Гитарист группы Lynyrd Skynyrd Дамон Джонсон выступил в студии радиостанции KSHE

This past Thursday just gone by was kind of a special one on the show. I got a call from my friend Chicken Dan from Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken, who wanted to know if he could bring a friend into the studio so they could play some music. “Depends which friend,” I told him. But bearing in mind that Paul from Tofu Band, a rock and roll weekend warrior, is a regular studio guest and has proven to be wildly entertaining, anyone more than a guy in sales who plays acoustic classic rock on the weekends made sense. “Well, it’s the guitar player from Lynyrd Skynyrd and Brother Cane, Damon Johnson.” Chicken Dan from Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken has apparently been friends with Damon from Brother Cane, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Alice Cooper’s band, a guy who’s written songs with Stevie Nicks and Carlos Santana, and played with Thin Lizzy for over a decade. They met at some kind of rock and roll fantasy camp. I’m sort of of the opinion that Chicken Dan from Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken’s entire life is some sort of fantasy camp, but they’ve been buddies ever since. And, of course, I said, “Yes, the guitar player from Lynyrd Skynyrd can come in and be on the show the night they play.” And the hilarious irony of this was not lost on me. It was not management. It was not record label. It was not Live Nation. It was not top brass of the radio station. It wasn’t my decades-long experiences in the music business, including my time as a touring musician and my time in radio and television and writing, that brought the guitar player from Lynyrd Skynyrd, Alice Cooper, Brother Cane, Thin Lizzy, Stevie Nicks, and Carlos Santana into the KSHE studio for my show on a Thursday morning. It was Chicken Dan, the marketing director for Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken. This is the sort of thing that makes radio fun. You can spend years accumulating experience, contacts, stories and slightly questionable industry connections, and then the marketing representative from a fried chicken chain walks in with the best guest of the week. Why not? It’s that level of ridiculousness that fits perfectly into what we do. “Can he sing and play on the air?” I asked. “I’d love to hear him do a Brother Cane song.” “Well, he can, but his guitar is packed in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s production truck.” “Can we get him a guitar from somewhere?” I’d had high school seniors from Raised on Radio in the studio to talk about their final hometown show before going off to college. And I asked Luke, their guitar player, if he’d be willing to bring in a guitar that the guitarist from Lynyrd Skynyrd could borrow. This, unsurprisingly from a high school senior that was off to college to try and become a professional musician, was a quick yes. So it was a weird situation. A chicken marketing director, a rock star, and a high school senior showed up in the lobby of the radio station early Thursday morning. There are probably not many places where those three things would naturally appear in the same sentence, which is probably why I enjoyed it so much. This is life. It’s weird. And the weirder it gets in these situations, the more I kind of love it. They came in. We had a great time on the air. We barely scratched the surface with Damon. And the thing that really impressed me about him the most was he was hanging out while the mics were off, really taking an interest in the young musician that had showed up to loan him a guitar, really caring about his influences, what he was trying to do with his life, what kind of finish he had on his Les Paul. And they had an amazing full-circle moment where Damon held up his phone next to Luke’s phone, and there they were, both around the same age, both around 18 years old, just a few decades apart, holding almost identical sunburst Les Pauls. And when he said to the young guitar player, Luke, that they had a lot in common, it wasn’t patronizing, it was honest. They were just two guys hanging out talking guitars. I didn’t make it to the show that night, but Damon put the kids on the guest list from Raised on Radio. They went backstage. And Chicken Dan from Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken found himself the chaperone to two of Raised on Radio and his own recent high school graduate son, a saxophone player looking to make his way in the music world and off to college to do so, and their one-of-a-kind experience backstage with Lynyrd Skynyrd right before they rock an amphitheater. Pretty good. And it reminded me how all this happened. The kids in Raised on Radio around two and a half, three years ago just started calling my show, bombing the phones on a Friday morning, saying they were in a band and they were going to be playing some venue over the weekend. The more they called, the more hilarious it became to put them on the air and get the name out there. The more the name got out there, the more they got booked, the more things started to happen for them. Their band was included in a tribute to Ozzy that played at every single St. Louis Blues home game. And when they come back from college, they’re going to be playing Enterprise Center for the Guns N’ Hoses firefighter, police officer