Joe Grushecky

The Original Iron City Houserocker. Joe's got co-writes on Bruce Springsteen’s latest release.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Lefts That's Podcast.
My guest today is Job Brusheky So Joe, how do
you know Brewce Springsteen.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Well, back in the day nineteen eighty we did a
record called Have a Good Time to Get Out Alive
that Steve van Zant was participating in for a while.
He was doing some production work. Stephen was really good
friends with Steve Popovich, who was the president CEO of
Cleveland Entertainment Cleveland International. They had Meatloaf. We were rehearsing

(00:44):
in SR Studios in New York City to record the
album Media Sound and Steve pop Which brought Steve van
Zant to the rehearsals and eventually into studio and produced
some tracks on that particular record. And after the initial

(01:06):
tracks were finished, we took a break and Mick Ronson
was also working on that record and went home to
Pittsburgh for a while, came back to New York City
and Mick was working with Meatloaf to do the follow
up to Bat Out of Hell. And he invited me
down to the power station one night and in the
next room one of the studios a I think the

(01:30):
Mick Ronson and Meeto for studio b Steve and Bruce
z Vansant and Bruce were working on the River and
just happened to run into him and were introduced, and
Bruce became a fan of that particular record, and we
hooked up one night in Big Man's Claire's Clements Club,

(01:53):
Red Bank, New Jersey, and hung out for most of
the evening and just hit it off, became friends, and
basically that's how we met. But we played New Jersey
a lot, and some of Bruce's crew and you know
people who work for him, It comes to his play
all the time.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
So since you know him personally, what does the average
person or the media and not know about Bruce?

Speaker 3 (02:20):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (02:22):
He's very kind, he's funny, he's hilarious. He could be
a stand up comic. If he decides this rock and
roll thing's not going to work out.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
Okay, you end up writing songs with him? How does
that happen?

Speaker 2 (02:38):
Well, the first record we did together was called American
Babylon and I had He invited me out to Los Angeles.
I played him a couple of songs he really liked.
At the end of the session, he asked me what
else I had I played him a few more songs.
They weren't very good. He said, you gotta write better

(03:00):
songs than that, and I agreed with him. I didn't
have a really good batch of songs at that particular moment.
So when I came back to Pittsburgh, I had a
determination to write better, better, better music. And uh so
I came up with a set of lyrics for a
song called Homestead, which is uh the uh, you know,

(03:22):
the quintin central Pittsburgh steel mill town that I had
known all the guys who worked in the union there
and we had helped set up food banks, et cetera
over the years. And so the next time Bruce and
I got together to finish those particular songs we were
working on in Los Angeles was in New York City,

(03:43):
and just on you know, on a whim or you know,
built my courage and gave him a set of lyrics.
He liked it. So we wrote Homestead together. Then we
wrote Dark and Bloody Ground together. As for my je accident,
we started working a bit on you know, something that

(04:05):
we hoped that was going to be a Bruce Springsteen
project for a while, and did a bunch of other
co writes the ones that come out just recently.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
Okay, So you're sitting in Pittsburgh and Bruce calls you
and says, come out to LA. I mean, tell me
a little bit more about that.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
Well, I was at the uh A trough in my career.
I wasn't doing that great and my wife Leanne mentioned
she said, you know, you're pretty good friends with Bruce.
Why don't you give him a call and ask him
if he'd consider playing on one of your records. So

(04:46):
I was doing a weekday gig at a singles club,
which is something I rarely do, but I was doing
a single solo show acoustic.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
It was one of those gays where nobody was particular
and interested in what I had to sing, you know.

Speaker 1 (05:05):
And you know, so I'm up.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
There playing away and re evaluating my career choices and
during the break my sonme and Brian Coleman. He comes
over and says, hey, you better call home right away.
In the end, just call it. So this is the
days before cell phones. So I went back into the
kitchen and you know, the kitchen help was banging pots

(05:29):
and pans. It was a restaurant and there was a
lot of noise. I asked him to keep it down
a bit, and I call it home. She said, Bruce
just called and he wants you to give him a bus.
I called. Bruce was out in Los Angeles in those days,
and he invited me out to work on a song.
So you know, I had to actually borrow money from
my mom and dad to get plane ticket and went

(05:50):
to Los Angeles and worked on chain smoking and never
be enough time to forget about you.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
So you go to LA you stay at his house?

