Get Steady

It’s Sunday, January 8, 2006, nine o’clock pm, and in 15 minutes the biggest rock station in the New York metro area, Q104.3, is going to reveal one of the city’s best kept secrets. For the first time since joining a new record label, sandwiched between Death Cab for Cutie and Liz Phair, the band Jonny Lives! will be played on major radio for a multitude of listeners. Like employers in the hiring process, casual music fans and pop snobs alike will form impulsive first impressions. Is the band on the precipice of stardom, or have they started down the long, sullen road to nowhere that swallows so many bands that were once on the cusp.

Lead man Jonny Dubowsky has dreamed about this moment for years, the time when he could play for a vast audience of listeners. Looking out the bedroom window, he sits by the radio in his Lower East Side apartment, a little nervous, a little anxious, but mostly confident. Jonny’s fingernails are long, and he taps them methodically against the pane as he looks out into the city night. He pushes his face closer to the glass, squints, thinks about the future: His EP is due out in a few days, and his debut album is coming out in May. The whole world is happening in front of him, right here, right now. From behind him you can see his reflection in the glass, his boyish face, fare skin, slender body and his short, beach blonde hair; he looks classically Californian, sweet, not at all New Jersey, and certainly too nice for rock n’ roll.

But Jonny’s looks make a disguise. He’s like a prizefighter unafraid to get hit, making him all the more dangerous and resilient. He made his choice years ago. Since he was a kid in Tenafly, New Jersey he has dug inch by inch for success — to live off his music. He knows what it’s like to sleep on cold, hard floors after playing shoddy rock clubs for eight people in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of winter. It’s 9:14 now and the DJ makes an announcement: “That last track was from Death Cab for Cutie. Here’s a new one from a local New York City band called Jonny Lives!, with their debut single ‘Get Steady.’ ” The room feels ten degrees hotter as the distorted guitar begins to sound the song’s hook: da-na-na-da-na-na-da-na-na-da-na-na; it’s full of attitude and soul — sassy, taunting, standing strong on the principles on which rock n’ roll was built. The chorus comes: “I don’t need no cheap success / I’m ready, I’m ready / Get steady, get steady.” All the blood in Jonny’s body rushes to his face, which pulsates as if about to explode. His fists are clinched; his knuckles go white; he’s quiet but inside he’s howling at the moon. The bass rattles the room. The tension is immense; it’s a rocket ship preparing for liftoff, preparing to burst through the sound barrier at any moment. This is the beginning; this is where it all starts: Get ready, get steady.

* * *

Jonny is not the first in his family who decided that life and music were one in the same. His grandfather, Grandpa Milty, was a steelworker in Brooklyn but a musician at heart; a man who lived by his hands with the hope of one day being able to live by singing with his fingers. At the age of 50, years after he had worked his way up to owner of the steel mill, he became fed up with blue-collar life and opted to embark on his dream of being a fulltime musician. So at 55 Milty was a genuine struggling, troubled songwriter but, as Jonny says, “He did it for love, not for money.” Milty had a passion for vaudeville music, which pervaded the pop songs he began to write. Unfortunately vaudeville had reached its peak audience decades before.

Milty also had a propensity for classical music and began to school Jonny in the ways of Mozart when he was four. By the time Jonny reached age six he was playing full Tchaikovsky pieces with both hands, and by ten he was considered to be a real childhood prodigy. Like many stories that go like this, it wasn’t soon after Jonny reached prodigy status that he decided to quit. At ten, Johnny found playing the classics wasn’t half as intriguing as playing in the dirt; for a whole year he completely ignored music and played nothing at all.

But in a year Jonny decided that he wanted to pick up the guitar, and at 12 he started his first rock band, Page, named after the lead guitar player from Helmet, Page Hamilton. In the seventh grade he played in bands with people he would eventually share bills with later on in life, like Will Scott, the drummer from the Mooney Suzuki. Soon Jonny was playing Sunday afternoon punk-rock matinee shows at CBGB’S as well as other clubs. Through middle school and high school he partook in pay-to-play shows at Obsessions, a teen nightclub in Randolph, New Jersey, where he would buy tickets from the venue and then sell them to 25 of his friends, who his parents would stuff into their cars and caravan 25 miles to watch Jonny play. The band would rock for an hour and then spend an additional hour getting high off of Coca-Cola with their friends, running around and bumping into each other while the Clash played in the background.

Jonny began his college career at Syracuse, where he studied classical guitar for two years. During that time Jonny spent a lot of time listening to bands like the Jam, the Kinks and the Buzzcocks as well as songwriters like Eliot Smith, Jeff Buckley and Elvis Costello. He transferred to NYU, creating his own major called “integration of mind, body and the performing arts”– a combination of physical and mental awareness; a duel balance: integrated healing for injured musicians, because Jonny once had carpel tunnel syndrome, and a way to sustain mental health while on the road. “A real way to not lose my mind,” as Jonny put it.

