Bands come and go, as do band members. But when keyboardist Erin Johnson left Villanova Junction, taking his 280-pound Hammond spinet organ with him, he took the band’s trademark stage prop along with his whirligig, Jon Lord-style runs.

No hard feelings exist, but it left the remaining two-thirds of the group, guitarist and singer Ryan O’Neill and drummer Julian Leonard, at a crucial junction — pun definitely intended.

When Johnson left, the band could have simply closed up shop. But the best way to move forward, they found, was to super-size. After playing a few transitional acoustic shows, O’Neill and Leonard recruited keyboard player Nick Dorfman, songwriter and bassist-by-default (à la Paul McCartney) Justin Kaiser and vocalist Megan Jourdan (already an honorary member, having previously sung on their debut CD).

Jourdan views VJ’s growth as emblematic of the constant struggle to remain a Sarasota-based indie band. “That’s why it’s so important that Villanova Junction has continued to evolve,” she says, “because even though the Sarasota music scene for independent original bands is expanding, it’s still fairly limited, so you have to keep expanding the music that you make by bringing in new instruments and performers so that people don’t get bored.”
“Kind of like Hugh Hefner with his new girls,” Leonard adds. “Twins plus one,” Jourdan quips.

Some recently surfaced YouTube video of the group at the Emerald Bar in St. Pete demonstrates the value added. As always, O’Neill, a veteran of a number of local bands, knows how to please a crowd and works hard at it. “You don’t want to go to a live show and just see a couple of people,” he previously told CL, “A bunch of jackasses just strumming away and that’s about it. You want a show. It’s entertainment.”

He now has other front-liners to cavort with. Kaiser gives the sound’s bottom end its own dedicated representative for the first time in the band’s history — Johnson’s left hand previously played that role. Dorfman rolls his fingers around the keys pretty good, and Jourdan belts it out.

Kaiser and O’Neill were previously in the Scandals and an Orlando-based outfit called the Uptight. Most recently they played together in a local band called the Stiff Saints. “We played a bunch of shows around town,” says Kaiser. “I got back from California this year, and I’ve been in St. Pete. [Ryan’s] been trying to get me in on bass for several months, but I neglected VJ for several months, and only recently did I decide I wanted to… I had nothing better going on. Times were bad. I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel right now, until my jug band gets back together.”

With its new members, VJ is fine-tuning old songs and writing new ones. “We’re still doing ‘Panic’ and ‘Pirate Grace ’O Malley,’” said O’Neill, “but since we have a new lineup, we are trying to introduce Justin’s writing skills. Justin and I were in a band before VJ, so we’ve been collaborating on different songs and writing new material since then.”

VJ’s debut CD, recorded over a year ago, is worth listening to even though the band has moved on. Its high-water mark is the two-song punch of “Young Minds,” with its fuzzy “Highway Star”-channeling organ solo, and “Panic,” a song with a stop-start organ riff, a static, repetitive melody, novel chord changes and relentless drumming from Leonard. “Panic” segues into “Outside Intermission,” featuring locals Harper Sublette on mandolin and Dayna Osen on violin. “Underage Drinking” and “I Licked Your Hole,” another pair of back-to-back howlers, precedes “A Heart Full of Chloroform,” a dark, bluesy showcase for Johnson’s swirling runs and O’Neill’s baritone. Lyrically, “Chloroform” mistakenly sounds like a 4:20 anthem (“Feeling like you wanna / Taste the marijuana / Dancing like you wanna get high”) before veering into dark thematic territory and cheap sex in crummy hotels. The song is about the alleged behavior of Casey Anthony, the mother of 2-year-old Caylee Anthony, who went missing on June 9, 2008. The opening “I Shot Her Down” is a sinister song about Marilyn Monroe. (“Music is history just as much as anything else,” notes Leonard. “And it’s cool to someday look back and listen to what was going on.”)

These days, Kaiser contributes new material. “It’s me and Justin mainly writing the main material,” O’Neill explained, “but again it’s going to be all of us starting to implement ideas, transitions or changes.”

“A lot of the music I’ll be contributing is more melodic and a little softer,” Kaiser mentions. “Right now I’m doing some backing singing, but when we write more stuff, I’ll be taking over lead vocals on a couple of songs… I’ll do whatever. I’m kind of a whore. But I still haven’t gotten paid.”

The band profess love for Sarasota and speak at length about how the local music scene is shaping up. “There’s been some exciting stuff happening downtown,” Jourdan says, “primarily because of The Box Social, which is an all-ages music venue. There aren’t a lot of those around town. Rico’s has started having live music. The scene is definitely expanding a little bit.”

Still, they lament the dearth of local places to play and hear live music, citing the closing of stalwart Steel Can Alley in Gulf Gate as one particularly sad example. “[Places like Mattison’s and The Gator Club] want to draw an over-30 crowd,” says Leonard. “It’s very age-specific. That’s why they don’t have a lot of original music because then it would draw the younger crowd.”

O’Neill hopes the band can play a show at Box Social soon, set up some monitors outside facing towards Mattison’s and crank the volume. More band members, more noise — why not put it to good use?

Photo by Angela Jenkins

Read a previous article I wrote for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune here.

Here’s more talk with the fellas. Parts two and three are worth reading as well.