By Neal Pollack
“It’s a tradition with pregnant women in Tunisia that when they’ve got some vice you have to give it to them. For instance, if when my mom got pregnant, she said, ‘You know, I’d love to have six beers now,’ and we were in the desert, you have to bring her six beers. Anyway, she was with my father in a restaurant, a club. And they started playing darbuka. She patted her stomach and said, ‘Oh, I wish my boy inside here would come out darbuka.’”
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Najib and Cathy fell in love, and Abdelhal fired them in a fit of jealousy. They then traveled across Europe and the Middle East with their own four-piece band, playing in Belgium, Holland, Egypt, Greece, and Syria. In 1983 they were married in Cathy’s hometown of San Francisco.
By age four he was taking lessons. “It was really magic when I first heard the sound of the guitar,” he says. “We were walking through an alley, and I heard a guy on guitar. I started playing the air, like I already knew how. Then my mother told me the story of the movie.” By the time his family relocated to Beirut in 1971, Johnny was playing guitar professionally. In the 70s he lived in Italy, France, Spain, and Greece. He had relatives in Chicago and moved here in 1979. Almost immediately, he started a heavy-metal band called Babylon, which covered songs by Pink Floyd and Deep Purple.
He disbanded Bandido d’Amor and left for Spain, hoping to play flamenco music. Flamenco was first inspired by a Moor named Zirab, who opened a school in Cordoba in the ninth century at the court of Abd al-Rahman II. According to legend, Zirab, nicknamed “the Blackbird” because of his dark skin, brought with him 20,000 melodies, the five-string lute with lion-gut strings, and guitar picks made from eagle claws.
Johnny: “We learn how to understand each other. To be in a band is a marriage situation. That is the whole point. In music, it’s all understanding and communication. In everything, marriage, relationships.”
“This happened to me,” says Johnny. “I bought an old mobile home once. It cost me 800 dollars. This was my dream to do that. Live in the car and just go all over. I wanted to ship it to Spain, but they said it would cost me 3,000 dollars. So I sold it. There’s a problem with musicians. You cannot hold a job. You are not satisfied. You always think you want to be on the stage. I spend 50, 60 grand on my pizza place, and I walk out on it for my guitar. You risk anything in life. You risk anything for music. If you’re really a true artist, you just walk.” o
