Boston-based Johnny A. is one of the world's most toneful guitarists. Johnny A. has toured and recorded with many national artists, and has now released a solo CD entitled "Sometime Tuesday Morning." Good guitar players come along pretty often. Great guitarists happen once in a while. Players that have the tone and ability to treat each note like the syllable of a word show up pretty rarely. The "rare" has just occurred, and his name is Johnny A. This interview discusses Johnny A.'s musical history, the solo album, his gear setup, and exciting label news about the CD. the
JOHNNY A. interview Q: Johnny, did you produce and also self-release your album, "Sometime Tuesday Morning," on your own label? JOHNNY A: Yes, up until now, that's true; it's my label Aglaophone. The record just got picked up by a label called Favored Nations, owned by Steve Vai. Eric Johnson's on the label, Chad Wackerman, Stu Hamm, Dweezel Zappa, and I believe there is a Larry Carlton-Steve Lukather record coming out. Also, Greg Bissonette. So, I guess I'm in pretty good company. Q: That's great. The album, I've got to say, is a tremendous piece of work. It's just such an inspiration to any guitar player, as well as any listener. I was wondering what genres of music you have played, before coming to this solo guitar format. JOHNNY A: Pretty much a rock/blues/pop guitar player. But always, even growing up, listened to a lot of stuff, like the guitar playing that was behind the Everly Brothers, who was Chet Atkins, you know . . . listening to Les Paul, and Wes Montgomery, and all the rock guys: Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Clapton in the early days and . . . you know, there are just so many: George Harrison, Todd Rundgren, Pat Martino, Kenny Burrell, just a ton of guys that I listened to. I like all kinds of music; Blues guys obviously, BB King, Albert King, Freddy King, Albert Collins, Jimmy Vaughn. I like a lot of different stuff; I try not to get pigeonholed into playing a certain way, and I try to keep an open mind on what I listen to for guitar players. I just like the sound of the guitar. So, good guitar playing to me, is just good guitar playing; it just kind of crosses genres. Q: Well, your signature sound really does cover all those styles you mentioned and some others, too. When somebody comes up and says, "Johnny, what kind of music do you play?", what do you say? JOHNNY A: Good Music! Q: I like that! That's great. Have you always been professionally-based in the Boston area? JOHNNY A: Yeah. I was born in Malden, Massachusetts, and grew up on the North Shore of Boston, and then was kind of in the Boston music scene for a long time. Then I went out and played my first time out of the area . . . I moved to San Francisco for a brief time and played with Mingo Lewis, who is the percussionist on the John McLaughlin-Carlos Santana record; he also played with Chic Corea in the original "Return to Forever" and also played drums with the Tubes. And then I went back there, funny enough, to San Francisco, and played for a brief time in a band with Bobby Whitlock (from Derek and the Dominoes) and Doug Clifford from Creedence Clearwater. I didn't stay with these units long, because I had my own bands back in Boston, and we were always threatening to be signed, so, I was more a member of those bands as opposed to my own bands, where I was kind of the driving force in being the songwriter and the arranger and producer. I enjoy that work load. There were things going on with these local bands that I was in, and unfortunately they didn't come to fruition, but those are the choices that we make. But I got to meet some great people and play with some great people. Later on, I made the decision to go after a sideman thing and just say, I wasn't having any luck with my own thing, and that's where I ran into Bobby Whitlock again. We played together for a couple years--we just did the Northeast area--and then I started working with Peter Wolf, and we worked together for about six years, and I did co-produce his "Long Line" record, released in 1996 on Reprise-Warner, and then I played a little bit on his follow-up "Fool's Parade" in 1999 . . . it came out in '99. I toured with him for six years in the band, and then we also did an offshoot type of unplugged thing that we toured with for about a year and a half. And then it led me to what I'm doing now. Q: So, how long has your present band been together? JOHNNY A: Two years, and the record came out a year ago this month. Q: And you use the same band for recording and touring? JOHNNY A: Yes, it's Craig Macintyre on the drums, and Ed Spargo on electric bass. Really really good players, great personalities in their playing and having the ability to sound good, play interesting stuff, and be very, very supportive at the same time. I picked very sympathetic players to support what I'm trying to do. Q: Yeah, it's a great mix. I mean, they're there where they should be, and it's great. JOHNNY A: Yeah, it's kind of cool when you hear something and everything just kind of sounds right. Q: Well, your album certainly sounds "right." I've got to say so, again. JOHNNY A: Thank you.