charity event. Pretty good for a bunch of high school kids. Unbelievable, really, when you think about it. And all this up to and including hanging out backstage with Lynyrd Skynyrd after having spent a morning with their guitar player on the air. A few phone calls, a few asks, a borrowed guitar, and somehow the road from a Friday morning radio phone call ends backstage with one of the biggest bands of all time at an amphitheater. Life occasionally has a very strange sense of routing, but it will take you to places you wanna go if you’re willing to get out on the road. It really came from one thing. Them trying, them asking, them calling a radio station and asking to be included and mentioned in what we do. There’s a lesson in all of that for all of us. You wanna do something? You must try. Sometimes you have to make the call, ask the question, bring the guitar, and see where it takes you. You know, I honestly can’t remember the last time life was this busy. Summer of 2026 is about three weeks from being done, and I genuinely can’t tell you where the time went. And I think part of that has been the fact that every last weekend has had something. I don’t think there’s been a single weekend of nothing where there hasn’t been something to do, usually something with a professional obligation attached. And if not a professional obligation, something that you really don’t want to miss, like the show the other week, seeing punk rock legends and personal heroes all at Delmar Hall. Friday was a busy one. Jam-packed day on the air, constant phones, Richard Fortus, local boy, virtuoso guitar player, and member of Guns N’ Roses for the last 20 or so years, called in to talk about how excited he was to be home and play a hometown show next week. He’s a local ordinary guy that has gone off into the world and done some extraordinary things, and fits in perfectly with a city wanting to talk to each other on the show. After I wrapped my interview with him, there were numerous people that called in to say how they bumped into him at the grocery store or how a couple of kind and encouraging words from him had made young kids who were struggling with their music lessons reapply themselves after he met them at his daughter’s school. Frequent caller to the show and recent high school graduate, High School Sander, said he’d bumped into him a couple of times before because he was in a school production of Mamma Mia with his daughter. It’s pretty crazy to have the guitar player from one of the biggest bands that ever has been or ever will be, one of the largest touring groups on the face of the planet, millions upon millions of albums and tickets sold, and the audience that listen to my show know him not from that, but because they’ve bumped into him at high school plays. That’s really kind of been one of the great revelations of my time here at KSHE. There’s never been another place where I could, in the same way I have here, make the city my co-host. It started off with the desire for me to get to know them a little bit better, and vice versa. And now it’s just an opportunity for them to get to know each other a little bit better. Everyday life in St. Louis is a hot topic of conversation, and the minor, seemingly unimportant details are often the things that seem to matter the most to the people listening. The show and the station is a campfire that St. Louis sits around. And one thing I’ve discovered that’s really interesting is that even if someone doesn’t listen, if I say something on the show, chances are, if it carries enough weight, the person that doesn’t listen will hear it because it will be repeated to them by someone that does. If you want to have your finger on the pulse of what people care about in St. Louis, listen to KSHE. You will hear it there. And that was evidenced by the pop-up store out at Cafe Telegraph. I wrapped up what I had to do at the office, and then I went to the gym. Gym has become kind of non-negotiable for me over the last several years. If I miss a day, it’s not the end of the world. If I miss two days, I start feeling distinctly out of sorts. Also, I’ve started doing cardio again recently. And the cardio makes me want to go to the gym. Not because I enjoy my time on the treadmill, but because I found a show that I can watch on the treadmill. The most recent season of Daredevil on Disney Plus has stopped me from canceling my subscription. It is so unbelievably good. It’s a page-turner. It’s a gritty noir crime series, and I am completely and utterly hooked. I’m in the fourth episode, and Matt Murdock hasn’t even put the Daredevil costume on once, and I cannot get enough. It’s not the sort of thing my wife is going to want to watch at home, so I figured it would be a perfect thing to watch on the treadmill. And I find myself being unable to wait to get to the gym, anxious to get through my workout so I can get my cardio in while I watch Daredevil and find out what happens next. It’s a weird thing. But I’ve been in and out of the gym for so much of my life, much of it is kind of dull, so you look for these little things to make it something that you look forward to. The other thing I’ve started in the gym is a pull-up challenge. There was a point in my life where I could do 50 pull-ups. I don’t know if I still can or if I’ve become a weak, worthless piece of crap, but I’m giving it a go, trying to build up to