snmag.com

It’s 9:30pm at the Roxy – Jonny and his band are about to take the stage, but not before we drag Jonny off to a secluded area of the car park and molest him with questions, Rock Star style. Jonny, a graduate of NYU and a self -proclaimed ‘nerd’, is wearing red cowboy boots and a tie. He talks to us with an intelligent ease and approachable friendliness as we sit surprisingly comfortably on the concrete. His concentration and passion for the music never waivers, even when we nearly get run over twice.


You’re about to go on stage: Are you nervous?

No, I’m excited.

Do you ever get nervous?

I get nervous after, it’s weird. I’ve been playing since I was 5 or 6, so I’ve grown up performing and have never really developed that kind of phobia. I’m also really critical, I’ll play back the show, but as of lately it’s been pretty smooth sailing, knock on rock [laughs]. We’ve just been playing so much that it’s like in a really nice, comfortable place right now.

How old are you?

I’m 28.

When did you guys form?

We formed about 2 and a half or 3 years ago. John Weber the drummer and I started the band. We enlisted Tommy U.S.A [bass] and then we met Christian [guitar] in England actually, when we were on tour.

I read that you wrote half the record in England…

Yeah, we did 6 tours of England over the last two years, on my credit card basically, before we were with the label. I just had seen my friend’s in NY bands go over there first and it seemed a really obvious thing to do just because all of my main musical influences, like The Kinks and The Who and The Jam. I wanted to see what was in the water.

Do you find it inspirational?

Totally. I think that American rock culture is just reaching a point that the English rock culture had been at a few years ago. With the use of MySpace and all that, it’s really allowing Indie kids in every city to find what’s really good instead of stuff that’s on the radio and MTV. In England, radio and TV aren’t as corporately dictated, radio especially.

Yeah, I find that a lot more diverse types of music get into the charts in England…

Now I think that it’s catching up and it’s a really exciting time to be in a band because good music is starting to make a comeback, which is exciting to me.

Are you going to go back?

Oh yes, in January or February we’re going to go back.

Where?

I don’t know, basically we are touring all of America until then and that tour may be extended so we haven’t actually booked the dates yet. We’re going on three loops of America, touring the whole country. We’re going on tour with Everclear.

Everclear are on 11/7 too right? How have the label been?

It’s really cool; it’s a new kind of model of a record label. It’s a lot more of sitting in the back of a van and sharing one hotel room and not eating too much. But that is actually a really smart thing to do because at the end of the day we don’t owe a million dollars to anybody and it’s going to allow us to have much more of a career, but we’re still not giving up the business side of things in terms of promoting the record and stuff like that.

You were born and grew up in New Jersey right? How do the scenes differ, Los Angeles and New York?

I went out to a crazy fucking party last night; do you know the Demac label? It’s Steve Aoki, a DJ who started this really cool Indie Label and he throws this party at Cinespace, and it was absolutely off the hook! He was DJ’ing and it was a total dance party in one room, and there was bands playing in the other room and it was just jammed with people from all over the place. It was really exciting to be here, I felt a lot of the energy. LA is way more spread out than New York City, so you have to do a lot more to initiate people to come out. But this is the entertainment capitol of the world – there is so much music going on and coming out of here, and now I’m starting to see a whole different side to the business - putting music into films and TV, and that’s really cool too because you can just sit down on your lap top and make songs and that’s another way to have the music work for us.
 

It seems like it’s a different time for musicians now to be in bands because they have all these different technological opportunities opening up for them that weren’t there for kids when they were starting up even 10 or 15 years ago…

Oh it’s crazy - you can make a record in your bedroom! It definitely is changing. You can do everything from a wireless laptop, from making the record to promoting it on MySpace, to setting up your tours and everything. It’s definitely a time of empowerment for an artist to really do stuff for themselves.

But do you think it’s empowering or is it actually more difficult?

It’s a double-edged sword. It’s not just about the music anymore now, from certain industry perspectives, they’re also looking at how you’ve marketed yourself to see if they want to get involved with a project. It puts a lot more responsibility on the artist to have their shit together, so to speak. I don’t know if Jimmy Hendrix would have sat on MySpace for 6 hours a day to get his songs out to the kids. He would have been busy dropping acid and writing songs. I definitely see both sides. On the other side, it’s amazing for me to go online and talk to a fan in Bristol or Australia or China, where I have no reach to possibly even get there, but my music can get there and I can talk to these kids and create a relationship with fans. There is a lot more direct communication between artist and fan. The era of the rock star is changing. Fans want more of a realistic person behind the music, and not this pompous, arrogant, snotty rock star.

I’ve noticed that bands like Weezer and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, their websites put content up that are very personal, like blogs and journals. They are just guys out on the road writing…

And that’s the stuff that really ties it all together because you get a better perspective of the writer and where the songs are coming from… but then there is always that mystique of the rock star, which is very romantic as well. It’s a contradiction.

What do you find your fan-base is like? Who are you playing to?

It’s very, very, very diverse. I mean, we were in this video game a couple years ago, NVP Baseball [EA Sports]. It sold 4 million copies so we have a ton of young fans. Today we just did an online show for this gaming community. I also went on tour with Meatloaf last summer, opening up for him solo, acoustic, playing for 6-10,000 people every night. The audience was like, 45, and their 12-year-old kids, and so I had fathers and their daughters coming up to me, and they both were into the music. We’re inspired by classic rock so a lot of 40 and 50 year olds pick up on that because our influences are The Birds and The Kinks and The Who, and all that stuff in the 60’s. It definitely crosses a lot of barriers.

