Deadsplinter Up! All Night: Come Back Jonee

18/2/20 Jonee 36

One of the first albums I ever owned was Devo’s Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo. I was 5 or 6 years old and my brother bought it for me because he had seen Devo on Saturday Night Live and thought they were cool. I think everyone who saw that performance bought the record the next day.

The greatest cover of all time.

My favorite song on the album was always Come Back Jonee, a really sad song about a guitar player who dies in a head on collision with a semi in his Datsun. I was always a “Jon” as a kid, but one day a friend started calling me “Johnny” and it stuck. So, I decided I’d spell it the way Devo did and I’ve been Jonee ever since.

In 1983, a few years after Devo performed on SNL, Debbie Harry did a fun version of Come Back Jonee when she hosted that show. I’m not sure why because she never recorded it. I guess she just liked the song and felt like doing it.

Debbie Harry – Come Back Jonee

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36 Comments

  3. Lords Of The New Church

    Plus some Cold Meat

  6. Seven Days of Motorhead, pt.3

    Fast Eddie departed in 1982, having refused to record a cover of “Stand By Your Man.” In need of a guitarist, the band turned to Brian Robertson of Thin Lizzy fame. His tone and style are markedly different from his predecessor, but there are some gems on his only studio album, “Another Perfect Day.”

    • When I first moved out to L.A., I had a job delivering food for this chicken place in Beverly Hills. Once a week I’d see Bob Mothersbaugh (aka Bob 1) sitting on a bench smoking cigars with a buddy of his. Bob probably doesn’t get recognized as the lead guitar player of Devo very often, so he was pretty thrilled I knew who he was and I’d hang with him between deliveries and he’d tell me old Devo stories. My favorite celebrity encounter ever. Here he is singing Secret Agent Man.

  9. i think ill take the great covers aproach to this one and go with these guys


    who im pretty sure ive posted damn near everywhere by now…. but not here so ha!

  11. …I always figured there had to be a story behind the double-e thing…& that it would be a fair bet that there’d be a musical tint to it…but damn if you don’t have some great stories, so that was above & beyond

    …people seem to have the the DEVO angle covered though, so I thought perhaps I’d lean into that pair of e’s…because, although the song may not technically be called that…e’s are good?

    [p.s. for those too young or insufficiently cockney to be aware of such things, the phrase “anyone got any Vera’s?” means “Vera Lynn’s” which would be rhyming slang for “skins” as in “skin up a joint, there’s a good lad” which – being british & all, is a process also known to require “salmon” as in “salmon & trout” as in “snout” which, as any old lag could tell you is what some folks call tobacco]

  13. I can’t believe posting the best song with the name “Johnny” in the lyrics is left up to me. I mean, who the fuck am I to have this privilege/responsibility thrust upon me?

  16. Too much toggling back & forth, and I appear to have lost my comment!🥴

    Suffice it to say, I don’t really have any songs with Jon/Johnny/Jonee in the titles, but I *can* and WILL share some of my favorite songs *BY* Jons/Johnnys😉

    A deeper cut from my ‘Jovi:

    And a couple of my favorites by Johnny:

    This one’s technically not *just* Johnny, but I’ve loved it for half of forever:

    And because the Johnny cash ones reminded me of the other songs the wee Emmer loved, one of my earliest childhood songs, and also probably the one that sparked my love of dirges–

    Big Fitz sunk a bit over 3 months before I was born. The song came out 6 months *after* I was born.

    This song was literally a part of my existence as a toddler. It was played REGULARLY, everywhere, as I grew up in Minnesota. Big Fitz was our ship, and the sailors aboard her were our guys, some from MN in particular, and all from the upper Midwest/great lakes region. And they’ve never really been able to say quite *why* she went down that night, so she’s always been a bit of a tragic mystery.

    • I remember this song as a little kid and never understood how a ship could sink in a lake. We had giant waves in Hawaii & I visited cousins in Alaska where waves sinking ships is a fact of life but a lake? I now have a niece that surfs near Chicago in a lake so I get it has waves but that must have been some storm!

      • By all accounts, it was!

        Superior is the biggest & deepest of the Great Lakes (Chicago sits on Lake Michigan, the second largest one:https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/74674/10-deep-facts-about-great-lakes), and Superior is the largest freshwater lake (by some of the ways of measuring, anyway) in the world.

        They estimate that the waves that night got up to around 23-25 feet high, and there is speculation that there were even a couple “rogue waves” that got up around/past 35 feet that night–those two waves rolled right over Fitz’s sister ship that night, the Arthur Anderson. There’s also a theory that some of the hatches on the deck got loose & she swamped when the waves hit–or that there may have been some damage under the waterline–perhaps hitting a shoal.

        These are a couple good articles:

        https://www.mlive.com/weather/2015/11/relive_the_monster_storm_that.html

        https://www.mlive.com/news/2015/11/what_sank_the_edmund_fitzgeral.html

      • The Great Lakes will eff you up. We had a family friend who had passed his Captain’s exam for ALL the Great Lakes which was an incredible accomplishment and very few people at the time had done it. He was old when I knew him and had amazing stories. After he died, my Dad inherited his framed Captain’s certificate and it’s at our house.

        • “The Great Lakes will eff you up.”

          They WILL!!!

          Superior is honestly a bit mind-blowing, when you stand on the shoreline on a calm/light-breeze day.

          Aside from her being so cold & *un*-salty, it looks sooooo much like standing at the shore of an ocean, or at least the gulf of an ocean–just water on out until the horizon, and those 2-4 foot waves rolling in, unceasingly.

          And with the lake-effect weather, YIKES!!!

          Seattle/PNW-like rain in the summer, and blizzards dumping *feet* of snow that can pop up within hours in the winter😖🙃🥴

          But the views– Man….
          Those are what make SO many people willing to ride all that stuff out.

          And honestly? That’s what tempts me SOOOOOOOO much, to see if I could get a teaching job up on the North Shore around Grand Marais, after I get my SPED license💖

          It’s literally some of the prettiest land I’ve seen anywhere. Ancient mountains, eroded down by the glaciers of the last ice age; fruit & berry bushes as far as the eye can see (wild raspberries & blueberries later in the summer), Pine & Aspen forests, and Showy Lady’s Slippers just *growing* randomly so many places during the spring.

          All overlooking that giant body of water that changes by the hour.

      • All 5 of the lakes are really seas and only the lack of saltwater keeps them defined as lakes. They are huge and all create their own weather, especially Superior. I grew up in Traverse City in the late 70s and it was common to have ice blocks from the bays get blown into peoples houses.

        My mom and I were just talking about the 1978 blizzard and the snow that covered her 2-story house with huge wind blown mounds.

        https://whtc.com/news/articles/2016/jan/27/winter-weather-advisory-on-this-38th-anniversary-of-the-blizzard-of-1978/

        https://www.record-eagle.com/news/local_news/looking-back-blizzard-left-more-than-feet-of-snow-in/article_454e5387-d9d0-54cc-a562-6f9f019961ee.html

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