SERIOUS CHOPS
Billy Zabka — aka Johnny Lawrence, Cobra Kai’s resident badass sensei — has been playing guitar since he was a hair-metal-lovin’ kid (BTW, he’s still a hair-metal-lovin’ kid!)
ONE OF THE very first scenes in the very first episode of Cobra Kai depicts Johnny Lawrence, former karate badass (to use Johnny’s favorite descriptor) and walking 1980s artifact, hopping into his beat-up red Pontiac Firebird and cranking up Poison’s glam-metal anthem “Nothin’ But a Good Time.”
It’s one of many Eighties rock-soundtracked moments we’re treated to, courtesy of the soon-to-be sensei: Throughout the first three seasons, Johnny unapologetically rocks a Zebra No Tellin’ Lies baseball tee, inspires his teenaged karate disciple, Miguel Diaz, to change his ringtone to Ratt’s “Round and Round” and, later on, sneaks Diaz into a Dee Snider concert as physical therapy for a (literally) back-breaking injury. Clearly, Johnny Lawrence loves hair metal.
But what about the real-life actor who plays him, Billy Zabka?
“Yes, Billy Zabka does love hair metal,” confirms Billy Zabka himself, speaking to
Guitar World via Zoom after wrapping shooting for Cobra Kai’s new fourth season. “I lean more toward the Def Leppards, the Whitesnakes, the Van Halens. I’m all things Eighties rock. That was my music.”
That music, Zabka reveals, was there with him the day he auditioned for the role of Johnny Lawrence — his first-ever film appearance, by the way — in the original The
Karate Kid. He recalls being in his late teens and driving to the audition in his father’s Volvo, blasting Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark.” “I got there, walked into this room with all these karate black belts, and everybody was out Johnny-ing the next guy,” he says. “It was tense, and the energy pushed me back out of the room and into my dad’s Volvo. And I sat there with my little cassette player and cranked up some Zebra. It helped me to not get psyched out.”
Zabka landed the role, of course. But more than that, he inhabited it so fully — imbuing Johnny with a depth and pathos that turned him into a sort of anti-hero — that he went on to play hot-tempered bad boys in a slew of Eighties flicks, including the 1985 high-school caper Just One of the Guys and the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Back
to School. Additionally, Zabka continued to act in film and television, began directing commercials and music videos and also became an Academy Award-nominated writer and producer.
But before he did any of this, Zabka played guitar. In fact, he calls the instrument “the theme of my life since I was 10 years
You guys clearly aren’t old enough to have actually grown up in the Eighties. Is this music that you truly love, or do you just have a knowledge of and appreciation for it from a distance?
BIRENBERG For me, it’s more like one of many types of music I listen to. I’m really all over the place in my music background; I grew up playing saxophone and clarinet and flute, and I was heavy into jazz. My guitarloving background comes much more from a Pat Metheny place than like a hard rock place. So my aesthetic is less pure hard rock.
ROBINSON It’s music that I love. Growing up in L.A., I was a metal head — your standard classic-rock-into-metal guitar player. That’s kind of a rite of passage there, because that type of music is in L.A.’s DNA. Later on I got into film scores and all that, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the Eighties aesthetic.
For those of us unfamiliar with scoring, can you walk us through your process?
BIRENBERG The process is pretty similar for each episode. We sit down with the showrunners and have a meeting — it’s called a spotting session — and we’ll watch episodes. We usually work on two at a time, so we watch them together and go through every scene with the editors and say, “Should there be music here? What’s the music going to be like?” And we just make a list: “Okay, here we need some emotional stuff, here we have a big fight sequence, here we’ve got this, here we’ve got that.” Then Zach and I split off and start sketching things out. We’ll go into our separate studios and start working. Once things are listenable and put together we start trading files, trading mixes and piling on ideas. A really good example would be [the composition] “Strike First,” which plays during a scene in Season 1, Episode 1, where Johnny beats up some kids in a mini-mart parking lot. In a lot of ways that was our thesis statement for the show.
How did that one come together?
ROBINSON In terms of “Strike First,” which is also the music that plays during the end credits of each episode, we watched this scene of Johnny beating the crap out of these teenagers, and our first thought was, “We want the music to feel like the music that Johnny hears in his head while he’s doing that.” And in his head, he’s the ultimate badass, right? So “Strike First” came out as something that we think represents Johnny’s version of kicking ass. But it’s sort of our version, too. We grew up in the Nineties, with influences that range from everything from hair metal to video game music. So there’s that kind of video game, “boss battle” feel to it.
