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.

RED BANK ORBIT: That’s more like it. Now you’re gearing up for the big Fourth of July show, the companion piece to the big New Years show at the Count Basie.

SOUTHSIDE JOHNNY: An act that I stole, as you know, from the late Guy Lombardo.

RED BANK ORBIT: And yet when you show up at the Christmas benefit shows you get teased by the other guys onstage as The Grinch. But when it comes to the Fourth, whose mantel are you inheriting? Who would have been Mr. Fourth of July?

SOUTHSIDE JOHNNY: That would have to be the fireworks family — the Gruccis! And when they find out they’re gonna come around and try to blow me up.

RED BANK ORBIT: Now you’ve been doing these July 4th shows at the Pony for what, five years now?

SOUTHSIDE JOHNNY: I actually don’t keep track of things like that. I’m not interested in chronology — only when it comes to old records. I’m really not a nostalgist, and my attitude is, let’s move on.

RED BANK ORBIT: But so much of the appeal of your live shows comes from the old songs, not just your own, but other people’s songs that you’ve made your own…

SOUTHSIDE JOHNNY: When we do the Pony show, we’ll be playing some things from our new album, which isn’t even finished yet, plus some old songs that people have been requesting. But mostly we go up onstage and see what happens.

I did “Shout” for the first time ever the other night, if you can believe that. But it really worked out well; the band just really got it. And these guys weren’t even born when that song was a hit!

RED BANK ORBIT: So you actually don’t approach these shows with a set list? You must be the only nine piece band in existence that can just wing it like that.

SOUTHSIDE JOHNNY: I don’t know if it’s any looser than usual — it’s just that we don’t have everything all mapped out. We allow for some surprises — people are invited to jam with us onstage, as long as they know what they’re doing. So, no, we never do a standard set list for these shows; I try to read the crowd instead — if they’re feeling angry, we’ll give ‘em something a little more dark like “The Fever.” But the guys in the band are all pros, they can hit my curveballs.

RED BANK ORBIT: I gotta hand it to you, keeping the big-band thing going all this time. Just the whole logistics of getting everybody from one place to another on the bus is something that very few people are set up to do.

SOUTHSIDE JOHNNY: Well, Roomful of Blues is still out there, with that big lineup. But once you get horn fever, it’s hard to break away. We actually aren’t playing as much as we used to, and we don’t use a bus anymore — it got too expensive. We usually take vans, I just round up the band members, fill ‘em out with thorazine and throw ‘em on the van. It works out well. And I continue to pay for everything myself — I pay over and over and over…

Read the full interview at:
http://www.redbankorbit.com/wordpress/2009/07/southside-sez-life-is-good/

Also read Tom’s conversation with Bobby Bandiera;
http://www.redbankorbit.com/wordpress/2009/07/and-bobby-has-it-covered/

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