Tell us what we can expect from the new album, Get Steady…

It’s a collection of songs that document my experiences growing up in and around the city, going to NYU, bartending and going out every night since I was eighteen. It chronicles the stories of what happens downtown at 3:30am and what happens the next day as a consequence of that, and just watching it all unfold. The city has changed a lot over that time and the songs tell those stories. One song, ‘Everybody’s trying to break you down’, is inspired by Yoko Ono ‘Peace’ which is where she sat on stage at Radio City Music Hall in a sack and had audience members come up with scissors and cut off a piece of the sack until she was left completely naked. I wrote this song about a bartender who was basically having that happen to her, standing behind the bar having these customers rip into her. A lot of the songs are like that; taking one thing that inspires me and telling the story in another way through the music. I’m a huge, huge fan of melody. I think if you can’t hum a tune in 4 bars and know the song; it’s not a good song. It’s a lot of songs to sing along to.

You mentioned Yoko Ono and some outside stuff…bands like Dredge have mentioned that they are influenced by stuff, not just necessarily music, are there other forms of art like novels that inspire you as an artist?

Yeah, I studied philosophy and literature at NYU, so I’m a huge nerd. I graduated 4^th in my class, I was a total bookworm at school.

What’s your favorite book?

It changes. I really like Walt Whitman. Right now I’m reading Hunter S. Thomson The Gonzo, papers volume 2, which are these great political essays. I’m a big fan of science fiction, I’m writing a screenplay right now about aliens and the holographic universe. As far as novels, Jitterbug Perfume is probably my one book that I’ve read a hundred times.

What about movies?

I’ve probably watched a hundred science fiction movies in the past month to do research for this film that I’m working on. The Princess Bride is probably my favorite movie of all time.

What do you think of the Matrix?

I love that. I’m a big futurist. I definitely think that there is some crazy shit that’s going on in the world, and something is about to happen if we don’t correct ourselves in terms of technology and oil and the way we live our lives. It’s not really in the music yet because I don’t really sit down to write. The way I write songs is that they always come to me a lot of times when I’m sleeping, but now that I’m working on the second record I think that my politics are going to leak through.

You based the first one around New York, so what’s the base going to be of the next one?
I think it’s really going to be about the world at large. The first one is about all the trouble and debauchery that I got into as a kid and I think the second one, from what I’ve got so far, is going to be about my experiences as a young adult. I’m looking forward to it; we’ll see what happens.

A lot of your influences are bands like Dead Kennedy’s and the New York Dolls – Is that accurate?
Dead Kennedy’s – I just love Jello Biafra and his whole approach to art. The New York Dolls, Television, Lou Reed, people who grew up in the same way. A lot of these folks are suburban kids who went into the city when they were 12 and did a bunch of drugs and got in a lot of trouble. I relate to that dualistic world of safety and danger colliding.

What do you think it is about listeners growing up now that are drawn to the resurrection of that kind of attitude and image?

It’s the real deal. The stories that they tell are real. It’s dangerous; the lives that they lived, the places that they lived, the squats that they lived in, the crime and the grit. It’s silly to glorify those days of New York, now that it’s a safer place to live and a better place to raise your kids, but it’s gotten a bit boring and gentrified. I think that all those artists, they really lived it and talked the talk and walked the walk and there was no bullshit to it.

That seems very significant here in LA, because it seems like the crime and the violence are getting worse not better…

If good art comes from it, it’s at a horrible cost. It’s not good that the rest of life is fucked because of it.

In the MySpace age, do you find it disheartening that bands don’t have the same cultural grass roots and knowledge of bands that you guys are influenced by?

It is sad that the kids that are growing up now are not directly tuned into this music, but it also is a tool to hip them to it. When they get turned on to newer bands and they check out the influences of those bands. I’m always recommending music to our younger fans on MySpace and getting thank you calls and messages about it.

I’m interested to know what you think about ‘Emo’ – it’s kind of a 4-letter-word with a lot of people, not even just as music but also as an aesthetic movement that’s started to gain power…

I’m not really crazy about the musical style. There’s not really a band that comes to mind in the genre that I am personally into, just because I am more interested in the roots of that music, like punk-rock, the Sex Pistols… Green Day is about the last chapter of the punk evolution that I checked out on, and I love Green Day – they are just great songwriters. I like the emotional and political and D.I.Y ethos that surrounds the style and genre. When we play for those crowds, they like our music because, at the end of the day, it’s about our songs. The whole ‘Screamo’ thing is just over my head. Someone once showed me the 8 different forms of death metal – that was an interesting lesson – from dark metal to death metal to thrash metal to devil metal…the way they scream…it’s very interesting because it’s such a stylized sub-genre. You don’t mess with the purest in that genre about that stuff because it’s very real to them. I respect that.

What are you doing after the show?

I don’t know… hanging out with you guys? [Laughs] We’re looking to go out and we don’t have to be up tomorrow until 2 o’clock, so we are looking to get into some trouble. You guys should take us out.

And finally…what do you do on a Saturday Night?
I really love to get out of the city on the weekends and go surfing out in Long Beach or Long Island. The city is so noisy and what I do for a living is so noisy. The weekend is what we call ‘amateur hour’ in Manhattan because it’s when all the people from outside the city come in and the bars fill up. There’s a great energy to it and I love to play on Saturday night, but when I have them off I love to get out into the absolute quiet and have a little rest. That’s the only way that I can recharge to get back into the van and play the next Saturday night.