There’s some great guitar on that one.
ROBINSON Something that I think we do on our show that I don’t think anyone else does is that we’re pretty unabashed with our guitar usage, and we lean hard into lead guitar in our score. We’re very into shredding and treating the guitar the way Yngwie Malmsteen or Eddie Van Halen would treat a guitar, which is as a virtuosic, symphonic instrument. So there’s a lot of moments — in “Strike First,” or in “King Cobra,” which ends Season 1, or “Miyagi Metal,” which ends Season 3 — where we really highlight the guitar. As we’re writing, we make it a point to say, “We want to add guitar flourishes here.” And sometimes we don’t even write the parts. We’ll work with amazing guitar players like Andrew Synoweic, a session player in Los Angeles, and Myrone — he calls himself a “soft shredder,” and he’s very video game influenced — and we’ll say, “You’re a master shredder. We want to hit this moment on screen with some type of arpeggio or shred lick,” or whatever.
As a fan of the show and also of Eighties rock, I’d imagine that scoring for the Johnny Lawrence character has to be incredibly fun.
BIRENBERG It is. And in a lot of ways Johnny is the heart of the show. Or at least the show in Season 1. So originally it was really Johnny’s lens that was our main lens. Which is why we call “Strike First” kind of our thesis statement: “This is the sound, guys.” That was the first thing we unlocked. Then we had to figure out the whole palette: you have the badass rock stuff, the spiritual Miyagi stuff, the more electro-influenced sounds… And then we also went back to the music in the original movies and sort of re-consumed that. We asked, “What is it that makes this tick?” And one thing we noticed is that the music that made the biggest impression on audiences in the original movie wasn’t the score. It was all the songs that were in there, like “You’re the Best”...
Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer”...
BIRENBERG Right. “Young Hearts”... So we basically wanted our score to absorb that song functionality in a lot of ways, and play with the type of energy that those needle drops play with in the movie. That’s kind of how we came up with our sound and the approach to mixing the genres in scoring.
The music is not merely a throwback to the Eighties and the original Karate Kid. You also bring in a lot of modern sounds, in particular when you’re scoring for the teenagers, who obviously don’t sit around all day listening to Ratt and Poison. I’m thinking in particular about the score to the big brawl at the high school during the final episode of Season Two.
ROBINSON “Hallway Hellscape” [the piece of music that soundtracks the high-school brawl] was just a really fun one because we got to go all out — it almost feels like a fight in The Matrix or something. But in general when it comes to the kids, one of the ideas we had from the start was that the music they were hearing was going to be kind of influenced by their sensei. So for instance, the score for Miguel, during the cafeteria fight in the first season, it’s what he hears when he gets the Johnny Lawrence filter put on him. How does his own personality blend with, like, Ratt, and all this other music that Johnny is exposing him to? That actually became more complicated to do as the show went on because the kids were switching dojos all the time. By the end of Season 2, it’s like, who the fuck are you rooting for on this show? [Laughs] But what we ended up with for the kids is this kind of
“THEN THEY SENT US SOME SCRIPTS, AND IT WAS EVEN BETTER THAN ZACH AND I COULD HAVE POSSIBLY IMAGINED. FIRST OF ALL, BILLY [ZABKA] AND RALPH [MACCHIO] WERE IN IT!” — LEO BIRENBERG
middle ground where we took the synth-pop Eighties elements from the original Karate Kid soundtrack and mixed them with Johnny’s hair metal and a few other things. And you wind up with a modern EDM-inspired metal hybrid piece of music, which doesn’t feel that far from stuff that you’d hear nowadays from artists like Carpenter Brut or Perturbator.
All right, now for the important stuff: Clearly, Johnny Lawrence is a big fan of Ratt, Zebra and Twisted Sister. What are Leo and Zach’s favorite Eighties hard rock and metal bands?
BIRENBERG [Laughs] I love Bon Jovi. I listened to so much Bon Jovi in high school. I don’t even know how I got into it, but it was a major part of my high school life.
ROBINSON I would have to say Iron Maiden, because it got me into guitar. So there’s always a soft spot for that. And then Van Halen — I love Eighties Van Halen. Especially late-Eighties Van Halen.
You’re a Van Hagar man.
ROBINSON I mean, I love David Lee Roth, too. But I listen to the Hagar stuff and I’m like, “This is good music!”
How did each of you get into the composing and scoring world? Was that your initial goal, or did you start out wanting to be performers?
