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Anyone familiar with The Blood Brothers knows that they’ve got some serious Seattle pride, but you may not know that three out of five members of the band don’t eat meat. Keyboardist and vocalist Johnny Whitney takes his commitment to the animals one step further by cutting out the dairy products, eggs, and byproducts, too. That’s right, ladies. Johnny’s a full-fledged vegan. We’ve got his girlfriend to thank for that. We wrestled him away from his lady love (and his couch—the poor guy had a cold and fever when we were scheduled to chat) for a quick phone interview. Read on for more tantalizing tidbits about Johnny and the band.
How do you think that activism and music go together, especially in the hardcore and punk scenes?
I think that shows are a really good venue for kids to learn more about issues. Like, I mean, when I was a young kid going to hardcore shows here in Seattle, I was already a vegetarian at the time, but I remember picking up brochures at hardcore shows about vegetarianism, and, I don’t know, it’s just a meeting place for kids ... I think that providing information is always helpful.
So how long have you been vegetarian?
I’ve been vegetarian since I was 12, and I’ve been vegan for, like, almost five years now.
I think I was always just, like, slightly concerned with animal rights as a very young child. When I was a kid, I was really, really, really into McDonald’s. I’d eat, like, two Big Macs every time we’d go there, and I remember one time my mom told me something vaguely about, like, “You know, global warming is caused by people at McDonald’s paying people to cut down the rain forest in South America,” and, like, as a young child, I was just kinda like, “Ugh, someday I’m gonna have to give it up.”
So anyway, I remember it was right around Thanksgiving when I was 12, and I just told my parents I wasn’t going to eat meat anymore. It was actually pretty easy because my mom worked at a health food store, so I was always the kid with spelt bread and Orangina.
Was it hard at school? How did other kids react?
I got shit from some kids, but I had a pretty close peer group that all sort of shortly thereafter became vegetarian, too, so it wasn’t that hard.
Do you think that more kids are going vegetarian at a younger age now?
Yeah. It does seem like that. We are always in contact with really young kids. I mean a few that come to our shows are like 15 and 16, and it seems like people are much more keen on it now.
If somebody came up to you at a show and they wanted to know why you’re a vegan and how they could get—what would you tell them?
I would tell them to get a cookbook. There’s a cookbook that me and my girlfriend use called How It All Vegan. Just try to like find recipes if you’re kitchen savvy at all. I would just tell them it’s not really as hard as it seems. It’s not hard for me to be vegan at all anymore. Like after a while you just sort of lose your appetite for those kinds of things and meat becomes sort of repulsive to you. I just think that especially for younger kids, there’s the misconception that it would just be completely impossible for them to give up eating meat, and that’s just not true.
What would you tell kids they could tell their parents if their parents were concerned about their heath?
I would just tell them to tell their parents that, in fact, being vegetarian and vegan … is a lot healthier than eating meat. Eating meat isn’t good for you, and they should know that. I mean, there’s a wealth of literature on that subject that any parent, I’m sure, would be glad to read.
What was the reason that you originally decided to cut out dairy products and eggs?
I started dating my girlfriend five years ago, and she was vegan so whenever I’d hang out with her I’d eat vegan, and then about a year after we started dating, I just sort of gave it up to see how it would be. And I just felt great in, like, this way that I hadn’t felt in a really long time. You know how, like, sometimes in the middle of the day you’ll just feel like you need to take a nap or like you’ll just want to collapse? Like, I just stopped feeling like that. It just gave me all this, like, vigor. So that was one of the main reasons, but you know, there’s a lot of other reasons. It goes along with not wanting to support industries that support factory farming and cruelty to chickens and to cows in the process of extracting, you know, eggs and milk. And it’s bad for you.
Is Seattle a very vegetarian-friendly city?
Yeah! It is very vegetarian-friendly. There’s a lot of vegetarian restaurants here. There’s, like, a vegan sandwich shop here now …. They have a “Philly Cheese Steak” sandwich that’s really, really good. There’s a co-op that’s been here for 50 years that’s the largest, like, independent co-op chain in the country. And there are just a lot of people that are vegetarian here.
Why do you think that Seattle is more vegetarian- or vegan-friendly than other cities?
It’s always been a fairly liberal place. Obviously, liberal ideas and vegetarianism often go hand in hand. There’s all kinds of environmental stuff going on here, and it just sort of goes along with it. It’s really beautiful here, like, it’s very green and lush and pretty, and I think that people appreciate the environment more, and for those reasons, that’s one facet of becoming vegetarian.
In case someone isn’t familiar with the environmental reasons for going vegetarian, could you explain that a little bit?
If you look at factory farming, just one facet of factory farming, like, all the waste that cows and pigs produce, like, what that does to poison the water and what that does as far as releasing gases into the ozone layer. That’s just one thing.
Do you have any favorite restaurants you stop at along the way when you’re on tour?
Yeah, there’s a restaurant in Salt Lake City called Sage’s. They don’t have it anymore but the first time we went there, I ate “all you can eat vegan pizza.” I felt like I was in a dream. It was insane. You pay, like, $7.00, and they just keep coming around with all these weird, different vegan pizzas. They had a Thai Chicken Pizza and a Pesto Canadian Bacon Pizza, and it was all really, really good. They don’t do it anymore, but that was always a favorite. Honestly, we just go to Whole Foods a lot because we don’t really have a whole lot of time to go eat at a restaurant, unfortunately.
What kinds of vegetarian foods do you usually take with you in the van?
I always take a quarter gallon of Chocolate Silk with me. It’s really hard in a van to take stuff because it doesn’t keep. When we go to Europe, for the past couple tours we’ve gone in a bus, so there’s a refrigerator, so I always go—especially in Germany, it’s really easy to go find their natural food stores like Bio marts, like B-I-O whatever—so I always go there and stock up on tofu hotdogs and veggie slices and stuff like that. Yeah, but in the states, it’s like soy milk and peanut butter. We’re becoming a big enough band so that promoters will get us actual vegetarian food instead of just chips and hummus, which is nice.
Anything exciting coming up for the band?
The most exciting thing for me is just the record coming out. Like we’re playing a show at this place called The Old Firehouse, which is not in Seattle. It’s in this place called Redmond, where Microsoft is and everything, and it’s basically THE club that we had our first show at, so it’s always really fun to play there.
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Know what else is exciting?
You can send all your friends a Blood Brothers e-card with a link to this interview and tracks from the Blood Brothers’ new album, Crimes, so that they can get in on the fun.
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