At NYU Jonny was thrown into the then-burgeoning music scene on the Lower East Side, which was rooted in early ’60s British rock. He got a job at Greene Street Recordings — where Russell Simmons recorded the first 25 Def Jam albums — and worked alongside legendary hip-hop producer Rod Hui, who would eventually record the first Jonny Lives! demos. For tuition money Jonny played with different bands, like Luscious Jackson and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. But it wasn’t until he began to play with Sean Lennon and bands like Vespertine and Elwood that his connections began to develop. He started hanging out with the Strokes and Cibo Matto. He let loose at Brownie’s on Avenue A, an outpost of the new scene where other up and coming bands were playing: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Strokes, Interpol.

In 2002 Jonny graduated college and began to write songs with some of the guys from Elwood. After watching Eddie and the Cruisers, Jonny and some of the guys thought it would be funny to pay homage to the story about the mythical rocker who has success, burns out and then comes back from the dead like thunder out of nowhere, shocking and awing everybody, leaving the people to say only one thing: Jonny Lives!

For the next year Jonny funded his new band on his credit card. The idea behind the band, as Jonny puts it, “is to always find players that inspire me to write better songs.” John Weber, the current drummer and Jonny’s right-hand man, his musical arranger and “best drummer” he’s ever played with, joined in 2003, the same year Jonny went to the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas. There, inspired by watching the Yeah Yeah Yeahs play, he sat by a river and out of nowhere scribbled down a few songs. Each will appear on his debut album three years later: “Cliché,” “Breaking Down,” “Something About It.”

Jonny says, “For me, the songwriting process is very bizarre. I never sit down and write, and if I do, it’s at the end of a song. Believe it or not, I actually write in my sleep. I dream Jonny Lives! songs. I’d say about 75 percent of the album was written in total slumber,” Jonny tells me, as we sit at an East Village coffee shop. The shop is calm, about half empty. The place is more cozy than hip: The tables, the chairs and the floors are all undressed wood, not impatiently modern like a Starbucks or some of the other trendier coffee shops in the neighborhood. “You see,” Jonny continues, “since I was a little kid I’ve always had a very active dream life. All throughout my childhood I constantly woke up in different parts of my house, even outside, anywhere. My parents never knew where they would find me in the morning. I would have these really in depth conversations with my mom or dad while remaining completely unawake. I’d wake up in the morning and not remember a thing about it. It was really crazy.

“Now though, it’s turned into this thing where at around 6 A.M., I’ll dream a song or an idea, force myself to wake up from the dream, grab the tape recorder I keep by my bed and record it. Then I’ll go back to sleep, wake up a few hours later and have no memory of recording anything. It would be a safe bet to say that I’ve lost album’s worth of material by not forcing myself to wake up.” Jonny then takes a sip of coffee and brushes some crumbs off his sweater. Jonny’s brain, his unconscious, is like a continuous stream of music, when he lets himself go he inevitably falls smack in the middle of it.

Not long after the trip to Austin, a writer by the name of Mark Beaumont stumbled in while Jonny played a show in a New York City club. Beaumont, a writer for NME in London, was enthralled by what he saw. After Jonny left the stage, Beaumont greeted him, told him he thought he was amazing and that he’s going to change Jonny’s life. Jonny thought Beaumont was full of shit, but shortly after this interaction a myriad of English record labels began to call Jonny. He booked the first of six tours of England and recorded an EP. In the same year Jonny Lives! won the Nokia Opportunity Rocks Contest and took second place in the Coca-Cola New Music Awards. His band signed a deal with Superior Quality Records which, according to Jonny, “is the most indie label ever.”

* * *

“Thanks for coming out on this fine January evening,” Jonny says into the microphone, addressing the crowd. It’s the last song of their set at Sin-e, a small club just off Houston Street in New York. The place has almost completely filled up. Their debut single played on the radio three days ago, and friends of Jonny Lives!, the Mooney Suzuki, will be going on next. Jonny stands dressed in all black with a silver tie accentuating his pale face and hair. The club feels like a black shoebox with a stage. John Weber sits behind his drum set sweating; Tommy USA, the new bass player, who played on Liz Phair’s WhiteChocolateSpaceEgg, stands nonchalantly. Jonny Lives! has a new guitar player, too, Christian Langdon, but he’s currently stuck in the UK getting his visa in order. Jonny announces to the crowd that they’ll be playing the song “Cliché.” Sammy James Jr., the Mooney Suzuki’s singer, joins them onstage, is handed a guitar and Weber counts off. The guitars are distorted and the chords have space between them like a Who song — one hard down stroke, pause, pause, pause, another hard down stroke and then a turnaround. Jonny begins to sing, melodious but tough: “Wiser men have walked the street / And trucker men have lost their feet / But you don’t really care about me do ya? / It’s a cliché / Every thing I say / And all the games we play / Every single day.”

A couple of industry types sit among the crowd of rockers and hipsters. They don’t stick out too much; they’ve come to see their investment at work, for reassurance. Jonny is no longer on Superior Quality Records; he’s switched to another indie label called Eleven/Seven, an incubator label for WMG/ADA. Onstage Sammy rips a blistering guitar solo while Jonny screams “It’s too hot, hot, hot / It’s too hot, hot, hot.” He taunts the crowd, sneers at them; his eyes are ablaze. “Here we come,” Jonny must be thinking, “Here we fucking come!”