BIRENBERG I think I had that performing dream for a bit. And then sometime late in high school I just realized that what made me tick was less about me being the person performing and more about me bossing everybody around and telling them what to play. [Laughs] But like I said earlier, I played saxophone, and my high school had a big jazz program. That was what first led me to look at scores. Then later on I went to NYU [New old.” It was at that age that he first picked up the instrument, having just moved with his family from New York to Southern California. “It was a way to try and fit in and meet some friends,” he says. “I would go to a little park, Shadow Ranch [in the San Fernando
Valley] and learn guitar with a bunch of guys and a nylon-string.”
He continued to play throughout his school years, including at his high school Battle of the Bands in El Camino Real, where his group, Siricon (“a silly, funny name”) had some stiff competition. “We played against Fishbone,” Zabka recalls with a laugh. “Angelo Moore, John Fisher, I went to high school with those guys, and they were running around onstage with horns, playing all this crazy jazz and fusion type music that no one had ever heard before.”
In fact, Zabka continues, “Here’s an even crazier story: In junior high school Angelo lived across the street from me, and when they first started the band, they didn’t have a lot of instruments. So I had a little keyboard, I had an amplifier, and they would come and use my stuff and I would jam with them.” (When reached by phone, Moore recalls, “I remember going over to his house, kickin’ it and playing games and running up and down the street. Childhood memories, man…”)
Zabka obviously didn’t pursue music with the same zealousness as his Fishbone school mates (or, for that matter, his father, Stan Zabka, a successful pianist and composer who co-wrote the 1950s holiday classic “Christmas Eve in My Hometown” and later worked for and performed on The Tonight
Show), but he did take it seriously. He enrolled at the Dick Grove School of Music in California, where he learned to read music and studied to be a trained session player and studio musician, and he also played in a series of bands, including one with a few friends called the Acoustic Outlaws. “We’d perform at pumpkin festivals and things like that, where we’re sitting on haystacks singing ‘Listen to the Music’ and ‘Layla,’ ” he recalls.
Zabka says that he “loved guitar deeply,” but at the same time, “it was always something of a hobby. I went to college at Cal State Northridge and entered the film school, and then I got cast in The Karate
Kid. So as far as my career was going, I was headed to film. But music was the other thing that fed me artistically and creatively. And that’s also why I never chose not to pursue it professionally — it’s something I don’t look to get anything back from, outside of just the joy of doing it.”
That’s not to say he doesn’t find the time to bring the guitar into his acting life whenever possible. On the set of Back to School, for just one example, Zabka recalls impromptu jam sessions with co-star Robert Downey Jr. at their hotel after full days of shooting in Madison, Wisconsin. “I would always bring my guitar to any set I went to, and [Downey] happened to bring a Casio with him. So we did a little jamming. And he’s a great piano player, actually.”
In 2019, Zabka had the opportunity to live out his rock dreams by performing to a packed audience at Hollywood’s famed Whisky a Go Go (Johnny Lawrence, we presume, would be super-jealous). Armed with a Taylor acoustic (his other gear over the years has included a Takamine acoustic-electric, a white Ovation 12-string and a “chestnut-brown” Les Paul Custom with a Marshall stack), he joined Cobra Kai composers Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson onstage to perform Johnny’s theme song, “Ace Degenerate.”
At first, Birenberg and Robinson assumed Zabka would merely strum along and try to keep up. “They sent me the basic chords, and then I had one rehearsal with them in
York University], which also has a great film program. My freshman year roommate was a film major, and I just started writing music for his stuff. That was kind of this perfect creative meld for me. And that’s how I ended up on this path.
ROBINSON I started out playing guitar, and that just leads to you being in bands. But I was also interested in film music, and I never thought that being a performer and being a composer were mutually exclusive. So I was scoring plays in my high school, and at the same time my band was playing the Roxy and the Whisky and the Troubadour. Having those kinds of parallel lines was really formative for me. So I would say to anyone reading this who really sees themselves as a performer, don’t limit yourself to just that. If you feel like there’s something else kind of calling you, you should explore it.
A few years back you did actually bring your music to the stage, with a concert at the Whisky a Go Go called Enter the Dojo: The Music of Cobra Kai Live. What was it like to play this music for an audience?
BIRENBERG Putting together the concert version of this show was such a creative revelation. We did the concert at the Whisky, which is the ultimate Sunset Strip joint, and then we went and played again at a music and film festival in Spain. We had so much fun taking all the music from the show and expanding it into concert-appropriate pieces. We didn’t want to just go up onstage and do a 90-second track and then another 90-second track. We wanted it to be a freakin’ rock concert!