Speaker 2 (06:00):
Yes, I did?

Speaker 1 (06:01):
And how long did you stay?

Speaker 2 (06:04):
The first time? Couple of days, three or four days? Maybe,
second time, same thing. And then and then I went
to hung out with him in New Jersey for a while,
and then we just got you know, we just hit
it off. We had a nice easy wrapoor for writing
and just started working together a lot back in mid

(06:30):
to late nineties.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
Okay, if your wife hadn't pushed you, are you the
type of guy who would have reached out to the boss.

Speaker 2 (06:39):
Probably not, No, No, I probably would not have.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
Okay, so you're talking about the material you written being
on this extravaganza that Bruce recently released, right, So did
you think those songs would never see the light of day.

Speaker 2 (06:59):
Well, it took a while. It took a while for
him to get here, I'll say that, but uh, you know,
I'm more than happy they're out now, more than happy
they're out period. But yeah, yeah, I am happy there
they're out. I think they're really good representative examples of
what we were doing in those days.

Speaker 1 (07:19):
So you wrote a number of songs, I mean, Elton
John you know they call it two rooms. Bernie wrote
the lyrics and Elton wrote the melodies the changes. How
did you and Bruce do it? You talked to that
you gave him the lyrics for one time. Is that
how you normally did or you'd sit in the same room.

Speaker 3 (07:36):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (07:38):
Both.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Sometimes I gave him the lyrics, sometimes I sent them
the lyrics, and sometimes we wrote face to face. But basically,
you know, I did most of the lyrics that he
contributed some. He did almost all the music. I contributed
bits and pieces along the way.

Speaker 1 (07:58):
So how do you feel, I mean, you emailed me
that you had some songs on the new project, But
how do you feel when people talk to you and
they just want to talk about Springsteen?

Speaker 2 (08:10):
Well, you know that's part of you cast a large
shadow if you want to work with him, and you know,
so it was just part of the partner procedure. But
I'm confident enough in my own abilities that you know,
I'm not intimidated by it.

Speaker 1 (08:26):
Well, needless to say, although you had major label records
on MCA, you and the House Rockers did not reach ubiquity.
But no, we did not when you were working with Springsteen.
Did you feel this was my break? This is going
to happen?

Speaker 2 (08:43):
Well, you know every record I do, I feel this
is my break. This is going to happen. Of course,
if Bruce said a little bit more exposure, maybe more
people want to hear what he's up to, what you know,
why he picked me to work with So you know, yeah,
I'm always hoping to for that one song that you know,
Chris Fiel Easy Street like everybody else.

Speaker 1 (09:05):
Okay, he has played live with you a number of
times too.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
Yes, over fifty times we're played together.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
And what is that like?

Speaker 2 (09:15):
Well, it's like, you know, you got a baseball team
and you got Mickey Manno playing a center field, or
Willie Mays, or you got a football team you got
Joe Montana sitting in a quarterback. So you know, he's
a great musician and it automatically elevates what you're doing.

Speaker 1 (09:33):
You talked about your wife saying to call the boss.
How many times have you been married?

Speaker 2 (09:38):
Twice?

Speaker 1 (09:40):
And how long each time?

Speaker 2 (09:43):
The first time was about five years and we're over
thirty on this one.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
Okay, to what degree did being a musician affect your
first relationship and how is being a musician affected your
second marriage?

Speaker 2 (09:59):
Well, the first my first wife was very wonderful girl,
very smart, very intelligent, just just wasn't into the music thing.
So that was a factor and a splitting And my
current wife is you know, she's been there through thick
and thin thirty years on in and as you know,

(10:22):
if I'm talking to multiple musicians, you know it's not
an easy thing to do.

Speaker 1 (10:27):
So how did you meet your president mine?

Speaker 2 (10:30):
I met her at a job. I was playing guitar
and she grew up said hello, and she's one of
those things.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
You know. Here we go, and do you have kids?

