Rescuing Rock and Roll from Irony's Cold
Smoke Up Johnny
Rescuing Rock and Roll from Irony's Cold Grip
by Katherine Whitworth
Photo by Rett Peek
"Okay—who wants to play?"
It's an auspicious beginning for any rock and roll band to have their first practice busted by the cops. It was the fall of 2005, and Smoke Up Johnny had come together in bassist Matt Floyd's back-yard garage in Levy. Apparently the neighbors felt that North Little Rock's finest deserved an invitation, and before the band could get through a six-pack they were asked to relocate to the other side of the river.
Two years and several destroyed practice spaces later, Smoke Up Johnny have released their self-titled debut, on Thick Syrup Records. The band formed, as many bands do, somewhat by accident. Frontman Alan Disaster (no, it's not; you can ask, but he won't say much more than "It's a West Coast thing...I was drunk a lot"), drummer Jon Rice, and then guitarist Andy Conrad (a.k.a. A.C. Danger) had played together in Queen Cobra (along with Ryan "Straw" Britton and the late Steven Calhoun); Disaster and Floyd had been buddies for years but had never played together, despite talking about it many times.
Smoke Up Johnny is the product of a shared compulsive need to play music coupled with the simple fact that the band did not already exist. "If I'm not in a band, I'm thinking about what my next band is going to be," says Disaster. "Sometimes when a band breaks up, it's like 'Wow, on my days off I can just sit around my house.' But then a couple months later, it's like 'Okay—who wants to play?'" Rice seconds that emotion: "I've probably in the last 11 years not been in a band for about a month and a half total." A drunken argument disbanded Queen Cobra, which Disaster describes as a "musical mess," in 2003; in late 2005, the timing was right for Disaster and Floyd to finally combine punk-rock/hard-rock forces. Danger hopped right on board, and Rice followed with a bit of persuading.
It was a rocky start. "For the first six months, everyone called us 'Break-Up Johnny,'" says Floyd. Everything that could possibly go wrong—starting with the police showing up at their first practice—went wrong. They were kicked out of one practice space. They blew the electricity first out of the downstairs, then the upstairs, of another. Amplifiers were fried. Cops were called (again). Practices were canceled because everyone was too drunk to play.
"We've been through fucking hell," says Rice. But they kept at it, and that hell finally culminated about six months ago with the band's decision to oust guitarist A.C. Danger. "Basically, he was missing a lot of practices," explains Disaster, maintaining that they are personally on good terms. Within a few days, they had recruited Corey Bacon, of Real Fighting, who brings to the band not only an extensive collection of Thin Lizzy t-shirts but a smoking (ha) guitar technique that requires no on-stage acrobatics to prove its impressive point. He was their first choice, and was incorporated upon arrival at his first practice. "We told him he was in before we even asked him if he wanted to be in," says Floyd, laughing. It's been onward and upward ever since.
Though Alan admits that the band in its infancy lacked a definitive sound, that sound did eventually develop into what he now describes as straight-up, solid "good time rock and roll." That may seem like too simple a description, but it's accurate. The music is propulsive and catchy, hooky without being cloying, and crafted of familiar chord changes built upon a foot-stomping, head-shaking, air-drumming foundation.
"Good time" is a key phrase here—within a couple of minutes of watching them it becomes endearingly evident that these guys really like to play together. At a recent practice, they arranged themselves in a square and watched each other, laughing, while they played. It looks at times as if they are participating in a sport in which guitars serve as rackets: Floyd will play a little something, look at Bacon, smile, and toss the line to him; Bacon, grinning broadly, will catch it and play something back. Watching this sort of interaction is a little like watching people having an obviously delightful conversation in another language—you might not know exactly what they're talking about, but you know they sure are enjoying themselves.
Photo by Rett Peek
"I say 'fuck' in almost every song."
Their enthusiasm for playing makes the songs more fun to listen to, as does the fact that their music is completely devoid of agenda, posturing, and affectation. It's honest. They make the recent years' crop of bring-back-rock-and-rollers look like media-constructed automatons who beg the question "bring it back from where?" "I hope we're never compared to the Strokes," says Disaster. According to Smoke Up Johnny, rock and roll has been here all along.
