Erin BroadleyFor those of us raised in Los Angeles (not counting Silver Lake transplants who are too cool, or lazy, to drive west of Vine) partying and playing music on the Sunset Strip is a right of passage. Love it or loathe it, we all have at least one West Hollywood experience that we'll never forget: playing video games with Motorhead's Lemmy or swapping cooking recipes with Pantera's Vinnie Paul at the Rainbow; smoking a joint with Faith No More's Mike “Puffy” Bordin outside the Troubadour; dodging groupies' air-born panties outside Tower Records while interviewing Ozzy Osbourne; drinking too much tequila and inevitably starting a mosh pit during Guns N' Roses' “Night Train” as Slash rocks the stage during a secret show at the Roxy… yep, all true, and that's not even scratching my the surface.
L.A. band Warner Drive can relate. “As a kid, before I really started playing music, I loved the scene,” Warner Drive frontman Jonny Law told L.A. Weekly. “I wanted to emulate a lot of it — the bad boys and the trouble with the law and all that stuff. But when I started playing music, I wanted to be different. I realized pretty quick that the business and the industry was changing and you couldn't just be a rock star anymore. You couldn't just drink and be creative and screw around all the time. You had to have business savvy.”
Warner Drive has seen it all, done a lot of it, and still emerged as one of the Strip's next-big-thing rock bands. Tonight the band headlines the Viper Room as part of the third annual Sunset Strip Music Festival, which kicked off Thursday with a tribute to its 2010 honoree Slash at the House of Blues, and later a headlining gig by Filter at the Roxy.
We caught up with Warner Drive's Jonny Law and drummer Jonny U prior to the band's Viper Room gig to chat Hollywood business savvy, meeting one's idols, and why their band will never pay-to-play.
L.A. Weekly: From an L.A. born and raised musician's point of view, what was it like growing up with the history of the West Hollywood rock scene, the wild stories, and now being right in the midst of it?
Jonny Law: As a kid, before I really started playing music, I loved the scene. I wanted to emulate a lot of it — the bad boys and the trouble with the law and all that stuff. But when I started playing music, I wanted to be different. I realized pretty quick that the business and the industry was changing and you couldn't just be a rock star anymore. You couldn't just drink and be creative and screw around all the time. You had to have business savvy. Which was weird because growing up, those were the bands that I idolized. Everything was in my backyard. It was kind of ironic that when I actually started making a real go at playing music, I really didn't want any of that stuff. I wanted to separate myself from trouble and partying too much. My vision of what a rock star was not what I'm doing, that's for damn sure. It's a whole new world. Everyone says it's such a bad time in the industry, but realistically it's a time in the industry where there's never been so much good music available to the public. There's more music out there than there's ever been. Your chance of making a living as a working musician today is 100 times greater than it was in the past. But your chance of hitting it huge is 100 times less than it was in the past. The whole scene's different. From a musician's standpoint and from someone who grew up here, I saw pretty quick that you couldn't just be a rock star. You couldn't just be the creative party guy.
Or throw TVs out the window just for shits and giggles.
Jonny Law: Exactly. That's not to say we don't have fun and we don't do those kinds of things, but there's a time and a place. We definitely know how to be responsible and get down to business because that's what this is about. We gotta get down to business if we want to make a career doing what we love. With that said, if anyone would have told me that we'd be going out and playing on tour with bands like Jet or Ratt, the Killers, Fuel, CKY — we've toured with all these bands — but if you'd have told me that I'd be doing that when I was a kid, I would have said there's no way, you've gotta be kidding me. It's totally humbling and surreal at times. There's no situation I enjoy more than being up on stage in front of a ton of people when we're opening for a national band and you're either gonna crash and burn and get bottles thrown at you, or you're going to win people over. I love that. The adrenaline. That's not to say that I don't love playing for our fans at home, I do. I love selling out the Roxy, the House of Blues, the Key Club, and having 90% of those people be our fans because that's a different energy. That's an energy where everyone knows your songs and knows you and it's more of a party feel. Playing with CKY or Jet, when there are thousands of people there who know nothing about you and want to hate you, to get up there and win those people over, that's a whole different feeling.
Warner Drive's Jonny Law
Starting a band in L.A. and finding the right combination of personalities and talent… back in the day bands like Guns N' Roses placed want ads in the Penny Saver or whatnot… what was your experience putting together a band and recruiting musicians?
Jonny Law: I never had to answer a want ad or put out a want ad. I got really lucky. Warner Drive started with four kids who all were neighbors and lived on Warner Drive — [laughs] that's where the name came from — and a few of the guys moved on. One of them had serious drug problems by the time we were 15, one of them had two kids by the time he was 19, so that whole aspect about our roots is kind of gone. But I got very lucky in that we had built up the band and had built up enough of a reputation around town that when it was time for me to get new band members, I didn't have to look very hard. It was a really seamless transition. I count my lucky stars that I have these guys in my band. Our personalities are fantastic. We spend three weeks out of every month on the road in a van together and for the most part we all get along really well [laughs].
A lot of what this festival is about is celebrating West Hollywood and celebrating the Sunset Strip. What do you think is the enduring allure of the Strip after all these years?
Jonny Law: The heritage gives it it's reputation. Everywhere in the world people know about the Viper Room, the Roxy, the Whisky. They know that The Doors came out of the Whisky, they know that River Phoenix died at the Viper Room. There's something about the heritage of the Sunset Strip and what's happened here that really hasn't happened in too many places in the world. Sunset Strip has been the center of rock-and-roll for decades. If we have anything to do about it, I'd love to be the next band that breaks and becomes really successful from here and one day people talk about us, 10 or 20 or 30 years from now going, “Yeah man, Warner Drive used to be the house band here at the Viper Room.” We'll see. The pay-to-play thing that happened on the Strip in the late '90s really killed the scene. It stopped being about the music. Now, with people like Nic Adler who really want to see something different happen and want to get it back to the way it used to be, there's more integrity. I definitely feel like something's changing and there are a few bands out there on the Strip that are making noise and catching people's attention. The scene is coming back. The time is right. It's ripe for a change.