GREGORY “Grimace” Meredith knows how to pick blues players—like his bass player, Jamie Rodriguez, who grew up on a constant diet of punk rock and couldn’t believe he was asked to be in Meredith’s band, Grimace and the Fakers.
“I hate the blues,” Rodriguez says. “To be punk, you have to hate the blues.”
But after the first session, he was sold.
“I can’t shake it,” he admits. It’s infective. I’m a punk rocker, but I’m still a musician. When I went to jam with Grimace, it was good in terms of volume. He was loud, and that impressed me right off the bat. It was strong and potent music. I liked it and wanted to work with it.”
Meredith didn’t necessarily expect Rodriguez to go for it, either.
“I heard from a friend of mine that Jamie might be looking for something,” Grimace says. “I had met Jamie a couple years earlier, and he wanted to jam with me, but I thought he was this sort of Gypsy, and there was no way we were going to be able to chain him down. But I called him, and I thought the conversation was going to be me trying to get him in the band. As soon as he picked up the phone, it was about 15 minutes of him yapping.”
Now all they needed was a drummer, so they put an ad on Craigslist. Les Shanrock was the lucky fourth caller.
“I called them up and decided to show up to see what would happen,” Shanrock said. “I hadn’t really been gigging around at that point and was looking to get into a full-time project. It turned out to be a real serendipitous thing. We started jamming and we just clicked.”
“We tried out other drummers,” Rodriguez says, “but they imploded because they couldn’t take the volume.”
Indeed, one thing all the members of this self-proclaimed “alt-blues band” agree on is they like to play loud. Meredith says most people who tried out walked out after hearing where he was going with it.
“They said, ‘This is going to destroy my hearing,'” Meredith remembers. “I’ve almost gotten into a fist fight because one of the bass players we tried out said the volume snapped his glasses.”
In the end, vocalist and guitarist Meredith ended up with a trio of players who have more than 60 years combined experience in the South Bay music scene.
“We’re not three guys who just picked up our instruments five years ago,” he says.
Their roots in San Jose not only shaped their personalities, but also their music. Meredith had been in a few bands in the ’80s and ’90s, but until Grimace and the Fakers, he was never able to realize his vision of a band based on his biggest blues influences, like Mississippi Fred McDowell, Hound Dog Taylor and Muddy Waters.
His affinity for loud music also was born in San Jose, way back in the early ’80s.
“I first saw Ribzy when it I was 13 years old,” Meredith says. “I took the bus downtown and went to this punk rock show. I didn’t even know what a punk rocker was. My friends and I went to this house, down to the basement, and we were scared shitless. At that time, the twins [Donovan and Jason Drummund] were singing, and I thought someone was going to kill me.”
However, the scene has changed since then.
“It’s changed with the times,” Rodriguez says. “The venues, the music; it’s all retro nowadays. It’s harder to find venues to play, and it’s harder to find new music and a new sound.”
But the more things change, the more they stay the same—hopefully.
“I grew up here in San Jose,” he says, “hanging out with a bunch of dirtbags, drinking 40 ounces and hiding out behind the bleachers, smoking weed and playing in bands my whole life. That’s what I know, and that’s what I got good at. It’s hard to stop, and I don’t know what else I would do.”
GRIMACE AND THE FAKERS
Local shows will be announced soon at www.myspace.com/grimaceandthefakers.
