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Ben Johnson: making drinks and other things
Bartender, bandmember, book author — and filmmaker
Ben Johnson frames the shot
“Two years to the day after our first shoot, we have wrapped production on Find Them, a rock and roll thriller,” says local author, musician, and longtime Casbah bartender (29 years this month) Ben Johnson. “Immeasurable thanks to the amazing crew and cast that navigated these often stormy seas with me. It’s been a fun and educational haul…so many stories to tell. This has been so fun and rewarding, working with so many awesome and talented people. Fuck yeah, San Diego music scene people!”
With shooting on the film complete, it's on to post-production, "which has been underway for some time. I don’t do timelines, but I have a feeling this will be done fairly soon.” The movie trailer premiered in August at the North Park Film Festival.
Johnson has been making movies since the mid-teens, as well as acting in short films co-created with Grant Reinero and Smoking Jacket Films, a local collective of musician-filmmakers. One of their projects was a 48-hour moviemaking challenge entry entitled Deadline, which he describes as “a Twilight Zone sort of short.”
Johnson is also the writer and director of a 2021 rock and roll thriller called Fanboy, a film where he plays an unhinged drummer obsessed with joining Xenos, his favorite rock band. Local spots seen in the movie include the Ken Club, Whistle Stop Bar, and of course, the Casbah. The soundtrack includes San Diego bands such as Hot Snakes, Red Fang, and Johnson’s own groups The Long and Short of It (formed with his brother Tim while attending college in Santa Cruz) and Tourettes Lautrec. Entirely self-funded, self-created, and self-promoted, Fanboy ended up streaming on Amazon Prime and even enjoyed theatrical screenings at several SoCal moviehouses and drive-ins. “It was such a minimal expenditure for the film that the drive-in [screenings] really took care of all that,” he told the Reader.
Video:
Trailer: FANBOY
His promotional efforts for Fanboy included exposing the film to national bands that playing during his shifts at the Casbah. “I tell them, ‘Hey, this is about the world you live in, if you want to check out this movie.’ So, I have little stickers behind the bar with QR codes so they can QR it, and it goes right to my website where you can click a link to watch it on the web. That’s been successful, and uses that sphere of influence that they have. A couple of bands have reposted it so their fanbase sees that it exists. Grassroots is probably the most effective way for this movie to be marketed.”
Among Johnson’s own band projects is Hostile Comb-Over, which originated as a three-piece metal act with all three members on vocals as well. Wha? is a goth-punk band he formed in 2012 alongside keyboardist Tracy Wooley (of Beehive & the Barracudas and Tourette's Lautrec), with Kaoss Pad and David Robles (the Marsupials). Owl Be Damned is his rock trio with singer Douglas Thompson (Low and Be Told, The Marsupials), which happens to be playing the Casbah on September 15.
He also has a rapper persona known as Grammatical B. “This is my first foray into rap, after doing heavy rock and punk for the last 20 years,” he told the Reader after filming a video for a comedic song about ordering drinks called “Rules and Laws” at his workplace. “Shot at the Casbah, it’s me speaking - or yelling - at all those obnoxious people who just don’t get the art of ordering a drink.”
Video:
Grammatical B: "Rules and Laws"
As an author, Johnson (an avowed fan of sci-fi scribe Philip K. Dick) is the writer behind the 2014 book A Shadow Cast in Dust, subtitled “An Urban Fantasy Epic,” which mostly takes place in Golden Hill and concerns an “ancient order of web spinners, a silver knife, a detective, and a boy running from his captors through the canyons of San Diego with his new friends and special dog.” The book serves as part one of what ultimately became the Webworld Trilogy.
The Webworld books have featured area locales such as Switzer Canyon and other outdoor landmarks. “Our detective, Clementine, tracks the monster that has gone through there, ending up at the huge drainage tunnel at the foot of Florida Canyon, one of the creepiest places in San Diego.” Don’t look for many local personality cameos, though. “I don’t base too many characters off real life...that said, there is a big nightclub doorman that resembles a certain poet of that description.”
Johnson says he has always been a fan of narrative in songs, and writing a book seemed like the obvious next step. As he told the Reader, “Over time, my songs just started having a beginning, a middle, and an end and were trying to be little stories. That’s actually what thrust me into trying to write a book. I started writing little stories, and then two or three songs kind of go together in a story and then you’re, like, now I just wanna write a story. You can put a lot more detail into writing fiction than you can a song.”
So far, writing, filmmaking, and even bartending is proving somewhat safer and less traumatic than playing live rock and roll or hip-hop. “I’ve been injured countless times on stage. My old band Tourettes Lautrec used to end each show with the guitarist flying into me behind the drums.” The same group played what he recalls as his “worst gig ever, New York City in 1999. I was too drunk to play and embarrassed the shit out of myself in front of 500 people. That was not incredible.”
Here's something you might be interested in.
