By Edison Tesla
As many of you know and some of you might not, Johnny is moving on from his Monday Night at ZuZu on towards a new gig at Lilypad called ⓄⒹⒹ ⓉⒽⓊⓇⓈⒹⒶⓎⓈ. Read some of his fond memories below, and make sure to come to his last few nights in November. From Johnny:
I started working at ZuZu in 2004. In 2008, I started booking a live music night, and then in 2009 my manager asked me to give my night a name for the calendar listings. I remember attending a buddy brunch at Niani’s (Zuzu’s head bartender) one day we were watching zombie flicks and hangin’ out when a friend said it. We all laughed, and it stuck with me. Soon it all came together under the name ‘night of the living deadhead,’ and since then I have had hundreds of bands come play at ZuZu and have met probably thousands of awesome people. I had a lot of success using Facebook as a booking, networking and promotional tool– I had started a profile first called ‘Living Deadhead ‘ then a few years ago the Facebook police told me to pick a real name or be deleted- I quickly chose the name ‘Edison Tesla’ after seeing the drunk history episode with John C Reilly and Crispin Glover.
I have been trying for many moons to make a website for all the archiving I have done so far- in all of the
Facebook albums you will notice flyers album # 9 and players album #10 each album containing about 200 or so pictures. If you quickly tabbed through the profile pictures you get a sense of the bands and scene and all the artwork on the flyers. The flyers! One day I picked up a book at Lorem Ipsum called ‘
Hairstyles of the World’ photocopy gold I called it- I used it for years making the flyers up in the office on the old copy machine and then people who sat at the bar would add some color to them. I can’t remember at one point people came in specifically to color – but I knew I was onto something. It’s great it happened so naturally. The bathrooms at ZuZu became a weekly art show – I would only make a dozen or so – but I would hang up 2 or 3 in each bathroom, securing my spot for months on the cork board outside ZuZu and I would be able to save my spot at 1369 in Inman for months at a time too. I started saving all the posters (how could i throw them out?) and now I have a good size collection at home. Not sure what I’m saving them for exactly. I was thinking an art show sometime. I do plan on bringing a bunch in and taping them all over the place at ZuZu on Monday, November 25th – which will be the final night of the living deadhead.
My right hand man at zuzu, Joe Marrett (CreaturoS) has been working the Monday nights with me for years, doing sound for bands and helping me out behind the bar. He is going to take over the Mondays starting in December. Joe is one of the best and most creative dudes I know and I’m so happy he’ll be able to keep a Monday night music series going. Joe suggested a few weeks ago that for the last night, Idon’t work – I play! It made me really happy that this suggestion came from him and I agree that it’s a great way to end the series. The final night will be my band –
fedavees– and another band I play in called
headband. To make the night even more special I asked one of my favorites
Bobb Trimble to play and he is premiering a music video with the help of
Eye Designs. It should be a night to remember.
Here’s a list of the final ~night of the living deadhead~ shows ::
