Grubb

The idea of putting things up on a website for anyone to see kinda gives me the willies, so I'll give you some vagaries. I'm from Atlanta originally. I went to a private school and got outta there alive, with a few great, life-long friends. Then I went to school at Appalachian State University, where I realized that playing music was pretty much where it's at, so I tried to play as much as possible. Then I kinda got burned out on the bass after a few years (it happens), and needed a distraction, so I decided that I'd start DJing, since DJs were getting all the girls at the time. This really rejuvenated my spirits, having come from a rock and roll and jazz background, both things which require some thought to play. There is an amazing amount of musicality that can be put into simply mixing some records together and making people get down. Sometimes it's spontaneous and sometime it's rehearsed, but it's almost always fun. I guess I realized around his time that making people get down was more basically where it's at. So fast forward to after ASU and I moved back home to ATL. I got a cool place in midtown and started going to all the clubs you could go to to try and get myself some gigs. This kinda sucked because I had just moved from a town where there were more gigs than you could shake a stick at, and I had already paid my dues (or so I thought at the time). I had a really good time living back in ATL for a year, but then realized over a giant sink full of dishes at my kitchen job that I should get the hell out of there and see the world a bit. So that's when I just happened to meet the mandolin player from Railroad Earth, with whom I pretended to be very impressed. I thought that maybe I had heard of them as I also had a foot in this other hippy/bluegrass world in ATL. I forgot to mention that part. While working at Guitar Center, the first dude that I bumped into from Boone was a banjo player, whose band was in need of a bass player. Thus began my bluegrass experience, simultaneous with the last days of my DJ aspirations. So back to Jan 2003 and meeting the aforementioned mandolinist. I blew off a few of his calls (being the flake that I am) before calling him back and finding out why he was calling and what his band was all about. So to try and shorten an already long story, I drove up to NJ and auditioned and got the gig. So I left everything behind (it was very cathartic) and moved up to Skehan's guest bedroom in suburban NJ in the middle of winter. I saw this as my ticket, because they were playing a lot all over the country and had some very reputable festivals lined up for that year and seemed to have a goodish buzz about them from what I could gather. I figured 'what the heck, I'm only 24'. The only thing that I left behind that I was gonna miss was the most promising relationship that I had ever begun with a beautiful girl who worked at the restaurant with me. We had been hanging out for a few months and I had begun to fall in love. It was very sad to leave her. However, not knowing a soul in NJ, or how completely boring the Randolph area really was before I moved there, we kept talking on the phone for months before I saw her again. We got to know each other very well. Whenever I had a long enough break I would drive back down to ATL to see her, and we kept it going. A year went by, then two. I had been all over the country and was having a good time being a low-level rock star. The separation from my beloved was killing us both, though, so after lots of thought, I talked her into moving to NJ. Actually I think her dad talked her into moving to NJ, since he realized a lot of things that I didn't quite have the perspective to. At this point it gets kinda hard to put down, because we're too current to be able to summarize clearly. However, we have bought a house and have gotten married, and I'm enjoying being a low-level domestic diva with our dog and our yard, etc. I'm still in the band and the gigs have gotten better as well as the pay, and we're now playing world-wide. We just got back from England and Scotland, which was a major hoot. Is that enough for ya, Anne? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjNOEr328mE