Avatar of Network

Southside Johnny dishes on The Boss

Posted on by
2


By Joel Rubinoff, Record staff — “I’d seen James Brown and Ray Charles,’’ Southside Johnny, a.k.a. Johnny Lyon, is telling me over the phone from somewhere on the New Jersey Shore.

“But I walked into the place I used to hang out, the Upstage Club, and this long-haired guy was onstage telling a story about how the nuns taught him the blues by bringing in a B.B. King album one day. “And he just was riveting, and I thought ‘Wow, who is this guy?’ ’’His name, of course, was Bruce Springsteen, though at the time he was just another up and coming nobody trying to get a break.

And when he and Lyon struck up a friendship, it changed the course of Lyon’s life…

Continue reading →

Avatar of Network

Little Steven Van Zandt jam with B Street Band, Hard Rock Atlantic City

Posted on by
Reply

Posted by Marc Berman on Friday, November 18, 2011 6:48AM – Little Steven Van Zandt, Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez take the stage with the B Street Band and surprise guests at a fundraiser for Gilda’s Club South Jersey held at the Hard Rock Cafe Atlantic City

Source: NJ.com

Avatar of Network

Montreal Jazz Festival: Listen, it’s all about the music

Posted on by
Reply

MONTREAL – When Southside Johnny got on the road to promote a trio of classic soulful rhythm ’n’ blues albums with the Asbury Jukes in the second half of the 1970s, he was riding in the shadow of his friend and fellow New Jersey son Bruce Springsteen’s mega-breakout. And he had only one goal.

“I wanted to stick it to people,” the man born John Lyon said during a recent telephone interview. Lyon and bandmate Steven Van Zandt (now better known as Little Steven) were “very aggressive about that New Jersey being a joke state thing,” he said. “We thought ‘We’ll show you.’ We’d go onstage and the horns would hit that big chord. It was not like another band hitting two guitars. And I was a wild performer on stage. Iggy Pop was one of my heroes. So between Steve wanting to prove himself and me wanting to prove myself, that was the real bond. We really wanted to say ‘This is good and you have to pay attention.’

Read the full story at The Montreal Gazette…

Avatar of Network

Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes give it all on stage

Posted on by
Reply

By Jeff McMenemy / The Daily Item

Southside Johnny Lyon feels the anger and frustration that many working-class Americans have with the economy and has tapped into it for his new album, “Pills and Ammo.”

“It was just the way I was feeling at the time,” Lyon said during an interview Wednesday with The Daily Item. “ … There was a certain amount of anger in the air, because the economy had tanked and people were losing their homes. It makes you angry that good-hearted people who work hard and pay their bills have to go through this crap because some slick boy on Wall Street invented some new way of investing.”

Continue reading →

Avatar of Network

Southside Johnny says Asbury Jukes still same ol’ party band, despite serious disc

Posted on by
Reply

Posted by John J. Moser at 01:30:00 AM on September 30, 2010

In its 35-year history, seminal New Jersey rockers Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes has always channeled its audiences’ emotions in its songs — typically in boozy, bluesy tunes such as “I Don’t Want to Go Home” or Sam Cooke’s “Having a Party.” But that’s not the case with the band’s newest disc, “Pills and Ammo,” a collection of series songs set to swampy rock on which front man Johnny Lyon sings with a bluesy voice on tunes that wouldn’t sound out of place on Bob Dylan’s watermark late ‘80s disc “Oh Mercy.”

Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes formed around the same time and place as Bruce Springsteen’s E Street band and cross-pollinated with the group so much that E Street members Max Weinberg, Patti Scialfa and Steven Van Zandt all were Jukes at one point. But while others found huge success, Southside Johnny and The Asbury Jukes never had a chart-topping hit or platinum album. Its late 1970s releases marked its commercial high point, though 1991’s “Better Days,” also produced by Van Zandt and with contributions from Springsteen and fellow Jerseyite Jon Bon Jovi, was a critics’ favorite. (…)

In a recent telephone interview from New Jersey, where he still lives, Lyon talked about the new disc, his history with Springsteen and life as a Juke at 60.

Read the interview at the Lehigh Valley Music Blog

Avatar of Network

Southside Johnny returns with hard-rocking album, ‘Pills and Ammo’

Posted on by
Reply

Southside Johnny is getting in touch with his inner Mick Jagger.

“Pills and Ammo,” the new album he is releasing with his longtime band the Asbury Jukes, is a collection of lean, Rolling Stones-oriented rock ‘n’ roll — arguably the hardest-rocking set the band has released in its 35 years of recording. On a beautiful mid-May afternoon, I talked, by phone, with the 61-year-old Shore rock legend and Ocean Grove resident about the album, his career and his upcoming shows.

Continue reading →