In keeping with the good-time feel, band practice is largely about beer (as is their practice space—PBR should pay them for the advertising that visitors are subjected to). Between takes, they tell stories of the hard livin' bad old days before wives, kids, and the physical realities of being 30-plus reduced the party-hearty lifestyle to so many 45s in the anecdote jukebox. And this is not at all to say that we're dealing with a bunch of straight-laced old fogies here—the youngest member of the band is 24, and the oldest, at 39, is the wildest. The space's unofficial mascot is a mounted deer head named "Cokie" whose nose looks sort of melted and leaks plaster dust when tapped with a drumstick. They use a lot of euphemisms. They can't get a song on NPR.
"I say 'fuck' in almost every song," says Disaster matter-of-factly, referring to the 11 tracks that make up the band's debut record, which was recorded at the Terrarium over two sweltering weeks in August, with Will Boyd (Evanescence, Big Boots, American Princes) and Zach Reeves (Tel Aviv) working the boards. The album is a collection of ten solid originals and one stellar cover (into which the word "fuck" has of course been inserted), all of which contain curse words, as well as references to drugs or some other unsavory, not-fit-for-primetime subject, or both.
Tempering that foul mouth is the band's musical tendency to make shamelessly sincere references to some rather perky classics of early 80s rock and pop rock. (This shouldn't come as a surprise, really, as the band's very name is a semi-inadvertent reference to the 1985 brat-pack standard The Breakfast Club.) "I probably like a lot of stuff that people would make fun of me for," says Alan, who feels that if a riff is good it's good, no matter where it comes from. The album's central track, "The First Time (I Was Alive)," is a contagious anthem about a boy's life-changing first encounter with rock and roll. It's in the vein of Bryan Adams's "Summer of '69," but it lacks entirely the sentimentality that could make that an unflattering comparison. While some bands could only admit that such easily digested ditties are a part of their lexicon by jabbing at them in ironic imitation, Disaster doesn't "appreciate a band that does that." He happilly gives credit where credit is due, so don't feel guilty when you pick Rick Springfield out of a new track already slated for a 7" release in the near future.
Photo by Rett Peek
"It's desperate, fucked up, crazy livin', but it's okay."
Rock and roll has long been the province of disaffected youth, and the album is embedded in the genre without being sneering or obnoxious. Common themes like disappointment in people who've changed their colors ("12th Street"), or angsty frustration at the baseless inability to pull off a simple good night ("Right Tonight") mix with darker subjects like addiction and the death of friends, and all are articulated with a SNAFU-like acceptance that keeps anything from becoming maudlin "What I'm kinda trying to say is that it's desperate, fucked up, crazy living, but it's okay," explains Disaster, who writes the lyrics. "It's like when you listen to X, or Merle Haggard—they're these depressing lyrics, but you feel all right."
Nowhere is this attitude more evident than on "Popped Up Collar," one of two songs about friends who've passed away. This one, about the young victim of a drug overdose, details things that went wrong and ways they could have been different, and carries a simple and upbeat refrain of "It's gonna be all right." Rice and Disaster agree that anybody who knew the subjects of the songs will recognize them, and that there was no question that they would be written. "It's almost a way of coping with it," says Floyd.
One surprise, and a standout on the album (I'd say "instant classic" if the phrase didn't make me gag a little), is a cover of Otis Redding's "How Strong My Love Is," which was chosen because it is one of Alan's "favorite songs ever." The song is the perfect vehicle for what Rice refers to as the "Smoke Up Johnny stop"—that pause between phrases after which the music resumes with a resounding, gleeful head-slam.
Needless to say, they're happy with the album. And humble about it, too. "I think every band does that—you write a song, record it, and say 'yeah, I'm badass,'" Rice says, laughing at himself. If the album's finally coming into existence is a sign that the band is ready to get serious and break out of the practice-and-play-around-town rut, they're humble about that, too. When asked who their ideal tour-mates would be, Disaster declares friends and fellow Little Rockers the Moving Front. "Or Hoobastank," jokes one band member (who shall remain nameless), "but don't write that."
Photo by Rett Peek
taken from localist magazine