You even got Billy Zabka up there.
ROBINSON We didn’t even know he played! But yeah, he came up onstage and played his own theme [“Ace Degenerate”]. Which, by the way, he was only supposed to play rhythm guitar. He came to one rehearsal and that was all he did. But then during the show, and you can see it in the YouTube video, my face lights up because he starts playing the melody with me. He had practiced it the night before and surprised us. It was really special. I hope he can do it again with us.
BIRENBERG That’s one thing that’s really cool about this show — it’s a really closeknit group of people, from the cast and creators to the writers, editors and composers. And I think it comes from a place that, I don’t know, Cobra Kai is a bit like the little engine that could. It started out as just a YouTube show, and then it became the biggest thing ever on YouTube. It was this giant fish in a small pond. Now it’s on Netflix, and it’s like a giant fish in the ocean, eating everything. [Laughs] It’s an incredible thing to be a part of.
Hollywood and it sounded like crap,” Zabka recalls. “They were like, ‘Okay, that was good. We’ll see you tomorrow.’ ”
But just like Johnny Lawrence squaring off against Daniel LaRusso at the 1984 AllValley Karate Tournament, Zabka was intent on showing “Ace Degenerate” no mercy.
“I went home that night and pulled out my guitar, sat by the firepit in my backyard and learned all the chords, all the licks, everything,” he says. The next night at the Whisky, “We got onstage and I think I surprised Zach and Leo when I started going into the licks and actually playing the song. You can see it in the video that’s posted online, where Zach’s kind of like looking at me, like, ‘Hey, you got it!’ ” Zabka laughs. “But what a thrill to play the Johnny Lawrence anthem, and at the Whisky of all places. I mean, all points came together.”
It was something of a full-circle guitar moment for Zabka, and not his only one. He recalls a moment in 2015 when, in a twist of fate, one of his first guitar idols, Eddie Van Halen, gave him something of an impromptu guitar lesson.
“The first concert I ever went to was Van Halen — the 1980 Invasion tour,” Zabka says (and true to form, in a Season 1 episode of
Cobra Kai Johnny Lawrence can be spotted wearing an Invasion tee). “To be 14 years old and watching Eddie come out and play ‘Eruption,’ it was like this music came out of the sky. He was just bigger than life.”
A few years back Zabka celebrated his 50th birthday by going to see Van Halen, once again reunited with David Lee Roth, at the Hollywood Bowl. “And I bumped into a good friend of mine, Janie, who had actually married Eddie. And she said, ‘Do you want to go and meet Eddie?’ I’m like, ‘Are you kidding? Yes, I want to go meet Eddie!’ ”
He continues, “So I’m with a few of my buddies, and we all get in an elevator and go downstairs to the dressing room… and there’s Eddie Van Halen. And he was just the nicest guy. At one point he hands me his guitar and he says, ‘You play?’ I go, ‘A little bit — let me show you my version of “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘bout Love.” ’ So I go into it, and I’m playing it up on the fretboard. He goes, ‘No, man, no.’ And he literally gets behind me and starts playing the notes and showing me how it’s just a simple A minor thing. And then a few minutes later he’s like, ‘All right, I gotta get ready.’ It was so epic.”
Zabka may have received some guidance from the master, but these days he’s functioning as something of a six-string sensei himself. “My son is just starting to play, and he’s the same age I was when I started,” he says. “So I have a renewed love and interest in the guitar, and in getting the cobwebs off and the rust out in order to show him some things.”
Even as Zabka’s profile rises once again with Cobra Kai (in addition to his starring role, he’s also an executive producer on the series), he still makes time for his first love. “The guitar’s a companion, just like it always has been,” he says. “It’s just part of life for me.”
He recalls a recent visit with an old friend by way of example. “I was just in L.A. visiting a buddy of mine that I lived with for eight years back in the late Nineties. We used to have these great parties at our old condo together, and everybody would come and bring instruments and we’d have these big jam circles. He just bought a house in Toluca Lake, and so we went out to dinner and then went back to his place. So we’re walking through his house, and there’s his piano. We had some friends with us, and he had his Taylor over in the corner. We hadn’t played together in, like, 15 years, but I grabbed that guitar and we went right into ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’ And it went on from there for the next hour. We just jammed. It was so great. I love the guitar.”