it gradually. One more pull-up every single time I go to the gym. Day one, one pull-up. Day two, two pull-ups, until I fail. See how this goes. Anyway, went to the gym, knocked out all the things, pull-ups, cardio, Daredevil, and then headed to the KSHE pop-up store at Cafe Telegraph. It was wall to wall. You literally could not move. And there, Lern had finished up her broadcast, Tim was in the middle of his, I jumped on the mic with him, and then pretty much wasn’t able to move the rest of the time I was there. There were a whole bunch of old faces there, and, like it tends to be at the pop-up stores, way more that I’d never seen before. And this goes back to me saying that even if people don’t listen, they hear about it. I ran into a couple of 20-something musicians who are actually in a band I’ve heard of that worked with a couple people I know. They’re back from LA, and they’re at the pop-up store. And they were eager to hang out and had been listening to K-She constantly since they got back, based on what their mom and dad had told them was going on with the station they grew up listening to. What was going on is there’s kind of a fresh coat of paint on it, after decades of the same folks on the air. There’s been a lot of changes and some new blood. I’ve been here four years, and I still fall into that category. The whole family, both generations, was thrilled to hang out, take pictures, and talk about the parts of the station they loved. And it was crazy to hear them repeating things I’ve talked about on the air back to me. One of the women was upper management at Sam’s Club, and had heard me talk often about the Sam’s Club rotisserie chicken, which, by the way, you absolutely cannot beat value-wise. Five bucks for a deliciously cooked chicken so big, plump, tender, and juicy that you know it definitely does not exist in nature. She confirmed a rumor that I had heard numerous times, which is Sam’s Club makes absolutely no dollars on the rotisserie chickens, but by putting them at the back of the store, they know they’re probably going to get five to ten impulse purchases out of the customer as they make their way up to the front of the warehouse. She also said they make absolutely no money on gas, but it gets people through the door. Hence the deep, deep discounts and sweet, sweet savings. Honestly, I don’t know exactly what my membership to Sam’s Club costs, but in a day and age where there’s a good deal of food insecurity, a $5 rotisserie chicken that can feed a family is pretty awesome. It’s a good solution to the question of what’s for dinner when you’re on a tight budget. And really, there are few things in a year where the economy is going down in fiscal flames Strait of Hurmuz desperation that are more reassuring than knowing that somewhere out there is a five-dollar chicken waiting for you. It’s not glamorous, but neither is dinner every night, and the chicken doesn’t care. Can’t believe I’m saying this, but thanks, Sam’s, for feeding families. Anyway, the pop-up store was packed, the atmosphere was great. I had intended to swing by, but as is often the case with our listeners who want to spend time, hang out, shake hands, press flesh, get stuff signed, and take pictures, it was a little tough to get out of there. But these are the people that pay my bills. These people are, like I said, effectively the co-hosts to my show. And so the fact that I was ready to pass out by the time I got home was 100% worth it. It’s life, and apparently this week I’m living it one pull-up, one pop-up store, one local rock star and one five-dollar chicken at a time. Saturday was a day of doing nothing. It was pretty good. There is a particular luxury to doing absolutely nothing when your calendar has spent the entire summer packed full of obligation to be places and do stuff. For what I think was pretty much the first time all summer long, the weather was vaguely cooperative to the point where you could spend the day on a floaty, soaking up the sunshine without dying of heat exhaustion, being blown away by a tornado, getting struck by lightning, or being pelted half to death by golf ball-sized hailstones partway through the proceedings. It was a laid-back day of pretty much nothing. There was, however, an hour or so spent on the phone with customer service, talking to the same useless moron we talk to every few months at Oklahoma Joe’s. Said it before, I will say it again. You can be either stupid or you can be mean. You can’t be both if you work in customer service. That’s how I feel about it anyway. The customer service folks and the HR department responsible for hiring them at Oklahoma Joe’s have other ideas about the situation. The saga of my smoker is this. Going on almost a year ago, I bought it for myself as a birthday gift. I was thrilled. I was looking for something cheap and electric. This, this was a $700 gravity-fed charcoal smoker that doubled as a grill that could get up to a ripping hot 600 degrees, necessary for the reverse sear that I find to be the most satisfying part of the meat smoking process. Miraculously, it was on sale for the same $200 that I had budgeted for an electric smoker. I never get a deal. Never. It never happens to me. I always hear people getting unbelievable bargains on cars, on houses, on interest rates, on refinances, on vacations, on hotel rooms, and on flights. You name it, someone