• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 414 0

company involved in trading precious metals. Or, as he puts it now, ‘For being too bright and a wise guy on Wall Street.’ A situation that was especially difficult as Jonny maintains to this day that he was innocent of the charges, but that his lawyer advised him to plead guilty because he couldn’t afford the cost of a long-drawn-out defence trial which he was likely to lose anyway. The result: a six-month jail sentence, which he was allowed to serve at a ‘halfway house’. Or ‘a jail without guards,’ as Jonny puts it. ‘I was left with a pity plea, a wife and a beautiful baby. I never did jail time, they wanted me to be able to work and feed my family. [But] we lost everything, Marsha and I, from our Wall Street mis-experience. I would spend the week [at the halfway house] and the weekends at home. The only phone that was available to do all this organisation of the shows was done on a payphone in a halfway house with quarters, with people who’d just got out of prison waiting for the phone to speak to their girlfriends. Waiting for me on the phone for twenty minutes, they were gonna kill me. You can imagine this? Nobody knows this story.’

The six-month sentence was eventually commuted to four and a half months. In the meantime, Marsha not only had to somehow keep Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven going, she had to look after their infant daughter Rikki. Friends rallied round – from ‘Old Bridge militia’ pals such as Rockin’ Ray and Metal Joe, to the kindly neighbours across the street who sent their son over to mow their front lawn when the grass got so high other neighbours began sticking letters in the mail, complaining. Meanwhile, Jonny’s father-in-law took over the weekday running of the market stall while Marsha kept Jonny’s spirits up by doing everything she could to keep the dream alive of moving from market stall owner to local gig promoter. Says Jonny: ‘I knew nothing about the business. Marsha went and got me out of the library all these books about how to be a manager, and understanding music law, and all that. I would read them at night, during the week, so that I understood all the various points of a contract – What should a band get? What’s fair? – all that stuff. I learned it out of books ’cos there was no years of experience.’

What the Zazulas lacked in music-biz expertise, however, they more than made up for with sheer strength of will and a determination to succeed at any cost. Indeed, Jonny and Marsha were on their way to becoming one of the most formidable partnerships in the business – both personal and professional. As Jonny recalls, ‘Marsha used to go out with my best friend and she was really a bitch to me. We started out really hating each other. Marsha was a deadly girl. When she don’t like you, forget it. [But] it just changed over time. We started laughing, never knew why we were mad at each other, and it just grew into this great relationship. She and I never left each other’s side since.’

Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven, which he and Marsha had started in 1982 with $180 cash, was doing well enough that ‘by the time Metallica came along we had about $60,000 worth of inventory just from reinvesting, reinvesting, reinvesting’. From that they were able to scrape together $1,500 to send to the band so they could hire a U-Haul truck and make the cross-country road trip from San Francisco to New Jersey. ‘They bought a one-way ticket. I believe Dave and Cliff were living inside the truck all the way from San Francisco, ’cos there was no car with the U-Haul. They showed up a week later without a fuckin’ dime.’ Living in ‘a small residential, blue collar area’ what Jonny and Marsha hadn’t bargained for was the ‘culture shock’ of a bunch of drunken teenagers suddenly arriving on their doorstep. ‘They come and land right on my front lawn. Basically, me penniless, them penniless, and we’re going “What the fuck, man? How we gonna do this?”’ The answer was for them to stay in Jonny’s basement. But the band soon outstayed their welcome and the Zazulas had to move them out. ‘I had a little bar in the hallway and they poured themselves