briangrunk

Brian Grunkemeier

Never having been one to look at things from an ordinary perspective I approach music from the same viewpoint. My brother Gary handed me his classical guitar in 1963 and taught me a few Leadbelly songs. Within a few years I had bought his friends’s 1932 National Duolian and I was playing slide guitar versions of the tunes on the radio.
My journey took me down roads of different styles of music: Jugband, Old Timey, Blue Grass, Blues, Rock, Country AND Western. Some of the bands I was in had ordinary names like Silver Dollar, Garbanzo Gas, Sally Metcalf’s Jugband, Actual Size, Moonlighter and Jalopie Ramblers. Others, mostly short term engagements, didn’t such as Goose’s Trash and Treasure Jug and Funk Band, the Smash Hit of the Century Somewhat Approaching the Fabulous, and Big Nuke and the Holocausts. Big Nuke was a group I put together to play the first annual Magic Skagit Festival. For that group (circa 1977) I wrote some anti-nuclear/pro-solar power songs and played with Phil Raiguel, a fiddler who played with such greats as Woody Guthrie and Oscar Brand. Phil taught me a few mandolin licks and I started buying old mandolins, one of which was a 1940s unnamed resonator.
Thus began my use of open tunings and slide mandolin.
In January of 2018 when my friends George and Donnette invited me on a musical road trip through Mexico I met Patty Todd. We fell in love and my life plans changed. I moved to Tucson and Patty and I started playing in pubs and clubs from Washington State to Central America. We're writing new songs and plan on keeping on until we can’t. Check out the audio section for some of our latest compositions.

Dancing on the table just because it makes people happy.

On a recent visit to Haines, Alaska, Brian’s friend Beth asked him if he could still play guitar and harmonica and sing and dance all at the same time as he had done years before. Of course he had to give it a try.

No matter where in the world Brian travels he makes new friends
–music is the universal language.

Click on the video below to watch Brian sing, dance, play the guitar and harmonica all while stubbornly refusing to obey the laws of gravity by bouncing around on a rickety old picnic table.

Brian Grunkemeier

“The next summer I moved to her place in Tucson. One day she started playing George Farrell’s old washtub bass and, to my delight, she was great. Now we’re heading down new musical roads together.”