Interview: John Thomas Griffith from Red Rockers

John, welcome to the podcast.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

So if you can, can you take us back to the beginning? How did Red Rockers first come together, and what was the, maybe the original vision for the band?

Well, it was about 1979.

Uh, I had gone, uh, to high school with James Singleton, the guitarist.

And, uh, to be honest with you, there was a, um, a little radio station called WTUL in New Orleans.

It was a Tulane, uh, basic, their radio station, Tulane University.

And there was a gentleman on there on Tuesday nights, uh, that, um, had a show called the John G Show.

It's no relation, but, um, he, um, had a great ra- radio show on Tuesday nights from seven to ten PM.

And James invited me over to his house one night 'cause we had start talking about, um, punk rock music and this and that, and I kind of had gone, had asked James, I said, "Well, how do you find this music?" 'Cause it was very, there was no radio station in New Orleans.

Of course, it was far from it.

And, uh, he said, "Well, come over to my house on a Tuesday night, and I'll, we'll listen to the John G Show." So we did.

I went over to his house.

He was a neighborhood guy and, uh, that lived, lived probably about four block, blocks away.

So I went over to his house, and we started listening, and he had, he had a guitar.

I had, like, an old acoustic, a beat-up, uh, acoustic and a beat-up, uh, gold top Les Paul.

And we real-- both didn't know how to play guitar very well.

But when we listened to the music, and they played everything from Sex Pistols, Clash, New York Dolls, Ramones, and stuff, and we sat down with our guitars and started kinda playing through these, uh, chords and going, "Hey, man, we can do this." You know, we couldn't play Yes.

We couldn't play Led Zeppelin.

You know, you might as well just don't even bother at this point, at eighteen years old, if, if you haven't really gotten that, that good on your guitar, any instrument, uh, it's probably not worth even trying.

But anyway, the one thing we really enjoyed was Johnny Thunders-type guitar, GG, Steve Jones.

And that's what really brought us to the table.

We thought, "Oh, well, we can do those licks.

They're easy to do, and we learned them.