It's an auspicious beginning for any rock and roll band to have their first practice busted by the cops. It was the fall of 2005, and Smoke Up Johnny had come together in bassist Matt Floyd's back-yard garage in Levy. Apparently the neighbors felt that North Little Rock's finest deserved an invitation, and before the band could get through a six-pack they were asked to relocate to the other side of the river.

Two years and several destroyed practice spaces later, Smoke Up Johnny have released their self-titled debut, on Thick Syrup Records. The band formed, as many bands do, somewhat by accident. Frontman Alan Disaster (no, it's not; you can ask, but he won't say much more than "It's a West Coast thing...I was drunk a lot"), drummer Jon Rice, and then guitarist Andy Conrad (a.k.a. A.C. Danger) had played together in Queen Cobra (along with Ryan "Straw" Britton and the late Steven Calhoun); Disaster and Floyd had been buddies for years but had never played together, despite talking about it many times.

Smoke Up Johnny is the product of a shared compulsive need to play music coupled with the simple fact that the band did not already exist. "If I'm not in a band, I'm thinking about what my next band is going to be," says Disaster. "Sometimes when a band breaks up, it's like 'Wow, on my days off I can just sit around my house.' But then a couple months later, it's like 'Okay—who wants to play?'" Rice seconds that emotion: "I've probably in the last 11 years not been in a band for about a month and a half total." A drunken argument disbanded Queen Cobra, which Disaster describes as a "musical mess," in 2003; in late 2005, the timing was right for Disaster and Floyd to finally combine punk-rock/hard-rock forces. Danger hopped right on board, and Rice followed with a bit of persuading.

Though Alan admits that the band in its infancy lacked a definitive sound, that sound did eventually develop into what he now describes as straight-up, solid "good time rock and roll." That may seem like too simple a description, but it's accurate. The music is propulsive and catchy, hooky without being cloying, and crafted of familiar chord changes built upon a foot-stomping, head-shaking, air-drumming foundation.

Katherine Whitworth