For more than three decades, Scott Paris was a fixture of Northeast Ohio’s live music scene, performing up to 200 shows a year in bars, clubs, casinos and festivals.
Now, the longtime Canton-based musician is reflecting on his career in a new book, “A Guitar Called Harry V and the Cover Band Conundrum,” a memoir told through journal entries chronicling his life with one special guitar.
“This was never meant to be autobiographical. It really is the story of a boy and a guitar,” Paris wrote in the book’s opening lines.
The guitar at the heart of the story is a Fender Acoustasonic Telecaster, which Paris purchased in January 2024 and called “my sword in the stone, my one ring to rule them all.”
“On a Friday night, I might be solo acoustic at a little bar, and then Saturday, I might have to do a big rock performance with a band at a festival or a casino,” he said. “For years, there was never one guitar that you could just take everywhere.”
That cherry-red and wood-accented guitar became an important part of where Paris decided to head in his career.
“A guitar’s a tool for me, the way your car is a tool for you. It gets you somewhere,” he said. “I found it, and I thought, ‘OK, I’m keeping this for a while.’”
Naming his collection of stories
Paris named the guitar “Harry V” after a chance encounter with actor Alan Tudyk at a fan expo in Cleveland.
A self-proclaimed nerd and sci-fi lover, Paris used to tour with the now-defunct Wizard World Comic Con, performing as part of its traveling house band.
When he met Tudyk, who played Harry Vanderspeigle on the TV show “Resident Alien,” Paris asked him to autograph the guitar, right above the “Resident Alien” sticker plastered to the back.
He signed both his real name and his character’s name on the instrument. Paris said he had never nicknamed a guitar before, but at that moment, he christened his “Harry V.”
“Now it’s got a personality and a persona,” he said. “And then I ran with that.”
Paris’ book captures a full year of gigging with Harry V by his side in 2024.
“A guitar’s a tool for me, the way your car is a tool for you. It gets you somewhere."Scott Paris
He and his bandmates wanted an excuse to see each other more outside of playing music, so they started a podcast where they shared stories from decades of gigging together.
Paris changed storytelling formats as the podcast began to wind down and started journaling about his guitar, gradually filling up notebooks until he had enough material to bind it all together.
“Every time you see a date, I wrote that entry that day,” he said.
Whether it was a winery, a festival, or a water park, Paris documented the load-ins, the crowds, the anxiety — and the gear malfunctions.
“I tried to keep putting my perspective as talking to someone who doesn’t play,” he said. “Like if you’re not a musician, you don’t know that I have to load my gear in through the kitchen of the place, or I have to take an elevator two flights up and then load it through all these hallways you’ll never see.”
The resulting story is a behind-the-scenes look into the life of a working musician, hustling from one gig to the next, not moving to Nashville, New York or Los Angeles to break into the business and become a celebrity, but amassing a loyal fanbase closer to home.
“I’ve put out lots of original music, played to empty venues because it was original and no one knew what it was, so no one showed up,” Paris said. “And I’d done nights where I played top-20 certified hit songs all night because I learned them.”
That balancing act between original artistry and commercial cover gigs is what Paris calls the “cover band conundrum.”
He and his band, The Imaginary Cookies, formed two decades ago when Paris realized playing cover songs could provide financial stability.
“We used to sneer at cover bands. And then, you know, I got married and we started to have kids. Bills got very real,” Paris said.
He said playing cover songs allowed him to fund his creative endeavors.
Paris said writing about “the cover band conundrum” and his adventures with his trusted guitar will be of interest to casual music fans, other musicians or those who like to peek behind the curtain for more about the life of an artist.
”When we share these stories, it’s like the old guys at McDonald’s at nine in the morning talking about Vietnam," he said. “You connect with other people who’ve seen the things you’ve seen.”
Playing for fun
As 2024 came to a close, Paris found himself facing a turning point. With no gigs booked for 2025 and a growing sense of burnout, he decided to step back from performing.
“I really did kind of go through, I don’t know if you call it a ‘midlife crisis,’ but like a kind of like an ‘Oh my God, what am I doing? I sing in bars for a living,’” he said.
Thinking about how his “big break” hadn’t come and playing gig after gig wasn’t sustainable long-term, Paris landed a non-music day job to support his family.
He now performs only occasionally, when it feels right. But he has no regrets.
In the final pages of his story collection, Paris wrote a poignant message to his children:
“Just fall in love with something, anything. And if it sucks, give that up and try something different. And don’t let anybody tell you that you have to have your life put together.”
More than a farewell, “A Guitar Called Harry V and the Cover Band Conundrum” is a love letter to the life of an independent musician, filled with the raw highs and lows of an artist who never quite “made it,” but still made his music matter.
