Thrill of the Fight
               One Man's Journey From Farm To Fame

        My name's Johnny West. Now it don’t say nothing like that on my birth certificate, but that’s my name. Johnathan Westbrook is a little kid, working on a ranch and scared to death of rattlers. I ain't that kid anymore.

        Now you most likely won't guess from my appearance, but I'm a guitarist. My 1959 Les Paul Sunburst is my passion, my life, the vessel for my self-expression. It was my ticket from that ranch to the arena stage, and I have that guitar to thank for the life I live today.

        Guitars are expensive. They drain your pockets faster than five hundred heads of cattle in a drought year, and they always need something. I have ol' Tom Galveston to thank for my first guitar. I was 'bout eight, nine years old when I saw it, collecting dust in his broken down barn. It was a little Fender Telecaster copy, worth about a hundred bucks. I sat there and played for hours, just strumming away with no clue how to make the sound I heard on my little tornado shelter radio. 

         Tom came up behind me, and clamped his hand down on my shoulder. I jumped and dropped that old guitar, fearing for my life. I had come into his barn without permission, and used his guitar without him knowing. I turned around, waiting for the backhand that was sure to come. Instead, the farmer in his mid-sixties just smiled under the brim of his faded leather hat. "You come by here tomorrow and move them haybales," he said, pointing out into the fields. "Take 'em into this here barn, and that old guitar's yours." I was absolutely bewildered as to why he would be so kind to a boy that just trespassed on his property. But I didn't hesitate to shake his hand and seal the deal. The next day, I came home to my little white farm house sitting on a creek in the small town of Yale, Oklahoma ('bout 40 miles west of Tulsa) with my fingers bleeding from the straw, my back sore from the lifting, and happier than I'd ever been.

        From that day on, I played that old Telecaster whenever I could. I loved to take it down to Yale Creek and sit beside the water, playing alone with the guitar unplugged. I managed to get pretty good, and could play some decent riffs from my favorite bands, bands like Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones, Guns N' Roses, all that stuff. By the time I was eighteen, I had worn down the fretboard so much that you could barely play it. But I never quit. Guitar meant the world to me, and I wasn't about to let no technical issues get in the way of my dream.

        I graduated Yale High School in 2008, and proceeded to get a football scholarship to Oklahoma State University. I was a pretty good quarterback, and my high school team, the Yale Bulldogs, won the state championship all three years I threw for 'em. My 2-year stint for the Cowboys ended real quick, thanks to a torn ligament in my arm and nerve damage during a sack in a game we played against Kansas State.

        After that injury, I was off the team. Johnny Westbrook was no longer the starting quarterback for the Oklahoma State University Cowboys. I was devastated. I thought I would never play football again, much less guitar. I spent weeks going from surgery to surgery, with pins in my hands and a wrench in my plans. I had figured that I would go on to the NFL after graduation, but that wasn’t gonna happen anymore. The admins wouldn't even let me play for the Cowboys after my injury.

        But after about six months of surgery, I gained back enough control and feeling to play guitar again. Even after all those years, I was still playing the Telecaster copy I earned that day back home. I thought it was about time I upgraded a little.

        I started looking for an evening job, and was soon employed as a ranch hand at night and on the weekends. I had plenty of experience from my childhood, but now I got a salary that wasn't half bad. After a few months, with the money from my earlier football sponsorship deals and my job at the ranch, I had saved up enough to buy a beautiful '59 Les Paul Sunburst for about five grand. It had a beautiful flamed cherry top piece, and the original PAF double-coil pickups had that classic tone that I had been searching for ever since I started to play guitar.
 
        Les Pauls were played by almost all my idols: Joe Perry, Eric Clapton, Slash, Duane Allman, Jimmy Page... the list goes on. After hearing their sound, and watching the  feeling that they played with, I knew that I wanted to play a Les Paul. I was absolutely stunned by the difference in sound quality between my old, cheap Telecaster and this brand new guitar. It was around this time that I decided to start a band.

        I was so excited about the idea of playing on a stage with a full band that in my imagination, I skipped all the difficulty, all the practice, all the struggle, and went straight to the arena tours, to selling out stadiums. I convinced myself that making it to the top would be a piece of cake. Turns out, I had trouble just finding people to play with! The day after I bought the Les Paul, I started asking around. I knew a bass player at the time named Paul Janssen. He really did know his instrument, but was sure that he wasn't good enough to play in front of no audience. It took me months to convince him. After I had a bass player, I started looking for a drummer, singer, and rhythm guitarist. I found a guy who's band had just fallen apart, and invited him to a rehearsal with Paul and I. His style of vocals turned out to be a perfect match for our group, and Jay Keaton officially became the singer of our little band. 

        At this point, I had gained confidence. All we needed was a drummer and a rhythm guitarist. Finding a drummer was fairly easy; my childhood friend Steve Johnson had been playing drums since he was able to hold a stick, and he jumped at the chance to play with a band. Rhythm guitar, on the other hand, was the real challenge.

