You can’t get more unpretentious than Valdosta, GA. Nestled in Southern Georgia, just a few miles from Florida, you’re more likely to see a tractor than a tour bus passing through downtown.Like their hometown, the guys in Ninja Gun are just as laid back. You’ll never catch any of them squeezing into girl’s jeans or delicately applying eyeliner before taking the stage. Their music is equally modest, just beautifully-executed, roots-based rock with hooks that would make Brian Wilson jealous and punk rock sensibilities.
Having hooked up with Suburban Home for their second release (“Restless Rube”), the band is about to storm the East Coast.
Front man Jonathan Coody spoke recently about the band, being the son of a farmer and life in Valdosta.
Did you all know each other growing up?
Yeah, Jeffrey and I are actually cousins. We grew up down the dirt road from each other. We kind of cut our musical teeth together too. I'm a few years older than him and when I was in high school I played drums in a band called The Primates. He was always around and he started playing drums around that time I guess. We met Thad and Jacob a lot later. They were childhood friends that also started playing together at a very young age.
What made you decide to start the band?
About 10 years ago Jeffrey and I were in a band called The Bleeding Gumdrops in which he played drums and I was the guitarist and singer and our buddy Jason Fernandez played bass. The Gumdrops eventually called it quits and I started writing a lot of songs by myself on an old Silvertone acoustic folk guitar that I found under a bunch of other stuff in the top of my dad's closet. He ordered it from the Sears catalog when he was a kid and never really did much with it. I eventually wound up with a bunch of songs that I didn't know what to do with. They weren't anything like the stuff I had written for the Gumdrops and I was curious how they would sound with a full band. Jeffrey and I went to the One Up club here in Valdosta one night to see some friends of ours play and Thad and Jake's band Caspian was the opener. We had never met them before. Caspian was an instrumental band in the vein of Tortoise or something. They were all so young and they were really good players. They couldn't have been more than 15 or so and I was intrigued that they were playing music like this that had so much depth at such a young age. I guess we asked them to come out to The Trailer of Tears (the single-wide that we practiced in) to jam around some time and they eventually did. When I heard what those songs could sound like in the hands of those guys I knew we should be a band. Here we are 6 years and two albums later. Same four guys doing what we love.We were called Watermelon Fast for our first show because I read somewhere that Mike Love from The Beach Boys freaked out on a bunch of drugs in the sixties and ate only watermelon for a year. We gave away watermelons that we grew at that show. We eventually changed the name to Ninja Gun and I'll never tell where that came from. Probably should've kept Watermelon Fast.
How do you describe your sound to those who haven't heard you yet?
Ooh, that's always a tough one. I think as a writer it's very important to listen to a wide range of stuff so you have a lot of colors to paint with. Having a homogenized sound may make it easy for you to get laid and sell records or whatever, but it makes for bad art in my opinion. I see so many haircut bands these days that work really hard at sounding just like whatever haircut is selling at the time. That just tells me that they have nothing to say. I think the best songwriters filter life through themselves and spit it back out with some degree of perspective attached. We actually thought about calling the new album "Eclectic Warrior" in tribute to T-Rex - Didn't do it though. It's called "Restless Rubes" because that's what we are. As a cop out, I'll tell people what I hear other people compare us to. We get a lot of Tom Petty, The Lemonheads, Replacements, John COUGAR Mellencamp, Weezer, Smoking Popes, and stuff like that.
Are you still a farmer when you're not on the road?
Well, my dad's the farmer. I've never had any ambition to pursue that as a career. It's just something I've done my whole life to help him out. It's a damn near impossible way to make a living these days. Government deregulation and corporate farms have really decimated small family operations in the past twenty years or so. I feel like my generation is kind of the last of the farm kids. I know a lot of farmers around here have encouraged their kids to go to college and try to find some other viable way to make money. It means the death of that way of life and it's really sad. That's why it was initially really hard for me to explain to my folks that although I have a college degree I would rather travel around in a van playing songs that I wrote in my underwear for little to no money. They place a lot of value in financial security because they know what it's like to struggle to keep the bills paid. I can appreciate that, but I just can't seem to rationalize trading in my happiness for a 401k or whatever. I know what I was built to do and I have to do it or I'm going to be miserable. Everyone in this band feels that way and that's what keeps us together.
Is it easy for all of you to get time off to record and tour?
Yeah, getting time off to tour and record is always a challenge. Being in a touring band in Valdosta, GA is kind of like leading a double life. There aren’t any cool record stores, record labels, or anything like that to work at around here so you have to work some square job where people aren’t going to get what you do. There’s no support network like there is in other more music-centric towns. With that said though, I like living here because I think the best art comes from isolated places because it has to gasp for breath in a sea of fucking practicality. It weeds out a lot of bullshit because you have to work really hard to be heard. On top of that, it provides you with a unique viewpoint that others might not have.
What can you tell me about the new record?
It’s called “Restless Rubes” and it just came out on Suburban Home Records. We worked on it on and off for about a year and a half. It was recorded here in Valdosta with Lee Dyess at Earthsound Recordings and we’re really proud of it. The songs are ripped straight out of our lives and they’re honest. I hope that comes across to the listener. I hope somebody can relate to or find some kind of value in them. I guess growing up in an environment that has a built in belief system that we don’t agree with was the catalyst for a lot of these songs. Things like poor rural people having blind faith in an administration that doesn’t care about them really troubles me. Most people around here don’t ask questions. Life here is a lot easier if you don’t. The “Good Old Boy Network” is the law of the land here and if you don’t rock the boat, you’re afforded a better quality of life. You have to work the right job, hate the right people, vote the right way, and the best thing about it is you don’t even have to think for yourself.
How did it come out compared to your first record?
Coody: Our first record is called “Smooth Transitions” and it came out on a label called Barracuda Sound out of Gainesville, Florida. Our buddy Jon Reinertsen who also plays drums for Whiskey and Company put it out. We had a lot less time to work on it because of financial constraints, but I think it’s a pretty good portrayal of who we were as a band at that time. Barracuda Sound is also co-releasing the vinyl for Restless Rubes with Suburban Home. There’s a four year gap between the releases of both of our albums so there’s a lot of undocumented growth.
How did you hook up with Suburban Home?
I think I just sent Virgil an email of the roughs of the new songs and told him to give them a listen. He wrote me back and said he liked them a lot and we went from there. He’s a super nice guy who was willing to take a chance on a relatively unknown band just because he liked what we were doing. That type of integrity is hard to find these days and we’re extremely lucky to be associated with Suburban Home. We were in Denver on tour about a month ago and we got to meet everyone that works at the label and a lot of the bands on the label. They’re a great bunch of folks and they made us feel welcome and I would like to publicly thank them now!
I live in Atlanta and the rock scene is pretty bad here. I can’t imagine what it’s like in Valdosta, GA?
Well, the cool thing about living in an off-the-radar town is the lack of pretension. Our local punk scene has always been about playing for your friends and just doing what gets you off. Valdosta always has a core of about five really good bands that write their own stuff and they all sound completely different. There’s a lot of cross pollination because the kid that is 16 and is in a Black Flag style band is playing shows with a band that sounds a little like Pavement or something. I’ve never been a fan of going to shows and seeing three bands that sound alike. The byproduct is that the fans of each band get turned on to something that they might not have normally been exposed to. The rest are haircuts and Dave Matthews cover bands who stoke out sorority girls by playing Brown Eyed Girl for the thousandth time. They’re also good at giving AC/DC the pop country treatment. Gross. Check out these locals if you get a chance: Second to Edison, No More Analog, False Arrest, Knock Galley West, and Fancy Blood
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