JOHNNY A: Yeah, well I'm a songwriter. This is really the first instrumental project that I've ever done. All my other songs I've written have always been vocal-based and I think that even though these are instrumentals, they have a vocal quality to them. I think they are very melodic in the sense that they are not riff-oriented; it is really melody-oriented and arrangement-oriented, and pop-oriented. I know it has this kind of jazz dynamic and a little bit of a rock edge, but it definitely has a pop sensibility. But, yes, some of the songs I write do have lyrics; none of the ones on this record, though. These songs were specifically written for this project, and the only ones that have lyrics are, obviously the Beatles and the Jimmy Webb song and the Willy Cobbs song. Q: I was really pleased to see the Jimmy Webb piece on your CD; I'm a big fan of him from way back. Do you do any of his other material in concert? JOHNNY A: No . . . he writes, obviously, fabulous, fabulous material, but that is just a song that as a kid always stuck with me. You know the Glen Campbell version of that was just always a great song and I always said, "If I ever get a chance to do it, I want to record that song." So I brought it to the band, and it has turned out to be a really nice piece, and I think it came out very nice on the record, and it's a piece that people do respond to and I get a lot of mail about. Q: Any idea if Jimmy Webb has heard your version? JOHNNY A: Well, we did give him a copy. I saw him last November when he played at Scullers here in Boston. I don't know if he listened to it, but I did give him a CD. Q: Well, I'm sure if he has heard it, he's proud of the treatment that you gave it. JOHNNY A: Well, thank you! Q: What's the guitar and amp setup that you are using? JOHNNY A: I've been using these Marshall 30th Anniversaries. The Combos are 6101s, and the half-stacks are 6100s. I have a bunch of those; they came out in 1992 and they made them for one year in this blue color, and they had EL-34 tubes. Then they changed in '93 . . . they changed the amp and they modified the third channel, and put 5881s in it. The amp doesn't sound the same after they changed them, so I have the '92 models. . . . I currently have six of them; I just like the amp a lot; I've been using them exclusively for a long, long time. I have four of the combo versions and two of the half-stack versions. That's what I recorded the whole record with . . . the amp is equipped with a really nice speaker-emulation circuit, with an XLR in the back to compensate for speaker "out." If any guitar players are out there digging the tone and wondering how I did it, it was recorded direct, the same thing as live, when I use the amp live it's a DI signal from the back of the amp; I don't "mic" the amp. Q: What about guitars? JOHNNY A: The whole record was recorded with Gibsons except for the baritone guitar, that was a Fender Bajo Sexto, but a lot of the record was recorded with the ES-295 Gibson. I used an L5 on the record, Firebird VII, various historic Les Pauls, and an ES-335 . . . most of them all with Bigsbys; I use a Bigsby tailpiece a lot. Q: The baritone is a favorite of mine--I'm a big baritone fan--I've got a couple pieces myself, and it's just a tremendous sound. JOHNNY A: Very rich, regal-sounding instrument, and you know, a lot of people use it for country music work, that "Marlboro Man" sound, but it's really a beautiful instrument if you start doing chord clusters on it . . . the way the harmonic structure is on the instrument, because its scale length is halfway between a guitar and a bass, which just has these very, very rich overtones and harmonics, and you play these full chords and it just sounds beautiful. I used it a lot on the record just to reinforce a melody in a bridge; it just kind of lies underneath. I didn't use it as a lot of people use a baritone--when it's very upfront and they put tremolo on it, and it's just kind of that big baritone twangy sound. For me, it was more of a trying to add a subliminal push to the melody, that's all. Q: Speaking of strings, I noticed that you are a D'Addario endorser. What set gauges do you use? JOHNNY A: I use .011 to .049. I use two different types of strings; I use their regular roundwound, the EXL115s, and I also use their Chromes, which are the flatwounds. I have guitars that have flatwounds and guitars that have roundwounds, so the flatwound set has the wound G, and the EXL115s have the plain G. Currently, what I'm using for guitars live, is two '59 Gibson historic reissue Les Pauls with Bigsbys, and one of them has flatwounds and the other one doesn't. The flatwound thing . . . that's a lot of that sound in my record. There's a lot of, like the ES-295 that you hear it in "Oh Yeah," you hear it in "Wichita Lineman," and you hear it in "Yes It Is," and again in "Walk Don't Run" and "Two-Wheel Horse." A lot of that record is mostly that ES-295 with the flatwound strings. "Oh Yeah," that whole song is just that one track, that one guitar with the flatwounds--the same with "The Wichita Lineman." On "Two-Wheel Horse," a lot of the bed tracks of that guitar were flatwound strings. "Sometime Tuesday Morning" was an ES-335, and that does not have flatwound strings on it. "In the Wind," the body of the song was the 335 that doesn't have flatwounds, but the low melody is an L5 with flatwounds. I've been toying with going up to .012s, though. I've been thinking of jumping up. My hands have gotten a lot stronger since I started using the .011s. At first, you know, it was work, but it just gets a little easier, so I might want to bump up to .012s; I haven't decided yet. Q: Do you use a flat pick? JOHNNY A: I use a combination of a pick and two fingers. Q: Are you doing a lot of touring this year? JOHNNY A: We did some work with Robert Cray over the summer and then some work with George Thorogood, and we're currently in the middle of three dates with BB King. Then next week, we do a couple dates with Buddy Guy. And we expect that with the release of the record in May on Favored Nations, it will allow us to bring the act