        Here's the thing about some guitarists: they all want to play lead. Only a select few want to play the background, provide a spine to the music. However important rhythm guitar may be, no one wanted to play it. After weeks and weeks of searching, interviews, and auditions, I overheard a sophomore talking to his friends about his passion for rhythm on the campus green. At this point I had almost given up, and this improbable moment was the savior of our band. I immediately ran over to him and asked him, pretty bluntly, if he would join our band. To my surprise, he said yes. I didn't even audition him; I was so desperate, I took my chance and invited him to our rehearsal later that day. We met up in my dorm room, and all played better than we ever had. Our playing styles all complimented each other, and we all had chemistry. That day, a band was born.

        The story concerning where our name came from is actually pretty funny. A few days after that first rehearsal, our rhythm guitarist, Everett Dylan, was walking down to the general store a half mile from our campus park. When he had walked about half the distance, some kid jumped him from a little alleyway, and Everett ended up in a knife fight. When he came back a few hours later, he was cut up pretty bad, but the smile on his face was as wide as ever. I asked him what he was so happy about, and he said the thrill of his fight was still in him. We all laughed, and decided to call our band "Thrill of the Fight."

        We rehearsed every day at around five o'clock in a little storage unit we rented for twenty-five bucks a month. We had a drum kit in the corner, four amps for the guitars, bass, and microphone behind it, and the rest of us stood in the front. We really had a passion for the music we were creating back then, a passion that hasn't faded since. That's what our band really means to me nowadays: it ain't the money, or the touring, or the fame, (but I can't say I mind all that), it's the self-expression, the direct channel from creativity to sound. I still find the same joy in playing guitar that I had with the old Telecaster in the hay barn. 

        Anyway, we thought we sounded pretty good. After a few months of rehearsal, we decided we were ready for our first performance. I talked to one of the managers of the OSU games, and he agreed to have us play at halftime in the next game. We were excited beyond words. We were finally getting some exposure, and to us, this was our chance to get "noticed."

        The game was in five days, and we practiced like you would not believe. I probably ended up only getting about three hours of sleep that whole week. But by the night before the game, we had a solid set to play, and the music had really gelled and become cohesive. We watched the game from a little viewing area beneath the bleachers, and as soon as the referees called half, we rushed to the middle of the field and started setting up our equipment. The announcer introduced us, and we received a huge roar of applause from the audience that boosted all of our confidence levels. After a quick sound check, we rolled into the first song of our set, Hardline. 

        We played that show better than we ever imagined. We all played our parts perfectly, and it all came together 'bout as good as it possibly could have. After our third song, everyone in the stadium was on their feet cheering. The feeling was amazing; we had successfully played our first performance! We took a bow, then cleaned up and left the field. The Cowboys won by 42, by the way.

        After that, the band gained popularity, and we were asked to play at parties, events, stuff like that. One day, August 13, 2013, a year after I had graduated from Oklahoma State, we got a call from a representative of Geffen Records. As soon as he introduced himself, I was completely at a loss for words. Geffen is the record label responsible for some incredible bands, and never in my life did I expect a call from them. The gist of what they said was that they had seen us on several occasions, and saw something special in our band that they see very rarely. They thought we had real potential, and were considering signing our band! They just asked us to record a 3-song demo album and send it to them at their headquarters in Santa Monica.

        We rented a time slot at a recording studio, and crushed the three songs we played at that Cowboys game in one take. The audio engineers mixed the recording, and sent us the sound file. I sent it to Geffen, and the waiting period began. 

        The wait time I anticipated never happened. We heard back from them the next day, and they told us the most amazing thing I had heard in my life, to this day: Thrill of the Fight was officially signed with Geffen Records! They flew us out to California to sign some paperwork and discuss the technicalities, and there we had it. I was now the guitarist for a signed rock band! The thing that made this deal all that much more incredible was that it was 2013, and we played classic and 80s rock. I guess Geffen thought we could bring it back, and man, were they right.

        Geffen booked us our first tour opening for Aerosmith, which was a huge step for us. We were very lucky to get our first tour with such a popular band, but somehow, the record label made it happen. Our tour with them really opened our eyes to the world of rock n' roll. We had the "inside scoop" on everything you read about in magazines and see in movies; we learned how the whole system worked. On that tour, we learned some valuable things that we draw on to this day.

        After that tour, we had a few more opening tours, one with the remaining members of Lynyrd Skynyrd, another joint tour with a small Hollywood band, and finally, opening for Guns N' Roses on three occasions during their Not In This Lifetime tour in early 2016. After we got back from those shows, Geffen told us that we were ready for a tour of our own. They wanted us to put together an album, then play a release tour, all in about six months. So we got to work, and four months later, our debut album Three Days Gone was recorded, mixed, and ready to ship. At the initial release of the album, sales were a bit slow, but that was to be expected. As Geffen predicted, the numbers shot up as soon as we went on tour.

        Speaking of the tour, we left Oklahoma City, where we all shared a little townhouse, on the bus the record label had provided. We got moving on November 2nd, 2016, and headed to Missouri for opening night. I will never forget that first show at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City... getting up on a stage for a full show, under the lights, knowing that the crowd came to see us, not the band we were opening for. It was an incredible feeling. We played the rest of that tour with vigor, and it truly shaped us as a band.

        So that essentially brings us up to today. Thrill of the Fight is now the world's seventh best selling band of all time, right behind Led Zeppelin. We have a total of 6 albums currently released, and we're still going strong. Despite all this, however, we all still play for the same reason: we love it. We have fun, we create something, we channel our ideas into something cohesive and exciting. We're all still in it for the thrill of the fight.