Ben Johnson: making drinks and other things
Bartender, bandmember, book author — and filmmaker
Ben Johnson: making drinks and other things
Bartender, bandmember, book author — and filmmaker
Ben Johnson frames the shot
“Two years to the day after our first shoot, we have wrapped production on Find Them, a rock and roll thriller,” says local author, musician, and longtime Casbah bartender (29 years this month) Ben Johnson. “Immeasurable thanks to the amazing crew and cast that navigated these often stormy seas with me. It’s been a fun and educational haul…so many stories to tell. This has been so fun and rewarding, working with so many awesome and talented people. Fuck yeah, San Diego music scene people!”
With shooting on the film complete, it's on to post-production, "which has been underway for some time. I don’t do timelines, but I have a feeling this will be done fairly soon.” The movie trailer premiered in August at the North Park Film Festival.
Johnson has been making movies since the mid-teens, as well as acting in short films co-created with Grant Reinero and Smoking Jacket Films, a local collective of musician-filmmakers. One of their projects was a 48-hour moviemaking challenge entry entitled Deadline, which he describes as “a Twilight Zone sort of short.”
Johnson is also the writer and director of a 2021 rock and roll thriller called Fanboy, a film where he plays an unhinged drummer obsessed with joining Xenos, his favorite rock band. Local spots seen in the movie include the Ken Club, Whistle Stop Bar, and of course, the Casbah. The soundtrack includes San Diego bands such as Hot Snakes, Red Fang, and Johnson’s own groups The Long and Short of It (formed with his brother Tim while attending college in Santa Cruz) and Tourettes Lautrec. Entirely self-funded, self-created, and self-promoted, Fanboy ended up streaming on Amazon Prime and even enjoyed theatrical screenings at several SoCal moviehouses and drive-ins. “It was such a minimal expenditure for the film that the drive-in [screenings] really took care of all that,” he told the Reader.
Video:
Trailer: FANBOY
His promotional efforts for Fanboy included exposing the film to national bands that playing during his shifts at the Casbah. “I tell them, ‘Hey, this is about the world you live in, if you want to check out this movie.’ So, I have little stickers behind the bar with QR codes so they can QR it, and it goes right to my website where you can click a link to watch it on the web. That’s been successful, and uses that sphere of influence that they have. A couple of bands have reposted it so their fanbase sees that it exists. Grassroots is probably the most effective way for this movie to be marketed.”
Among Johnson’s own band projects is Hostile Comb-Over, which originated as a three-piece metal act with all three members on vocals as well. Wha? is a goth-punk band he formed in 2012 alongside keyboardist Tracy Wooley (of Beehive & the Barracudas and Tourette's Lautrec), with Kaoss Pad and David Robles (the Marsupials). Owl Be Damned is his rock trio with singer Douglas Thompson (Low and Be Told, The Marsupials), which happens to be playing the Casbah on September 15.
He also has a rapper persona known as Grammatical B. “This is my first foray into rap, after doing heavy rock and punk for the last 20 years,” he told the Reader after filming a video for a comedic song about ordering drinks called “Rules and Laws” at his workplace. “Shot at the Casbah, it’s me speaking - or yelling - at all those obnoxious people who just don’t get the art of ordering a drink.”
Video:
Grammatical B: "Rules and Laws"
As an author, Johnson (an avowed fan of sci-fi scribe Philip K. Dick) is the writer behind the 2014 book A Shadow Cast in Dust, subtitled “An Urban Fantasy Epic,” which mostly takes place in Golden Hill and concerns an “ancient order of web spinners, a silver knife, a detective, and a boy running from his captors through the canyons of San Diego with his new friends and special dog.” The book serves as part one of what ultimately became the Webworld Trilogy.
The Webworld books have featured area locales such as Switzer Canyon and other outdoor landmarks. “Our detective, Clementine, tracks the monster that has gone through there, ending up at the huge drainage tunnel at the foot of Florida Canyon, one of the creepiest places in San Diego.” Don’t look for many local personality cameos, though. “I don’t base too many characters off real life...that said, there is a big nightclub doorman that resembles a certain poet of that description.”
Johnson says he has always been a fan of narrative in songs, and writing a book seemed like the obvious next step. As he told the Reader, “Over time, my songs just started having a beginning, a middle, and an end and were trying to be little stories. That’s actually what thrust me into trying to write a book. I started writing little stories, and then two or three songs kind of go together in a story and then you’re, like, now I just wanna write a story. You can put a lot more detail into writing fiction than you can a song.”
So far, writing, filmmaking, and even bartending is proving somewhat safer and less traumatic than playing live rock and roll or hip-hop. “I’ve been injured countless times on stage. My old band Tourettes Lautrec used to end each show with the guitarist flying into me behind the drums.” The same group played what he recalls as his “worst gig ever, New York City in 1999. I was too drunk to play and embarrassed the shit out of myself in front of 500 people. That was not incredible.”
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