across the country and throughout the world. Q: Nice. JOHNNY A: That's what the plan is. Q: So you're not doing any touring out of the U.S. as of yet? JOHNNY A: No, not with this. It's just regional right now. It was my choice to just really try to develop a buzz for my record in the region and my act, and just to see if anyone would respond. And then if it took off, then hopefully, someone would pick up on it and take it to a national level. It just doesn't make any sense, as far as I'm concerned, to go to other territories where the record is not available, and just slug it out in a bar where maybe someone is listening, and maybe someone's not. I was distributing this CD myself. I worked at where I had almost sixty retail operations that I was self-distributing to; and it was a lot of work. It started off mostly being a consignment thing in the beginning. It's very hard to manage that many accounts and have inventory out there, and try to juggle all that stuff. That's why I decided to keep it in the New England region where you can drive everywhere in a day. The local and regional radio has been very, very supportive, WNCS and WEBK up there in Vermont, and down here in Boston, the River, WXRV, and WRSI out in Northampton, and WKZE down in Connecticut, and WLPW up in Lake Placid, and we had, WMVY down in Martha's Vineyard, as well as WMWV up in North Conway . . . all these AAA stations that embraced the record and took a leap of faith, and really got behind it, and they gave the record a chance. The record reacted on the radio, and it's been kind of cool! Q: When shopping the album around, did you feel any adversity from the music industry for bringing solo guitar into kind of a mainstream market? JOHNNY A: Well, you know, I'm definitely not the first guy to do this; you have Jeff Beck, Steve Vai, and you have Joe Satriani, and you have Eric Johnson, and then you have Robben Ford and Gary Moore who was doing an instrumental thing. There're plenty of guys before me who were doing it; the difference maybe with my thing is that it is more pop-oriented, it is more about songs. That's kind of my approach. I'm more of a song guy, and I think all of those guys are absolutely phenomenal players. You know, I'm a fan of all of them. I think it's tough for anybody in radio to embrace it, because of the music industry being such a vocal-dominated format. Prior to the signing with Favored Nations, there was interest from other labels, but I think at the end of the day, they just weren't confident that an instrumental thing could bring the numbers they want. Q: Your website is great. I'm on the web all the time, and you know, I'm just always going click-click-click, but when I got to your site www.johnnya.com and saw stuff happening in front of me, I thought, "Wow! This is good!" JOHNNY A: Thanks. I have a really good web designer; his name is Scott Glancy, it's a company called Interweave Web Design. You know, I have definite ideas of how I want things to look, sound, appear, feel, and he really took care into trying to get the vibe across about the record, and for me, the web site should be an extension of what I'm trying to do. The web is a sales tool, an information tool, and I'm trying to promote this record and the sound, so I wanted the web site to have the visual feel of the record. And when there's another record, the web site will change to reflect what the current vibe is. But right now, I just wanted to try to market everything to have this certain experience and this certain feel, so if you're listening to the record, it makes you feel one way. I tried very hard to have a consistency in the record and a vibe, so you're listening to the record as a whole, as opposed to hearing two tracks and skipping over, thinking you've got it. I really miss the days when you would get a Beatles album, and the whole record would just be great and it would feel like a moment in time. You know, "Beatles '65" feels a certain way; "Beggar's Banquet" feels a certain way, "City to City" by Gerry Rafferty feels a certain way, and they are complete sounding records, and that's what I think CDs should be: They should be a fifty-minute, sixty-minute experience where you're entertained for that time. There have been a lot of records I have gotten where there are two or three great songs, and it's like they take all this time mixing, and producing two or three songs to sound great as singles, and they forget about the rest of the record. I'm really into trying to make the whole thing as great as possible and keep the listeners' interest. They're paying good money. I don't want someone to feel like they bought the record and they heard the two or three songs that were on the radio, and feel like they got ripped off with the rest of the record. So, I work really, really hard to keep the quality of the record and the sequencing and everything "up" for that whole amount of time that they're listening. Q: I think you did it. JOHNNY A: Well, thanks. Q: Johnny, I've just got one more question. I ask everyone this question: You mentioned lots of artists who you've listened to and have been influenced by, but aside from all those, if the music police came to your house and checked out your collection of CDs, vinyl, and tapes, is there anything in that collection that would really surprise everyone? JOHNNY A: For the people who know me, they're not surprised to see anything that I have in my collection, but for those who don't, you might be surprised to see the Dolly Parton-Linda Ronstadt-Emmy Lou Harris trio album that I have. Q: That's great. Well Johnny, thanks a lot for your time today. Congratulations on being picked up on the Favored Nations label, and we wish you the best! JOHNNY A: Well, thank you, Kevin!
See www.johnnya.com for Johnny A.'s tour schedule, biography, photos, news, and to purchase "Sometime Tuesday Morning."
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Q:
Eight
out of the twelve songs on the CD are originals of yours,
and even though you are writing and performing solo guitar
pieces, I was wondering: Do any of your songs actually have
words?