MAGAZINES 
How John Ohnmacht and the Johnny O Band keep the grit in the Boulder music scene
By Dave Kirby
Tidy and unassuming, well away from sparkly charms of the Pearl Street Mall, the bar on the ground floor of the Outlook Hotel, just east of the CU campus, isn’t likely to dazzle an outsider as one of Boulder’s premier nightlife haunts. A faint whiff of pool chlorine sometimes drifts through the low-ceilinged room, reminding you that you’re actually in a motel, and there’s not much of the sticky-floored wear and tear that usually characterizes high-impact music venues.
But in Boulder, if you want to hear some blues, three or four nights a week, this is where you go. Period.
John Ohnmacht knows this stage pretty well. Based in Louisville, Ohnmacht fronts the three-piece Johnny O Band, a blues and Cajun-funk power trio anchored by Ohnmacht’s fleet and piercing guitar lines, with veterans Ian Anderson (bass) and Marian Edwards (drums) as his canny rhythm section. They’ve been plowing the waters of the local music scene for almost 14 years.
home of the blues
For Ohnmacht, the Outlook gig is an absolutely central component to keeping the blues an active and vibrant contestant in a live music community that has alternately thrived and suffered from its own successes over the past 20 years.
“The Outlook has been a really great thing in Boulder,” Ohnmacht says. “They call it ‘Boulder’s Home of the Blues,’ and Dan King, who owns the place, and Honey Sepeda, who books the music, have really elevated the room. It’s at the bottom of a hotel, so they have some of their overhead covered, and they’re able to bring in some great national blues acts, and make a nice home for a lot of the local blues acts.”
Ohnmacht suggests that a stable home base—where you can develop enduring relationships with the club owner, the staff and your audience—may be just the kind of venue that Boulder, with its typically transient nightlife demographic and often pitiless hospitality-industry fortunes, has long needed.
“I think so,” he says. “For us, there’s always been kind of an ebb and flow of clubs opening, then closing. Clubs all of a sudden stop booking music, and then other clubs say, ‘Oh look, we’re starting to have music again.’ In between is the seasonal stuff. There’s a lot of places that have summertime events, and then in the winter, when there isn’t so much festival activity, the clubs get a little more attention.”
But the key to holding down a seat at the table, especially for a band like Ohnmacht’s—which pivots from funky, New Orleans–inspired original jam rock to arresting Chicago-style blues—is being able to project on all stages. Squinting off the high country, spring-skiing sunshine at a street festival in Breckenridge, the Johnny O Band can rally a dancing, fist-pumping crowd (to original music, no less) just as easily as they mesmerize a Thursday-night blues crowd at the Outlook or Oskar Blues.
The festival crowds crave the groove; the club crowds need the punch.
“We played the other night at the Zephyr Lounge, down in Denver,” Ohnmacht says. “They called us out of the blue, because they needed some new blood down there. This is, like, east of East Colfax. But the people there were really appreciative of the blues, and loved what we were doin’. And the next day, we played to 500 people at the Twenty Ninth Street mall in Boulder. In a sense, it’s all the same. We just want to play.”
band du jour’s day in the sun
It isn’t too hard to decipher the classic-rock roots in Ohnmacht’s playing. Like a lot of musicians of his generation, he drew much of his inspiration from the icons of the 1960s, and came to embrace blues via the big-venue blues-rock players of the ’80s.
“Before the blues got me in a headlock, it was really Santana and Duane Allman,” he recalls. “In high school, I went over to Red Rocks and saw Stevie Ray [Vaughan] a bunch of times, and the Allmans a bunch of times. The Allmans were really at a killer moment—back around ’85 to ’89, the Seven Turns album, when Warren Haynes first came on the scene, and he was first in the band with Dickey Betts. And I was 18, 19, and front row at Red Rocks. That’s pretty much what did it to me. Later, when I really started to dig into the blues, it was a lot of Albert King, and Freddie King, and BB King. And Stevie Ray, too.”
Ohnmacht’s Boulder-area career began right after he got to Boulder in 1989, playing in a handful of short-lived franchises that eventually morphed into a kind of rotating collective called Band du Jour. These were headline-makin’ days for Boulder bands. Acts like Big Head Todd and the Monsters, the Samples, and Leftover Salmon had turned Boulder into a conspicuous and highly valued exporter of live music. Band du Jour, once they had stabilized their lineup and focused their energies, was right in the thick of the action.
Ah, but timing is everything. “We were touring hard, we were running hard, and it just kind of fell apart,” Ohnmacht says. “Certain people in the band needed to do different things. Some of them just needed to stop what they were doing and fulfill that life calling and start a family and do that thing.
“Y’know, with Band du Jour, it’s too bad that Danny [Schultz, who goes by Danny Brant now in his career in California] and I didn’t have the foresight to say, ‘Hey, let’s take a break, but we’ve got a brand name here; we need to keep this thing alive.’ Because bands like Phish, Widespread Panic, Leftover Salmon and Todd and all these other guys who were all basically at the same level that we were at the time when Jerry [Garcia] decided to die—all those bands took a step up. And Band du Jour had quit about six months earlier.”
After Band du Jour went their separate ways in 1995, Ohnmacht (who’s an Aspen native) took a little time off from the Boulder scene to return to the Western Slope, fronting the successful 12 Barflies blues trio for a year or two before returning to Boulder in 1997 and starting the Johnny O Band. Since then, the band has done a couple of European tours, worked several high-profile blues festivals stateside, and gigged at clubs up and down the Front Range and on the ski-resort circuit. In 2009 they earned the right to represent Colorado at the prestigious International Blues Challenge in Memphis, winning the Colorado Blues Society IBC competition over 20 other Colorado bands.
flying down to rio
Ohnmacht devotes a portion a of his time to his acoustic duo, the Jelly Roll Bakers, a partnership with acoustic bassist Andy Irvine, which plays many of the same venues as the Johnny O Band. He also gives guitar lessons out of his Louisville studio, and since the Outlook gigs are all-ages, his students can come out and hear him play.
And if taking the band on a North American tour remains an elusive goal, taking at least his guitar somewhat farther has become a regular exercise. Ohnmacht’s father lives in Brazil half the year, and John started going there a few years ago, making friends with club owners and musicians in and around Rio and playing “real American blues” gigs—sometimes solo, sometimes with local players. American blues still retains a kind of primitive, almost mystical appeal for audiences in South America, most of whom have little access to it in a live setting.
“When I’m in Brazil, where people aren’t so hip to the blues in general, there will always be a couple of people coming out of the crowd,” Ohnmacht says. “Like the father who’d been playing blues music for his son since he was a little kid, and he’s moved to tears. ‘Ah, this was the greatest day. I was able to show my son what Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix were all about.’”
While the Johnny O Band is without a label at this time, they are working on a new CD, their fourth overall and their first in five years. Ohnmacht promises that this will be a more focused, less festival-oriented and more straight-up blues offering than their past CDs, which have divided their focus between traditional Chicago or Memphis blues and funky, New Orleans–style jam rock.
Ultimately, though, Ohnmacht is shooting for the kind of road work and consistent, multi-city exposure that can be elusive for blues bands in a tough economy and a crowded field of musical offerings.
“I believe, in the big picture, what it takes is longevity. And sticking to it.” u
Dave Kirby has been writing about music for various publications since 1978. He lives in Boulder with his wife and their white German shepherd.
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