Local Treasures: Jon Hornyak

From garage bands to the Recording Academy, he’s embodied six decades of Memphis music.

by

Culture

Though he’s not a household name, you can’t really say Jon Hornyak has never been recognized. After all, a photo of his band appeared in the pages of Life magazine nearly 60 years ago, before he’d moved to Memphis from Caruthersville, Missouri. “Nineteen sixty-seven was when we won the Missouri State Battle of the Bands and got to go to Boston for the national finals. We’d never been on a plane before,” he says. “The Chamber of Commerce gave us travel bags! It was really a big deal. We won the local competition, then the state, and Les Paul was one of the judges [at the national level].

“We were called the Nite Raiders at that point,” he continues. “Because we were almost like a Paul Revere & the Raiders tribute band, right? We had the high boots and did the steps. And we also did a lot of Young Rascals, and R&B covers and stuff. I was the oldest guy in the band at 17. The other guys were from 13 to 15. We weren’t the winners, but our picture ended up being in Life magazine for some reason, which was a cool thing.”

Through the years, Hornyak has enjoyed many cool things, largely due to his own gumption. But he’s also brought cool things to others, and not just during his 30 years as the senior executive director of the Recording Academy’s Memphis chapter. It seems Hornyak has been in the thick of the Memphis music scene since he first arrived, and along the way he’s naturally been someone who makes things happen, to the great benefit of his fellow Bluff City musos.

Aftermath of the Beatles

Hornyak got used to being a team player at an early age. His mother, Elma, a teacher raising him on her own, got him involved in school talent shows with older students, first in Bragg City, Missouri, before they moved to Caruthersville. He was living in Bragg City when he did what you might call his first cool thing.

“I was in A Face in the Crowd, the 1957 Andy Griffith movie,” he recalls. “That film starts out in Pigott, Arkansas, and my aunt was in the marching band there, so she took me to the filming of the scene where Andy and Lee Remick leave on a train from Piggott to Memphis as his career starts to take off. I was on one of the railway carts. When I worked with Andy [later in life], we had a 30-minute conversation about A Face in the Crowd.”

Did being a literal face in the crowd in that film, or in the various school talent shows, give Hornyak a taste for show business? Even he is not sure, but he can trace his enthusiasm for music to a precise date: February 9, 1964. “I was, like, marginally interested in music,” he says. “Then the Beatles. It was just such a thing. There’s no way you can understand the magnitude of it unless you were there. There we were at my grandmother’s in rural Arkansas, watching The Ed Sullivan Show. I guess I was in ninth grade at the time. It was the defining moment for a whole generation. After that, I worked a summer job to get my first guitar.”

The Beatles’ live appearance at the Mid-South Coliseum in 1966 was also pivotal, but not because Hornyak saw them play. “I didn’t go, but I filled in with the local cool band for one of the guys who was going to see The Beatles. That was just for one night at the Batman A-Go-Go in Sikeston, Missouri. But that led to me starting the Nite Raiders with those guys.”

When the keyboard player left, Hornyak taught himself to play organ and stuck with that for years to come. Sometime after they attended the national Battle of the Bands, their band became the Collection, and then Interstate 55. “We were always looking for a new band name,” he says, “and were always on Interstate 55, either going south to Memphis or Jackson, Mississippi, or north to St. Louis.” Along the way, playing music was teaching Hornyak how to make things happen on a larger scale.

“Being entrepreneurs, we would rent buildings like the American Legion building in Caruthersville, or some building in Hayti, or some building in New Madrid,” he says. “We would go to these different places, rent a building, and put up a couple posters at the local drive-in or whatever.”

They would also play Memphis, where he was further educated in the ways of the music industry by way of WHBQ’s Talent Party, a local television hit hosted by the Elvis-affiliated DJ George Klein. “When you got on Talent Party, you would go and make a tape with Roland,” says Hornyak. That would be Roland Janes, Sun Record’s secret weapon on guitar in the early days. By 1967 he ran Sonic Recording Service, where he was cranking out recordings of local bands for Klein’s show.

“If George Klein liked Roland’s recording, you could then go on the show and lip-sync to it, right? We did the tape, and George liked it.” The Collection was thus broadcast to anywhere receiving signals from WHBQ. “We drove up, did the show, and then hopped in the car and drove to Kennett, Missouri, to play a gig that night. And it was like a lightbulb going off, because we had the biggest crowd we’d ever drawn at that point.”

Learning the Ropes

The best bands recording with Roland Janes could wind up with a release on his Rolando label, and that happened with Hornyak’s group. “We did one single for Roland as The Collection,” he says. “And the next one we did as Interstate 55.” The band name certainly applied to Hornyak, attending Memphis State University by then, and driving to Missouri to play with the band on weekends. Eventually all of them made their way to Memphis.

By the time the band broke up in 1972, Hornyak was deeply immersed in working with Janes. “You know, working with Roland …” he says with a pause. “Look at my mentors. I would consider George [Klein] first, because he introduced me to Roland, right? But Roland was really … we really connected. In a big brother/kid brother kind of way.” Or, as he told author Ron Hall for Playing for a Piece of the Door: A History of Garage & Frat Bands in Memphis, “I think we might have been the first long hairs he could relate to as human beings.”

Another mentor was his band’s booking agent. “In my senior year [at Memphis State], Frank Turner hired me to be a booking agent for his agency called Celebrity Sounds. He’d already been booking my band, and he had been the tour manager for Paul Revere & the Raiders. So I got a priceless education. You were seeing first-hand the entrepreneurial spirit. And I remember vividly, I was doing a session at Roland’s, about to graduate from college, and I go, ‘I’m going to try music for a while.’”

