Tennis, Anyone?

June 11, 2009 Issue

Jonathan Tennis was raised in south and central Florida but calls the Emerald Coast his second home. “It’s where my grandma and grandpa live, so it’s an ancestral home,” he says.

“In ’66, we were living in Fort Lauderdale. The late ‘60s music explosion happened in the suburbs—all the kids had instruments and amplifiers. The Beatles and the Monkees TV show opened a huge door,” says Tennis. At 15, he took guitar lessons from “a master,” who enabled him to play more than “Louie Louie.”

At 19, Tennis played his first paying gig with a borrowed electric guitar. During the summer of 1979, he was a street musician in Greenwich Village. “I lived in Brooklyn 30 years ago, trying to get a record deal,” he says. “There was a whole period in the ‘80s when I slept on couches and floors.”

Tennis returned to south Florida to play in supper clubs. In 1988, he returned to this area to visit an uncle and bumped into Pat Boone—the local guy, not Mr. White Bucks. “I ended up subbing for him at Nightown. Pat had his own club, Runaway Bay—a musician who owned a nightclub? I thought, ‘Damn!’”

The 1990s saw Tennis working for Carnival Cruise Lines and drinking heavily. “I met some fantastic entertainers, including one of the best jugglers in the world,” he says. “I had to share a cabin with the keyboard player. Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say. It wasn’t pretty.”

After that, Tennis continued to drink, but says he hasn’t touched the stuff in 15 years. “The cruise ship was an experiment—how much can you drink and still play music? I had a three-day bender in 1993, woke up and decided to quit. Everything improved in my life. Drinking is a necessary part of the system, though. I implore people to keep drinking until I sound good!”

He’s joking, of course. “Some people can’t grasp certain concepts—people who are trapped in these information-less places,” says Tennis. “Destin is unlike any place I’ve ever known. Fort Lauderdale is a similar model, but this is more of a fairy tale existence, a fantasyland cut off from any large metropolitan area. A certain behavior exists here—golf, boating, drinking and traffic jams. But it’s fun and provides work for people. They just need to redesign it for the amount of people here.”

Tennis puts Stevie Wonder at the top of his list of influential musicians, and adds that Lennon and McCartney were “good, but a lot of people make good songs. I suck at songwriting—I find it to be the most troublesome activity. It’s like running your soul up a pole and letting everyone look at it. I’m frightened of showing too much of myself to the world. I can’t tell them how I feel honestly—I don’t want to upset the world.”

Recently, a woman inspired Tennis to “write gushy, love-influenced music as only a woman can. This just sort of happens. I’ve been single for a long time. I don’t have much faith in a relationship growing in my line of work. I have too much fun to have to sacrifice my free time. A relationship would probably cut into that fun.”

There are love songs in his repertoire, though, plus the Beachcomber publisher’s favorite, “Waiting on a Friend.” “There aren’t a lot of ‘hate’ songs out there,” says Tennis. “During the ‘70s, all these people like Seals and Crofts were doing gushing, mellow stuff. I was always more funk. Radio-friendly ‘70s pop made me ill. I never liked a lot of popular music. I do like Al Green’s ‘Let’s Stay Together’—it ain’t sappy, but it’s still about the four-letter L word. And anything by Roy Orbison—he’s probably my favorite singer of all time.”

Tennis recently hit it off with Donnie Sundal and hopes to record something at Sundal’s studio in the near future. “I want to make a CD, collaborate with someone and write songs—not by myself,” he says. “I’ve spent 30, almost 40 years doing this, but I never got into the real ‘work ethic’—some of these guys teach, but my attitude was to get by with the least amount of work possible. I see a lot of young people and I tell them, ‘Learn about music, but don’t make it your life!’

“I really have a nice thing now, but for 20 years it was pretty grim. Drinking is an occupational hazard—it doesn’t make you a better musician. When you’re working in bars, that’s the game, but if someone hires me, they know I won’t show up drunk. I’m a safe bet. I just don’t want to play ‘It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere.’ Ugh! It gives me the creeps—a song about a guy quitting his job to get drunk. But I will play ‘Margaritaville’ and ‘Brown Eyed Girl.’”

www.myspace.com/jontennis is the place to befriend him, but there’s no music posted. “I’ve done some experimental recording to satisfy my curiosity,” he says, but nothing he wants to post for the world just yet. Catch Tennis at Tommy Bahama’s Grand Boulevard, Sandestin, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

FRIENDS OF THE BEAT
Speaking of sax players, Randy Sherwood has some fine new sights and sounds posted on his YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/SaxyGuyDestin. Sherwood also provided the entertainment at a recent wedding rehearsal dinner we attended—his skills on the horn and keyboards are without question. Musicians, if you have a YouTube channel, share it with us at thebeachcomber@earthlink.net.

If you can’t get enough of Beachcomber Music Award winner Cheryl “Diva” Jones—and who can’t, really?—check her out Sundays at Louisiana Lagniappe from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Shannon “Chief” Cherry—whose own jazz trio Chief’s Soul Kitchen wows audiences at the Village of Baytowne Wharf’s Top This four nights week—has booked some interesting new voices in the Tupelo Courtyard. Singer-songwriter Dannica Lowery recently knocked us out with her original “indie-folk” songs, and she’ll be back June 13 starting at 5 p.m. www.myspace.com/dannicalowery.

RECENT GIGS
If you’ve caught a great show—locally or otherwise—send us a review. Your comments and photos are always welcome at thebeachcomber@earthlink.net. Please provide date and location, along with your sharp observations.

(Top)

More Musician Profiles