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Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes have gone through glory days and slumps. Now the group some call the world's greatest bar band comes to Jannus Landing.
By COLETTE BANCROFT, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 16, 2002
Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes have been playing their hearts out for almost 30 years now, and they still don't want to go home.
Wrapping up a new CD and preparing for a tour that will run around the United States through the summer and to England in the fall, John Lyon, a.k.a. Southside Johnny, says the band tours often.
"I'd like to work more. That's why we're playing Florida and some of the other places we haven't been for a while. We want to remind people what we're like live. This is a great live band, and that's getting harder and harder to come by."
Lyon formed the Jukes in 1974, in the midst of the New Jersey shore music scene's glory days, courtesy of his longtime pal Bruce Springsteen's success. Steve Van Zandt was a Juke before he joined Springsteen's E Street Band (and long before he played a mook on The Sopranos), and he and Springsteen were heavily involved in the band's impressive first three albums, I Don't Want to Go Home, This Time It's for Real and Hearts of Stone. Those albums captured the Jukes' tight playing and glorious bar-band exuberance as well as Lyon's bluesy rasp and wail on R&B classics and originals by Springsteen and Van Zandt.
The band prospered for a while, went through record label changes and finally fell into serious disarray about 10 years ago.
"I quit the music business for two years," Lyon says. "I swore I'd never sing again. My friends said oh, yeah, yeah. But I wanted to get away from the music business altogether.
"So I thought I'd move to Nashville. I kind of forgot it was Music City USA. To me it was just where Garry Tallent lived." Tallent is another longtime friend and E Streeter. Besides playing bass for Springsteen and in countless studio sessions, he's a respected record producer.
Jersey guy Lyon found the distance from his roots was restorative -- enough so that he not only came back to music but founded his own record company, Leroy Records, and put out his first new album in eight years, Messin' With the Blues, in 2000.
He says he's glad he and the Jukes made their early albums with a major label, but he doesn't miss it now. "If you're a young act it serves a purpose. If you just want to be rich and famous, you need that promotion the record company can give you. If you want to make music, it's better to do it yourself."
Changes in technology are making that dependence on record companies less necessary, too. "We're getting to where the consumer can just say, 'I like this kind of music, where can I find it?' " says Lyon, who markets his CDs on his Web site, southsidejohnny.org.
Lyon lives in the Northeast now, not in New Jersey but "near New Jersey. That's better," he says. Calling from the New Jersey Turnpike, he says he's delighted with progress on his new CD, due out in June. He's producing and writing some of the songs for it.
Messin' With the Blues was an exploration of traditional blues and early R&B, a tribute to Lyon's early musical loves. (His "Southside" nickname came from his devotion to South Chicago style blues.)
The new CD should please the fans who revere Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes as perhaps the world's greatest bar band. Is the whole Jukes lineup on board? "Yes, all the feebs and addlepates," Lyon says affectionately.
"It's very much a Jukes album. It harks back to the early days, to the first three albums. Lots of classic R&B and rock 'n' roll," he says. "We're exploring some of those soul stylings I love. Very horn oriented, lots of horn solos."
He sounds like a man who's found his way back to making the music he loves.
"You go through different seasons of taste in your life. Sometimes you have to step away from things before you can go back and say, this is really great."
Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, with Tommy McCoy and the Tuff-tones. 7 p.m. Friday, Jannus Landing. $17-$20.