else has gotten an unbelievable deal for it, and I’ve paid full whack for it. I never get deals, but… This time was going to be different. This time, I was getting THAT deal. Sweet, sweet savings and deep, deep discounts on that which my heart desired, but my wallet put up an objection to. This time, for a couple hundred bucks, I was getting a $700 way beyond my means or needs pro-level smoker. Finally, the ball of life had rolled my way. This would have been totally true had it worked once. It has not. Every couple of months, we roll the worthless thing out of the garage. I fire it up, and it gives me the same old error message. You must be able to video conference the mean-spirited, stupid, worthless idiots at Oklahoma Joe’s with the smoker actively smoking to get customer service to do anything about it. Meaning, you can’t just call up and say, “This piece of shit doesn’t work. Do something.” You must dump a bunch of charcoal in the hopper, fire it up, wait for it to get to about 125 degrees, and then crank out the same error message that it always does, which tells you a door is open, despite the fact that it is most definitely not under any circumstances open even a little bit. They’ve sent us a new panel, they’ve sent us a new hopper, they’ve sent us new wiring, they sent us several new sets of hinges. This time, they sent us yet another new set of hinges and the ring that’s necessary to act as a seal between the lid of the hopper and the hopper itself. None of this fucking works. I know it won’t work. The smoker knows it won’t work. But the almost certainly inbred braindead morons at Oklahoma Joe’s are way more optimistic about the whole thing. They are, of course, wrong. None of this fucking works. And so now, many months, several bags of charcoal, and not one successful smoke later, they’re sending us new sensors. The sensors must be installed by yours truly underneath the smoker. This will not be an easy fix. It was already a pain in the ass replacing all the hinges, none of which made a difference, and it was an even bigger pain in the ass installing a new ring that’s supposed to act as a seal between the door of the hopper and the hopper itself. Being on my knees in the garage with a screwdriver and greasy, charcoal-stained fingers is a whole lot more fucking manual labor than I planned to put in a purchase of this nature. Generally speaking, when a hobby stops being relaxing and starts requiring tools, replacement parts, and a towel you don’t mind ruining, you’ve been doing this for a while. And it’s inevitable that your beloved, trusty, whatever the hell it is you do for a hobby, after having served you faithfully and well for an extended period of time, is going to need some maintenance. You’re not supposed to have to put all the work in before the thing is up and running, motherfuckers. It is absolute garbage that I’m expected to do this myself. Of course, they have said that I could bring it back to the store where I bought it, but that would mean I would get a refund for an amount of money that would cover a much lesser smoker after hauling it all the way there myself. This is an ongoing saga. I’ve talked about it on the air, and numerous people asked me at the KSHE Pop-Up Store if I ever got it figured out. “This might be the weekend,” I said hopefully, knowing it would not be the weekend. But I still must disassemble and reassemble this literally worthless hunk of metal for now the fourth time. Anyways, they’re sending me new sensors. There comes a point in all these customer service calls where Amy takes the phone from me because she knows I’m about to unleash nine months’ worth of pent-up fury on the same worthless, rude idiot that I talk to at least once a quarter about the worthless piece of scrap that I was sold last September. And Amy knows that whilst I’m generally affable and happy-go-lucky, every once in a while there’s a ledge she has to pull me back from, because if I tell a person on the other end of the phone how I really feel, they’ll never take one of my calls ever again. And if anything unfortunate ever happened to the moron, idiot, charcoal for brains, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, dim-witted, half-baked, thick-headed, pea-brained, witless, clueless, hopeless, useless, worthless, chuckleheaded, boneheaded, numbskull, jackass, dumb ass, and pro-level pain in the posterior at Oklahoma Joe’s that I have the great misfortune of speaking to every few months, after going through the call record, I will definitely be a person of interest. So, we did that. It was as stupid, mindless, frustrating, and pointless as I expected it would be. And the only thing that stopped it from completely ruining my day was floating around in the pool, watching the breeze blow through the trees above, and thinking every once in a while, no matter how much of a disappointment Oklahoma Joe customer service and humanity is in general, things can’t be 100% bad 100% of the time. Sometimes the smoker doesn’t smoke, the customer service doesn’t serve, and the day doesn’t go according to plan. There are no delicious smoked meats to be consumed. But the trees are still green, the pool is still blue, and for a little while at least, the only thing I had to deal with was floating around doing absolutely nothing. Which, as it turns out, when given the opportunity, is something I’m pretty good at.