Preconceived notions are a bitch. Having listened to Jonny Lives’ debut album and given it a rather unglamorous review for this publication, and having read the band’s rather hyperbolic press release, I thought I had the band’s ringleader, Jonny Dubowsky, pegged. He was a whitebelt, a mainstream pop guitarist, a Lower East Side hipster, a party animal; and when his publicist connects us, I expect to be speaking to a half-coherent music snob about the hangover he’s nursing. Instead, I find myself talking to a hard-working, well-studied scholar of rock and roll, who happens to have a social conscience. Almost immediately, before we begin talking about his album, his influences, or his songwriting processes, Jonny Dubowsky tells me about Rock and Renew, an environmental lecture series that sends rock musicians to schools to talk to students about energy conservation.
Damn. Who’s the snob now?
“I started this [Rock and Renew] on tour with Everclear, just going in to schools to talk to kids about making changes around their homes,” Dubowsky explains about his expanding project; he’s logged about 18 hours of film footage on Rock and Renew for an MTV documentary. “I’ve been interviewing all these artists, like Debbie Harry and the Kaiser Chiefs and all my friends who are in bands, just talking to them about the environment. In just about two weeks, I’ve learned how to edit video. It’s not that different from editing music, which I had to learn making the album.”
The album, Get Steady, is a bit of a contradiction in and of itself. It aims for retro grit, but ends up with a modern mainstream pop sound. “I don’t see why pop has to be a bad thing in rock,” Dubowsky says. “If you take pop elements and use them in your rock music, you can make something really cool.”
Hailing from New York, Jonny Lives! developed within one of the most noted and prolific music scenes in North America. New Jersey native Dubowsky recalls skipping school in the sixth grade to go on excursions to the City.
“I actually started playing CBGBs when I was 13 on their Sunday afternoon punk rock matinee shows,” he somehow manages to say without any hint of arrogance “so I kind of grew up in the New York scene. It’s really a close-knit group. A lot of times, it is still like high school, in that there are rivalries that come out in the media, and I think it’s unfortunate that bands do compete instead of making a collective effort.”
It was fitting, then, to have members from three other New York bands—Nick Valensi from The Strokes, Sammy James from The Mooney Suzuki, and Jody Porter from Fountains of Wayne, contribute to a grinding guitar-battle track called “Cliché.”
Dubowsky is a fan of old garage music, and it’s ironic that one of his best tracks, “B-Side,” is a tribute to the fifties concept of the throwaway song. “It’s about trying to convince someone you’re interested in that you’re not working on a secondary motive, that it’s all about the A-sides. As someone who’s been a bartender since I was 16, making martinis when I was totally not legally supposed to be, in that setting, watching people make choices every night that can take their night in one direction or another…”
Dubowsky also has a peculiar songwriting process. He suffers from funambulism, also known as sleep-walking. “60 % of the album was written in my sleep. I have these real waking dreams where my eyes will open and I’ll seem awake, but really I’m asleep. When I was fourteen or fifteen I realized that I was dreaming complete songs during these dreams, but I would forget them when I woke up. So I started keeping a tape recorder by my bed so that whenever I woke up, first thing in the morning, I’d just sing into the recorder. The rest of the songs came from working in the bar or being involved in any repetitive activity. You can’t force it; 99% of the time that I actually just sit down to write a song, I don’t write anything good.”
~ Caroline Evans
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http://www.jonnylives.com
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JONNY LIVES!'s GET STEADY is releases through Eleven Seven Music.
Buy Album from CD Universe
