to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, he realized that what they did consciously in music, he did unconsciously. Jazz, with its emphasis on improvisation and freedom, became his language.
As a young man, Larkin began playing in clubs along the West Coast of the United States, absorbing big-bop and blues. He was technically accomplished, spiritually prepared, and extremely serious about his music. But a steady stream of alcohol and drugs—used to bridge the gap between musical confidence and social terror—later forced him to live a more sedate, sober life. In the early 90s, Larkin married his second wife, Judy, and settled into a modest existence as a bar pianist in Germany, playing inconspicuous background music for patrons who could barely lift their heads from their drinks.
It was there, at an age when most musicians were winding down, that he began an unlikely transformation. Manfred Zähringer, head of Iceberg Records in Denmark, who had hired Larkin on cruise ships and hotels, suggested combining his improvisational [scat] singing with contemporary dance music. Larkin was skeptical. He viewed electronic music with suspicion, and Zähringer remembers thinking, “A jazz musician would never accept this.” But Larkin had little to lose. He also saw an opportunity: pop music could allow him to reach children, especially those who, like him, felt excluded because of their differences.
Encouraged by Judy, he agreed and decided to debut a song about stuttering itself. He teamed up with producers Ingo Kays and Tony Catania, and the result was Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop) — a song that was fun and absurd on the surface, but one that was underpinned by a serious message. “Everyone stutters in one way or another,” he sang. “If Skeetman can do it, so can you.” Such confident lyrics — and yet, when the single was released in late 1994, Larkin was terrified. He expected ridicule, the mockery of class amplified on a global scale.
At the age of 53, the global hit "Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop)" catapulted Larkin to fame.(Frank Hempel/United Archives/Getty)
Instead, the record exploded. By the summer of 1995, Scatman John was at the top of the charts in a dozen countries. Clubs played the song nonstop. Kids loved it. In Japan, “Scatman mania” reached near-hysterical levels: he was surrounded at airports; his face was printed on phone cards and reproduced on dolls. ScatmanIn Europe, it appeared on the can of Coca-Cola-s. At the age of 53, a man who once could barely pronounce his own name had become one of the most recognizable voices on the planet.
Skepticism arose when, occasionally speaking to the press, Larkin spoke more fluently. Amidst suggestions that his stutter was a ploy to sell records, Larkin decided to stutter openly whenever he was interviewed or performed live. “It was the first time I felt ashamed that I didn’t stutter,” he admitted. He never again tried to soften or hide it. This refusal became the silent radicalism of his career.
Scatman John's craze spread across Europe in 1995; in Japan he was mobbed at the airport(Lee Newman)
But the road to fame was paved with rubble. Before he recovered, Larkin had survived overdoses, hospitalizations, and repeated arrests. Losing control could be spectacular - he once lifted his electric piano Wurlitzer, weighing 25 kilograms - during a performance - and had thrown it on a table with people who were teasing him. Recovery did not come as a triumphant epiphany, but through hard work: Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, self-analysis and a difficult process of learning how to live - and speak - without alcohol or drugs. (The stuttering, however, never went away. Speech therapy offered only limited relief.)
Larkin's success was intense and short-lived. He recorded three albums, toured relentlessly, and received thousands of letters from people who called themselves outsiders and didn't fit in. Once, Judy found him near tears, surrounded by stacks of fan letters. He couldn't read them all. "What if there's another me?" he said, despairingly.
I was one of the isolated admirers who wrote to him. In 1997, as a teenager, I was hiding my stutter, avoiding the same kind but futile advice Larkin had received his whole life: “Slow down, breathe, think ahead.” To my surprise, he responded—not as a celebrity, but as another stutterer. “You belong with us,” he told me. We became close friends. I ran his website for years.
But by 1998, Larkin’s health was failing. Years of substance abuse had taken their toll, and, belatedly diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer, his condition deteriorated rapidly. When I visited him shortly before his death, the man in the fedora was gone. In his place was a fragile, spiritual soul, having made peace with his strange second act. “I had the best life possible,” he told me. “I enjoyed beauty.” He died in December 1999, aged 57, just four years after his global breakthrough.
After the death of his wife Judy in 2023, I felt the time was approaching for his untold story. With the blessing of his family, I began to reconstruct Larkin’s life and discovered a preface to an autobiography he had never finished. “Only a stutterer,” he had written, “could write a book like this.” That’s when I knew it had to be me.
From left to right: Larkin, his wife Judy, and Larkin's stepson, Lee, in 1997, two years before John's death(Lee Newman)
His early jazz recordings—technically assured, passionate and fiery—are now resurfacing, offering a clearer picture of how his late, accidental fame obscured, rather than revealed, his talent. The millions who bought his dance hits rarely recognized the obsessive virtuoso in hiding. As Scatman John, he lives on in memes, remixes and nostalgic playlists; his songs have been streamed more than half a billion times. A new generation has embraced him wholeheartedly—not as a hotshot, but as a wounded, authentic man who refused to hide what made him different.
In the end, Larkin didn't "beat" his stuttering. He stopped running from it, and in doing so, he gave others permission to do the same. "I hope that children, as they sing along to my songs or dance to them, feel that life isn't so bad," he said. "If only for a minute." /Telegraph/
