The Claudettes’ Johnny Iguana on the sound of a city

October 4, 2023

Nick Spacek,

Courtesy photo.

Chicago rock n’ rollers The Claudettes come back to Kansas City nearly every year for a raucous show drawing from R&B, blues, rockabilly, and so much more. Anchored by the barrelhouse piano of one Johnny Iguana, the group has punk rock energy and jazz chops. They hit Knuckleheads on Thursday, October 5, and we hopped on the phone with frontman Johnny Iguana to discuss what brings them back to KC and what makes Chicago their home base.

The Pitch: What keeps bringing you back to Kansas City?

I grew up in Philly and we would play in, you know, New York, Boston, Philly, and when you’re out here, you look at a map and there’s the, there’s the surrounding towns and logistics and stuff. I first played my first gig in Kansas City when I was 23, when I had just joined the Junior Wells band and you know, having grown up and early on had a copy of a record with Jay McShann on it, it just felt like, man, from what I’ve read, like Kansas City was the spot. There’s a huge music history there. One of the music towns from 100 years ago, so when I came there, it just felt like a music place to me

I had a band called Oh My God. In the early 2000s, we would come to Kansas City at least twice a year. Later on, we played the Record Bar. At first, we played Hurricane and The Brick. Pretty much 100% of the time, I had at least a mini adventure when I was there. It always seemed like our Record Bar nights and our Hurricane nights were were exciting. I’ve met really good people that I’ve still friends with over the years from KC.

It just seems very different than St. Louis and other towns that we come through. There’s something about it that’s just its own thing. I’ve always had a good time there.

Coming from Philly and then moving to Chicago and talking about Kansas City, you have lived in some music towns. What is it that got you to Chicago? I’m assuming it’s Junior Wells, but…

Yeah, I mean, I was living in Manhattan for my first job out of college, and I just happened to meet a musician who informed me that Junior was gonna be playing the next day in New York City. He was the previous keyboard player in Junior’s band. I got the chance to, join that band when 11 months into adult life after college and, and then had to tell the boss at work that just as quietly as I’d arrived, I was going to be leaving and moved to Chicago.

I thought I was going to be out here three or four years just ’cause it felt like a singular opportunity to play with him. But once I was out here and playing so much piano and I got to know so many musicians, I just kept having opportunities to travel and record and that just always seemed like a very very tough argument to get me to go back to the East Coast. I mean, I’ve always sort of felt like I’m an East Coaster, but I’ve been out here since the mid-’90s now, so it doesn’t look like it doesn’t look that way.

You seem to have wholeheartedly embraced Chicago. You rep it really hard and treat it as if it’s your home rather than just the place where you live.

When I moved out here, I had only visited it one time in my life. I thought of it as when I was 15 my uncle sent me some records and I really got into Otis Span and so I thought of it that way. But then, of course, once I’m out here, you learn about other histories–let alone the fact that when I was in college and then out here, it’s like, Smashing Pumpkins were rising. And then you learn about Jesus Lizard and all kinds of other Chicago history.

Once I was out here, I lived a couple blocks from a venue called the Lounge Ax and that and Empty Bottle were the spots here to go see punk bands. I grew up playing in and loving indie rock and punk, as well as getting into blues.

I always kind of kept them separate. I’ve never been one for what you might call blues rock and certainly I would certainly shudder if anyone tried to file the Claudettes under that because it means it means like Foghat. There’s lots of cool bands that have some elements of blues. I mean, the Kills have some blues in them. There’s cool ways to wield it. You’ve got to be careful.

I also expanded into a house and I have a Hammond organ and a piano in my house here. I mean, I was living in an apartment in New York City that was a Nobel prize winning use of space. It was two people and two full bathrooms and a kitchen but I don’t think that place is more than like, 750 square feet or something.

My bedroom had a full size bed and a little bureau and then you could exit the room. I had a keyboard I would keep under my bed and I would practice just sitting on my bed and playing it There wasn’t room for anything more than that and the kitchen and the living room were like funny little miniatures, so being out here now with a 1945 Hammond organ in my basement and a grand piano in my living room and a van and a car–I guess I’m in the Midwest now. It’s really hard to have to go back to those small spaces.

The Claudettes are an ever changing band, in terms of lineup. What challenges does that present to you as a band leader and what opportunities does it offer?

There was a time where I used to say it’s important to me that the Claudettes are filed as a roots group because There are just endless opportunities–especially with my pedigree in the blues world–to get invited to festivals that are called blues festivals, jazz festivals, folk festivals. You know, things that are that are rooted in what we would lump together as roots music and a lot of those are overseas and and so the Claudettes have gotten to play in France and Estonia and Finland and Germany and Switzerland.

