I’m standing in the center of the Venice Beach Boardwalk on a stubbornly bright late afternoon in mid-September, watching a street vendor work amid smoothie and souvenir shops. He’s hawking a tangle of tiny ball pythons, their scaly heads poking out of a small basket. Elsewhere, bikers and skateboarders zip past tourists as they wander down the coastal avenue, some oozing plumes of marijuana smoke as they wheel away. Nearby, an artist hovers above a blank sheet of paper, spray can at the ready to make an abstract mark, as sneakers squeak along the concrete of a nearby pickup basketball game.
A few minutes later, the crunch of power chords jolts the sun-soused boardwalk. I don’t need to turn my head to know where the wailing electric guitar is coming from: It’s Harry Perry, a local celebrity I’m here to meet.
Even within a beachside community known for eccentric architecture, neighborhood characters and aspiring powerlifters, Perry stands apart. Since 1974, donning a turban and visor, he has sauntered up and down Ocean Front Walk — often roller-skating — while playing the guitar for onlookers, the sound emanating from an amplifier close by. The trim 75-year-old hauls a heavy cart bursting with T-shirts and CDs of his music for sale. In the rare moments that Perry isn’t strumming down the Venice Beach Boardwalk, he can usually be found in Temescal Canyon, where he often trains for marathons, or playing at the raucous Grateful Dead parking lot tailgates known as “Shakedown Street”; he’s been following various iterations of the jam band for about 50 years.
For Angelenos, Perry is as much a part of Venice Beach as the ocean itself. While growing up in the LA area in the 1980s, Evan Lovett of “L.A. in a Minute” remembers seeing Perry there when his “hippie” parents would take him down to the boardwalk as a child. “It was always a treat to see Harry Perry,” says Lovett. “He, to me, always represented that he was part of the Venice Beach Boardwalk.” His presence “added an atmosphere, and it added fun, and it added approachability to a place that was already so unique in an LA context,” he continues. “It really just felt like he was there because he felt he was meant to be there.”…