NYE: A New Year’s Toast To The Grinch

Posted on December 29, 2009 by JUKES.NET

THE RED BANK ORBIT – 29.12.2009 – In an interview that appeared here in Red Bank oRBit last July, Johnny Lyon characterized his annual December 31 appearance at the Count Basie as “an act that I stole, as you know, from the late Guy Lombardo.”

Don’t remember Lombardo, the Canadian big-band leader they called “Mr. New Year’s Eve” back in the day? His signature hit was the definitive version of “Auld Lang Syne“ — a tipsy anthem propped up against a wall of woodwinds as warm and flush as a gin-drunk high. He and his Royal Canadians used to do an annual New Year’s dance at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria ballroom; a stultifyingly square affair that inexplicably became a nationally broadcast embarrassment — and after the bandleader’s death in 1977, his nephew attempted to jizz up the act by adding an element of then-fashionable disco to the mix.

If you’re way too young for all that, you’ve still been exposed to another annual event to be filed under Things That You Can’t Un-See — the spectacle of Dick Clark, executive producer of the excruciatingly un-hip New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, and as such a TV institution who can’t be fired and won’t step down from his Times Square perch…

Read the whole article at THE RED BANK ORBIT >>

Southside Sez Life Is Good…

Posted on July 2, 2009 by JUKES.NET

Red Bank Orbit has a great new interview by Tom Chesek with Johnny today. Giving some insights on the preparation of a show at the Stone Pony, Asbury Park… Preparation? Well, almost!

RED BANK ORBIT: Southside Johnny! Thanks for calling in. How’s by you?

SOUTHSIDE JOHNNY: Life is good!

RED BANK ORBIT: You know, for anybody who knows you, that doesn’t read like something you would say.

SOUTHSIDE JOHNNY: Life is good, because I’ve been dead for so many years, there’s no pressure.

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When Sonny Gets Blue

Posted on June 12, 2009 by JUKES.NET

Sonny Kenn, Asbury Park Legend, Guitar Guru and one of the great early contemporaries of Southside Johnny has been featured in a worth reading piece of interview by Tom Chesek of the Red Bank Orbit:

The way that a lot of his contemporaries on the Sound of Asbury Park scene dressed, they’d likely be denied entry in most of the new Asbury bistros these days – but Sonny Kenn always evidenced a more finely tuned sense of style.

It’s a look that we described more than once as “31st century sideburns, ice cream blazers and Vincent Price shades straight outta Tomb of Ligeia,” and even if the Star Trek ‘burns have been phased back a bit in recent years, the carefully coiffed look remains a marvel of pompadour and circumstance. (…)

Red Bank oRBit paid a call upon Kenn at his little “Fortress of Solitude” studio on the borough’s Left Bank — a place that’s equal parts musical mad-laboratory, bohemian painter’s garret and the attic lair of the world’s oldest living teenager. What follows is but a portion of a nearly three-hour conversation in which we spoke of many things — the painter’s passion and the inventor’s instinct; Muddy Waters and Mrs. Jay’s; dying industries and living legends.

Read on at: RED BANK ORBIT: When Sonny Gets Blue – An Interview with Sonny Kenn