But part of that was also there’s something I would call “the indie rock rat race” where it’s really just hard to get your footing as a hip indie rock band in terms of having five albums and being together for a decade and getting noticed. We’ve all seen bands that one year are all of a sudden on all the late night shows and seem to be blowing up and then a few years later you see them in quite a small venue.

I really love writing songs and expressing myself that way, and I’m really lucky that I have had a rolling kind of membership within the group. The drummer and I started the group and I actually intended it to be very bluesy. I thought it would be fun to be able to fill up a whole album and a whole show with just a bluesy piano and drums thing, modeling it after this Otis Spann, S.P. Leary stuff from the ’60s.

It just didn’t work out that way, instantly, because the drummer listens to music from all around the world. We both listen to a lot of classical. I grew up playing in punk bands and everything flowered out of the, the original notion. Our very first recording was just piano and drums. I was thinking about Meat Puppets while we were recording it, because I put an echo pedal at my piano, and I recorded directly into the echo pedal, and I wanted this thing to be trippy Tin Pan Alley–classic song chords, you know, kind of like a composition that is almost pop standards, but I wanted to take surprising turns and to turn that echo pedal up and all of a sudden you’re like thinking you dozed off and you were dreaming and now you’re listening to the song again. I wanted those pathways through the music.

All of that, and you got to score The Bear, too.

Yeah, that was a cool opportunity, and we got really good at it really fast. A fair amount of the music that we did for season two was almost kind of dominant. There was one theme that I mostly improvised that that’s in four episodes and it starts the entire several minutes of the finale of season two.

These days they put out a show all at once. Sometimes like they put every episode up on a day and I was the only one home. My wife and child were on the East Coast on a beach vacation, which is not my bag, so I didn’t go to that. I was home by myself and I watched, I watched the season in three days.. It was cool because some of the music, we did for particular scenes. Other music, we just submitted to them and it was really cool to just see: “Ah, there it is.” I could picture myself standing at that MIDI keyboard and I have the rough of that on my laptop and there it is. That’s pretty cool.

And it’s cool, especially since it’s such a Chicago show. Two of the restaurants prominently featured in it are walking distance from my house. It’s a pretty cool Chicago experience.

It’s so interesting when a show like The Bear brings like a very specific regional thing to the masses, which is very similar to like what you do musically. It seems like it’s a very good fit.

I sometimes like to joke when we’re on stage somewhere, I’ll say, “We’re here bringing you the sound of Chicago,” being that even within Chicago, I think we’re considered kind of like some weirdos because it’s got the blues in it, but we actually got kind of ridden out of town when we played at Buddy Guy’s Legends where it was when we were doing our most closest to performance art.

It was just the drummer and I were doing the shows and we had this woman with us who was supposed to be from Russia and she was a washer woman. She would come up with an apron and she would just sweep the stage while we played and she would occasionally interrupt us with completely unnecessary questions. We’d stop playing.

What we decided with the Claudettes at first was, rather than over emphasize how great things are, we’re gonna we’re gonna put a spotlight on how tough it is out here for a touring group. We would bring scrolling drink specials on an LED display to the stage and we would have us This woman on stage just interrupting us and yelling at us.

She was supposed to be the manager of Claudette’s bar, and we were like the long, toiling house band, and we would make a little stage set where, like, the stage was its own bar. We even encouraged people to come up onto the stage and buy beers from her that we would get from the bar. We made our a little tavern on stage. We even played festival stages where we made the stage like a little tavern.

This is the reality that was what we did at first. I literally played at Montreux, the biggest jazz festival in the world, one of the biggest stages. I literally played there with an all-star Chicago blues group. And then coming back, I’m just like, “It was all a dream. Now I’m back in another dive bar.”

I didn’t know if we’d continue after our last singer, Berit Ulseth, told me she didn’t want to tour any more. But Rachel Williams (a Claudettes fan who was known to our bassist…they had done some shows together years ago) came into our orbit. She’s stunning on stage (six feet tall before the heels, a Texan with a mohawk and spirit to match) and is a powerful singer. We’ve written a whole lot of new songs and added a wide array of new covers to our song list since she joined.

I’m really glad to have band mates that let me do it. We have a sound, we have a lineup, we have instrumentation, and we have good musicians, but it’s a little schizophrenic, you know, from song to song to song. Someone once handed me a postcard of what they heard in the different, in the different songs: Bjork meets Fleetwood Mac, Radiohead meets Bonnie Raitt, Debbie Gibson meets Motorhead, Feist meets Steely Dan, Kinks meet MC5, Everly Brothers meet Rush, ELO meets Ray Charles, Chuck Berry meets Daft Punk, Foreigner meets Nine Inch Nails, Air Supply meets Yes, and Nino meets Bowie.

Oh, and there’s one on the back, Pink Floyd meets Bob Seger. But I don’t think that they were making fun of me.