Some harmonies seem just meant to happen. — Most famously, back in 1968 Graham Nash was invited to Joni Mitchell’s house up in Laurel Canyon to meet a couple of her friends, Stephen Stills and David Crosby. The pair had just written a couple songs together, and Nash, a member of the Hollies, instantly broke into harmony when they started singing “You Don’t Have to Cry.”
“I thought I was gonna die,” Crosby later recalled. “I thought my heart was gonna jump right through my mouth. It was about the rightest thing I ever heard.”
Thus was born one of the great harmony groups in the history of American music.
The story of how Jake Burman met John Ackerman is considerably less heralded but likewise involves a spontaneous moment of harmony and many roads to follow. It happened at an eighth grade party in a small town in Michigan. John was from the agricultural town of Ida. Jake was from up the road a little ways, from a town called Monroe.
They had mutual friends and each arrived at the party guitar in hand. They started singing a Dashbord Confessional cover, and something special happened. Jake was startled when he heard John’s voice soar over his, hitting a higher octave perfectly, note for note.
Both kids stopped in the tracks for a moment. Both loved the Beatles, but neither had ever experienced this kind of harmony before. It was about the rightest thing either of them had ever heard.
Soon they were regularly playing parties together.
“Lots of 9th or 10th grade parties,” Jake recalled. “We’d end up jamming off in some room, impressin’ ladies.”
In high school they started writing their own songs. Soon their harmonies became more complex and their sound started grabbing people’s attention. They played a few cafes and shared gigs with John’s father’s band. Eventually, they both went to the same college – the University of Toledo, in Ohio – and the music just kept going.
It was so natural they didn’t give it that much thought. But as friends started entering the post-college job market, mid-recession, without success, it occurred to the duo that music made as much sense as an occupation as anything else. “Lots of friends from college were getting jobs and they weren’t much older than me,” John said. “That was the path I was on. So I was like, ‘Shit, I’m just going to play music for a while.’”
Two years ago, John hopped in his parents’ PT Cruiser and drove west. He had lined up an internship, but more than anything he’d decided California was the place he ought to be. Jake went along for the ride, but shortly after arriving decided to stay. They had the misfortune of spending their first months in Ventura County just off the 101.
“Where we lived wasn’t very good,” John said. “It was just a big neighborhood of big houses and unfriendly people.”
Then they found the South Bay. They knew the very day they drove into Hermosa Beach they’d found the place of their California dreams –the place they could make their musical stand.
“We came down here and it was so refreshing,” John said. “It was awesome.”
By accident, they also discovered the legendary apartment above the Green Store on Hermosa Avenue. A friend’s friend had lived there and they stopped by, found it vacant, then moved in the next day. They had no idea it was the place Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys had lived and surfed during the musical halcyon days of the 1960s. They converted the one-room studio apartment into a combination bedroom, jam room (with Beatles and Dylan vinyl records hung on the walls alongside guitars and Who concert posters) and songwriting lair.
Jake remembers sitting on the front stairs when an old neighborhood character stopped by and inquired about “Denny’s place.” It was the first he’d heard of his new home’s Beach Boys’ roots.
“I was like, ‘Really, man? That’s pretty cool,” he said.
Jake and John, who are both 22, have now lived above the Green Store going on two years. In that time, they have perfected their harmonies and written an album’s worth of songs. During the last year, their music has gained momentum, starting from a series of performances at Fat Face Fenner’s Fishshack that led to L.A. gigs at Genghis Cohen and Room 5. They play The Shore in Hermosa this Monday.
Local musician and promoter Fred Milani has taken the two young musicians under his wing, arranging gigs and bringing Jake into his Acoustic Warriors band. He raves about Jake’s ability as a multi-instrumentalist (he plays banjo and piano as well as guitar) and singer, and particularly praises the duo’s Beatle-esque harmonies. The comparison doesn’t stop there.
“John’s a young John Lennon, but with McCartney vocal range,” Milani said. “He has an impeccable ear for harmony and blows harmonica with a tone and passion beyond his years.”
Indeed, Jake and John show flashes of startlingly large potential. Their song “Paper Plate” is vocally and lyrically reminiscent of Lennon – the song, without being derivative, has that beautifully winsome and sadly wise quality of Revolver-era Beatles. Jake and John are at the beginning of something.
Such harmony rarely, if ever, happens by accident. That a road that began at an eighth grade party in Michigan has lead to a Beach Boys landmark is auspicious. And sometimes, both Jake and John swear, in the midst of a song somebody in the room seems to be softly singing along.
“Sometimes when we are jamming, just doing our thing, I feel a third person in here,” John said. “It’s eerie, and I don’t know why.” ER
Jake and John play The Shore at 10 p.m. Monday, April 18 and Room 5 in LA at 9 p.m. May 14.
