Long-distance monkey

“Coinciding with reestablishing the band and calling off our indefinite hiatus, I finally came to terms with the fact that these feet will never fit into corporate shoes,” says singer/guitarist Johnny Rukkus, whose band Monkeys in Space has been inactive for nearly two years. “I have concluded it is better to be an idiot-loser-dreamer — in my family’s eyes — than to have them catch me on the 5 o’clock news going all American Psycho on coworkers.”

According to Rukkus, “It was evident, after returning home from our last tour, broke and in poor health, that the hope for an uncomplicated future would be much harder than first anticipated...several fistfights and screaming matches later, everyone had taken off in separate directions with little more than a ‘Fuck you, have a nice life.’ I couldn’t help but think, Four years down the drain, my family was right. Maybe we do suck. Maybe I am just a giant man-baby that refused to grow up... I have two Monkeys in Space tattoos on my body, for Christ’s sake.”

With bills piling up, “For a brief nightmare of a stint, I found myself in a suit and tie, shaking hands, carrying on as an empty shell of a man, posting memes on the company message board... I turned in my guitar for a man-purse and traded my life for a meager paycheck.” Turning to his former bandmates Jeremy Vara, Josh Smith, and Ryan Higginson, who were having the same difficulty breaking from their former “rock-and-roll lifestyle,” Rukkus says, “It was clear my campaign of faith akin to that of the Blues Brothers’ ‘mission from God’ was taking hold of them.”

The Poway party band’s upcoming full-length Kill Your Past, due in May, was recently previewed on the Tim Pyles radio show, including the first single “My Drinking Buddies Have a Rock & Roll Problem.”

Keyboards were provided long-distance via a German musician named Sebastian Gottlieb. “We found him on the Do Anything For Five Bucks service website fiverr.com. He did a piano part for ‘Our Great Escape,’ and we were absolutely blown away, so we had him do the rest of the album. He was stoked to be a part, and we definitely consider him the fifth member and our long-distance Monkey.”