Paradoxically, Hornyak’s decision to stick with the music industry would gradually give him less time to play in bands, as the subsequent years saw him gravitating more toward backstage operations. Indeed, working with Turner marked the maiden voyage of the work that would define him.

“If it had been any place other than Memphis, I would never have pursued music as a career,” he says now. As it was, he thrived here. “When I arrived, from ’67 till ’74 or ’75, Memphis was really hopping as a music industry town. And so I started my own agency with a partner. We made a decision: We could work for Frank and give him half the money, or we could just go do it ourselves. Then we had the opportunity to buy this sound system that had been built for Isaac Hayes, and we thought we could book that just like we could book a band.”

The Demand for Big Audio

Born of his own touring experience, Hornyak’s instincts were right. The music industry was not only thriving in Memphis, it was growing, and the bigger bands were in need of louder, more high-end live sound, which Hornyak was happy to supply. “The Beatles in ’66 were just singing through the PA system, right? It was incredibly primitive,” Hornyak notes. “So when we came along in ’72 or ’73 and started a company, the idea of sound reinforcement for concerts was still pretty new. We were in the right place at the right time. We connected with the Southern rock scene, first with Wet Willie, and then the Marshall Tucker band, and then Lynyrd Skynyrd, and we put all our chips on Lynyrd Skynyrd. We just thought they were going to be the biggest, and we were right.”

He would also help the band 38 Special before they were hitmakers. For the bigger acts like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Hornyak and company “flew [the sound system] into whatever city they were playing. We were plugging it all up as the band walked in for sound check.”

During this time, Hornyak still dabbled in live performance. “I played weekends in what I would call rock and soul cover bands,” he says, “and kept playing until like ’86 when I moved into the studio world, and it got to be just too much. I knew I needed to really focus on what was going on there.”

By that time, the bigger studios of Memphis had either vanished, like Stax, or were experiencing a lull — an opportune moment for Hornyak to help launch a studio known as Sounds Unreel. Producer Niko Lyras, co-owner of the like-minded Cotton Row Recording Studios, recalls that “we were getting little record deals. And so was Sounds Unreel. The little places were actually doing more.”

Lyras would co-write and record Wendy Moten’s first hit, while Sounds Unreel scored record deals for local singer-songwriters like Rob Jungklas, Jimmy Davis, and Richard Orange. “And Xavion was kind of my discovery,” Hornyak adds. “They were like Living Color before Living Color, you know? With keyboards and rock guitar, somewhat like Prince. They got a major label deal, and Tommy Mottola was their manager, but they ended up being too rock for Black radio and too Black for rock radio.”

Things were evolving on a personal level for Hornyak as well. “I got married to my first wife in ’81,” he says, “during the period where we were recording all this stuff in our house. She was into all that up to a certain point. But in ’86 we split up, and I got with Ellen, and we didn’t get married until ’94. Ellen and I are still together. She was always very supportive of my musical endeavors.” From then on, Hornyak also helped raise her son, Ethan, who’s also making a name for himself as a music producer.

The Recording Academy

After that, it wasn’t long before Hornyak left promotion and production to become the senior executive director of the Recording Academy’s Memphis chapter, where he arguably made his most indelible mark on Memphis — and Southern — music history.

“When I was hired for this position,” he says, “there were only seven chapters, with Memphis being the sixth chapter, starting back in 1973, thanks to Knox Phillips. We had already started envisioning some sort of programming in New Orleans, and my first year as executive director, we honored the Neville Brothers at the Premier Player Awards, if you remember those. What made sense to me was expanding [the chapter] regionally.”

That’s exactly what he did, growing the chapter’s reach from just Memphis and Jackson, Mississippi, to all of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, and West Tennessee over the course of his career. As Recording Academy Board of Trustees member Gebre Waddell puts it, “Jon was the longest-serving employee of the Recording Academy, from my personal knowledge, at least at the time where he retired.” That was just last year, celebrated with much fanfare last August at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, though Hornyak is still involved with both the Memphis chapter and the Grammy Museum in Cleveland, Mississippi.

Indeed, for Waddell, it’s hard to imagine the Recording Academy here without Hornyak. “He embodies the culture of the academy to me, like no one else,” he says. “The Memphis chapter, they often say, is the coolest. There’s something special about it. Jon fully understood this entire region and connected people with countless opportunities, helping them develop as people, producers, artists, engineers. And when [Hurricane] Katrina happened, Jon was even more intentional about connecting with New Orleans. He engaged with Reid Wick in New Orleans and that was the genesis of the connection between the Memphis chapter and Louisiana.”

Better yet, Hornyak has begun to perform again — this time on the ukulele. Having helped found the Memphis Ukulele Band ten years ago, he’s their most enthusiastic spokesperson and a tireless promoter of their two albums. (Ukulele-curious readers can hear them live in the Green Room at Crosstown Arts on June 5th.) Meanwhile, all Life magazine photo spreads aside, the acknowledgments of his contributions are piling up, from being awarded a Beale Street Brass Note last year to receiving the keys to Cleveland, Mississippi, this March at the tenth anniversary of the Grammy Museum there.

Through it all, he’s championed Memphis and its music like no other, and doesn’t plan to stop anytime soon. As he’s fond of saying, “I wasn’t born in Memphis, but I got here as soon as I could.”