Rockin' The Mancave

Even when he was running the boutique inner city Sydney venue he established more than a decade ago, The Vanguard – and he was often upstairs cooking for its patrons – Johnny Cass would sometimes book himself and a few musical friends to stretch out on some blues rock, just to remind himself that he was a singer first and restaurateur second. Once he sold the business, he decided to return to the business of making music in earnest once more. The first fruit of that is the debut Johnny Cass Band album, Tombstone Bullets, which began in The Lakeside Ramble.

“Lakeside Ramble is basically my 'man cave',” Cass chuckles, on the line from his property down on the south coast of NSW, “looks like an old-style kind of shack, and that's where we did most of the recording. It's a ten by ten metre room and it's got a really high five-metre roof, so it's quite a large sound and I guess one of the challenges that we faced what to do if we didn't want a large sound! That's when the old Vanguard curtain came in handy – we baffled the drums and kind of made a big tent the drummer played in under the Vanguard curtain.

“There's one song on the album that was actually recorded at The Vanguard in 2010 – Holdin On. I'd recorded about eight songs there before we left and I never really did anything with them.”

As you can tell from the album's title, the music Johnny Cass makes is very much in the roots rock vein.

“The songs start with a bit of a genre twist,” Cass suggests, “starting off blues and roots and then venturing into a gumbo of Southern rock. I think the biggest challenge for this album was trying to have continuity within the songs, which I guess is the struggle of most artists. As far as the songs go, they're a mixed bag of storytelling, personal experiences and writing about characters that I've met. There's always a little bit of me in there as well.

“A lot of people might say I'm a bit of a cowboy,” he chuckles, regards the imagery he's put into the cover and title, “ready to shoot off any moment. But yeah, I really love the whole '70s rock thing and with the '70s, especially with the Southern rock thing, you've got that element of a cowboy, a gunslinger – a guitarist is a gunslinger – so that's imagery I'm trying to get through.”