Ben, the band’s leader, and some other guys were trying to determine the name of their new band. Interestingly enough, the band’s name, The Johnny High-Fives, actually came from a night with the Cartright boys. Cartright had this dirty, gritty vibe like The Ramones, Bob Dylan, and Thelonious Monk poured their collective DNA into a whiskey bottle and shook. I first encountered this sound while living in Denton, Texas, with an old friend who had a band called Cartright. The words just flowed from there and I had found how I wanted The Johnny High-Fives to sound: a hybridisation of folk and punk.
Gather round, you Corporate Huns, I’ll show you the death of your future sons. The noise finally peaked, like that rare moment when you are sitting at a traffic light and your blinker momentarily syncs with the blinker of the car ahead of you.
I was looking for a connective tissue between these different sounds. On my record player was Springsteen’s Born in the USA, my PS3 was playing the Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home, and my laptop had two windows open that blasted Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs and Deer Tick’s War Elephant. My search for The Johnny-High Fives’ style led to me listening to four songs at once while drinking a fair amount of coffee. On my own, I wrote lyrics for three songs, Corporate Hun, Protest Nation, inspired by the spoken word riffs of Tom Waits, and Puking Blue that came from absorbing a lot of the post- Yellow Submarine era Beatles songs and ballads from newer bands like Deer Tick and The Drive-By Truckers. The songs from The Johnny High-Fives included in the book were a combination of original lyrics that I wrote and the songs of various friends I have made during my own travels. Joe Blake and his best friend, Lee Green, front man for their band The Johnny High-Fives, travel the country, playing to tent cities and hobo encampments and earn a fair living. My novel, Dystopia Boy: The Unauthorized Files, follows a folk-punk protest singer through a collapsing American economy in the not-too-distant future.
Writing about music is the closest I have come and it’s worked for me. Only one problem: I don’t have a musical bone in my body. Soundtrack by Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Hank Williams, Bruce Springsteen, The Drive-By Truckers, Deer Tick, Jay Calhoun, Press Black, David Rovics, Cartright, BeatlesĪll I ever wanted was to be Bob Dylan.
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