Local pop punksters Hello John have only been around for a mere two years, yet they're already starting to sound like a married couple.
In addition to the playful bickering, the members sometime even finish each other's sentences. When asked to give a little insight into their band, the guys all remain equally pensive for what seems like an eternity before singer and guitarist Brent Trotter says, "we like long walks on the beach."
"Naked," adds bassist Phil Leach, with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.
OK then. Who are we to argue with that logic? The rest of the group — guitarist Jason Brockway and drummer Andrew Trotter (Brent's little bro) — are self-professed goofballs that just want to be heard.
"That's all we really want," Brent says. "There's lots of good stuff going on in the Phoenix scene right now. It would be really cool to see a lot more people coming out and supporting local music and listening to some different music and help us all out, because we're all going after our dreams."
"Word," says Brockway, who jokingly claims he was once in Blink 182 .
As to how the band came up with the name Hello John, Brent explains, "It's when you drink so much and say hello to the john."
The band — whose members are between the ages of 18 to 21 — even has a logo of a cartoon stick figure spewing into a toilet on its Web site.
After Hello John initially formed, the members realized they had something special going on.
"We'd been playing in bands for awhile and then when we met it just seemed to work," Brent says. "You know how when you meet people and it seems like you just kind of have a chemistry? It just clicked right from the beginning and we just started doing it and we loved it."
The group started off by adding covers to the set list.
"We were known for closing shows with 'Broham' by Pennywise," Brent says. "We did that forever. But we had to stop when every other band in town started doing it."
In addition to covering Pennywise, the group says that they also performed covers by the Vandals, Guttermouth and the Ataris — "all the drinking sing-along songs."
Now the band, which performs at Buzz Funbar one to two times a month during ska-punk night, only adds covers on occasion.
This doesn't stop Hello John and their audience from getting hella crazy when they take the stage, however.
"Once we played with Something Corporate at the Buzz," Brent says. "People packed the place and we played after Something Corporate. They came on stage and I think everyone that came out to their show wasn't expecting the whole piano thing. People were there and just kind of standing around. We opened with this song, 'Runaway,' and the way we start it every time, we do this unison jumping thing and just when we started we see an ocean of heads popping up and jumping. It was great.
"That's what this is all about. It left us speechless."
Leaving them speechless is hard to do. They were taken aback again in July when they performed at a freestyle motorcross event in Tucson.
"KFMA [Tucson's answer to local station 103.9 The Edge] had been playing one of our songs on the radio," Brent says. "So some people knew who we were. After the show, they were asking us for autographs and couldn't believe we were signing autographs. It was weird. We wanted to ask people why they wanted our autographs."
The group will hop on the Southwest Freestyle Motorcross Tour in October, where they have one goal:
"To make it back here without being broke," Andrew says.
The band plans to release a full-length album before Christmas, as a follow up to their EP Got Puke and their three-song demo CD.
"People have been waiting like a year and a half for this CD, so we're really looking forward to releasing it," Brent says.
As for what type of material they cover in their music, Trotter says, "We try to tell stories and give a positive outcome to it. Some of the songs are about reaching for your goals because that's what we're doing. We have a dream and we're going after it. If you have a dream, go after it. We're living examples of that right now."
Reach the reporter at Kelly.Ann.Wilson@asu.edu.
