Johnnie Newman’s parents met as actors on the set of the CBS daytime serial Guiding Light in the early 70s. Several years later, an athletic boy was born in New York City with a penchant for subtle melodrama. At five years old, Johnnie had his first and last guitar lesson with a long-haired Samoan man who spoke too loudly. Soon after, at around the highly impressionable age of eight, Johnnie began his passionately determined foray into music collecting, beginning with the Stand By Me soundtrack and the Beastie Boys’ License To Ill – an inaugural investment with far-reaching implications. He wrote his first song at nine, an in-the-shower composition tentatively titled “Mutual Experience,” the chorus of which still manages to somehow haunt Johnnie’s current oeuvre. At ten years old, a disastrous piano recital at Valley College left Johnnie with deep but necessary psychological scars. At fourteen, his family relocated to Fairfield County, Connecticut, leaving Johnnie to fend for himself in the unforgiving heat of the San Fernando Valley. That’s not true – Johnnie moved with them, and enjoyed a successful four-year run as an all-county first baseman for the Staples High School baseball team. In college, Johnnie begin his mutually beneficial kinship with the technically illegal substance known throughout the world as marijuana. Music composition soon followed. Whole days were subsequently lost, unsentimental drum beats were found. A year after leaving college for the sympathetic coastline of Jersey City, Johnnie began writing Aphex Twin inspired electronic madrigals. These first homemade records, the majority of which were instrumental, resembled a thudding attempt at sonic profundity. A year or two later, Johnnie had secured a precarious writing contract with the NBC soap opera Days Of Our Lives. With a new but fickle reservoir of spendable cash, Johnnie bought a homemade recording rig and began his songwriting career in earnest, under the clunky moniker Jack Studio. A hundred lo-fi songs followed and Johnnie met an unctuous music manager who introduced him to prodigious music producer and unforgiving hedonist Oliver Goldstein, of Ima Robot fame. Within an hour, Goldstein and Newman were writing songs in a dizzying haze of acute pharmaceutical psychosis. Inspired by a Quixotic fit of grand delusion, they decided to start a band. They called the band Tarzana. DJ Lethal of House of Pain soon joined, but the group dissembled after five shows due to a general lack of courage. Johnnie, licking his wounds on a summer family vacation – aboard a Mediterranean cruise liner which may as well have been called the Sycophant of the Seas – managed to find a quiet and rarely-frequented room replete with decades-old board games and a Yamaha grand piano. The room was called Cloud 9. It was here, amidst six cubic tons of banana daiquiris, floating blackjack tables and interminable belly-flop contests, that Johnnie would write the bulk of the songs for his proper debut album The Golden Coast.