Speaker 2 (10:42):
I have two children. I have a daughter, Desiree and
my son Johnny, who's current band member and producer of
my last several records.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
And what is your daughter up to?

Speaker 2 (10:57):
She works for P and C Bank, she's in the
corporate world.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
Okay, So how did you decide to become a musician.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
Well, pretty much, my family was musical. My father was
a musician. We were coal miners. Both sides of my
family were coal miners. Yeah, but dad's family especially was
very poor and music was just his passion and he

(11:30):
played could play just about any instrument you put in
front of him, and he was pretty serious at it.
Before World War Two he had a band called the
Happy Serenaders, who you know, would play on AM radio
live in those days as they did all around one microphone.

(11:50):
So I grew up in a house full of music,
everything from old time country, western to swing to polka's
to ethnic music. My mother was in a Tamba rits
in groups, which is an ethnic group here in Pittsburgh.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
Wait, wait, tell me what was the name of what
what kind of music?

Speaker 2 (12:14):
It was called the Tamba Ritson's. Uh, there's a huge
Tamba Ritson's organization that plays out at Duquine University. But
this was local, local ethnic music. Played a Serbian, Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian,
Slovenian folk songs and dances. So she did that and

(12:40):
she also had a beautiful voice as she sang.

Speaker 1 (12:43):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
You know that she sang the standards of the day
around the house all the time. So there was music
going all the time. That that was, you know, their
form of entertainment. Uh. I can remember my mother washing
clothes and my dad sitting on a sellar steps playing
guitar and my mother sang on it. And then I
had an uncle who was, you know, more of a

(13:04):
Fonsie type with the slick back hair, and you know,
he was into uh rock and roll, and at a
very young age, I can remember him combing his hair
in the mirror and uh he had a little record player.
You know, it looked like a little little box with
a spindle, played forty fives and to this thing, I

(13:27):
could still remember the songs Speed Up by the Cadillact,
the Great Pretenders, uh Platters right, Great Balls of Fire,
Jerry y Lewis who wears short shorts to Royal Teams,
Great Balls of Fire, Elvis. And they played an old

(13:48):
stack of records. But he combed his hair and then
he missed his hair up, pull the records back up
and start all over again. So it was it was
a Saturday ritual and uh, you know, once I heard that,
you know, it just became part and parcel of you know,
just who I was. And then of course like the
big bang for for my generations, the Beatles on Sullivan Show,

(14:11):
and so they said, oh man, these guys, you know,
I want to be a part of that.

Speaker 1 (14:16):
Before we get to the Beatles. How many generations were
your parents' families in America?

Speaker 3 (14:23):
Uh, well, my grandparents came over, so my parents were
born here, but one set of parents, grandparents came over
from Ukrainia i was part of the Austrian Hungarian Empire
at the time, and the other set of grandparents came
over from.

Speaker 2 (14:40):
Serbia, which was also part of the Austrian Hungarian Empire at
the time.

Speaker 1 (14:45):
So how did they end up in Pittsburgh and how
did they become coal miners?

Speaker 2 (14:50):
Well, they're a I believe probably imported from their villages
to come work to coal mines. And so, you know,
I grew up western prences of any one little coal
patch we used to call it after another. So they were.

Speaker 3 (15:06):
There.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
They were, you know, all coal miners. My grandfather. By
the time I was born, the still steel mills were
going strong, but the coal miners coal mining in this
area where I grew up, it was primarily all mine out. Uh.
My grandfather I just to remember him coming home from

(15:28):
from working the coal mines.

Speaker 3 (15:30):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (15:30):
My dad and all his brothers were coal miners, and
all my uncles were coal miners. So I was basically
the first generation out of the coal mine for both
sides of the family.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
So you know, you hear you know, black lung and
all the negative effects of being in coal mines. Was
that in your family too?

Speaker 2 (15:57):
Yeah, my father had black mom and uh, you know,
it was not something that he aspired to do. Uh.
He he started working at Koleman when he's twelve years
old and uh got paid by the ton, so uh, yeah,

(16:18):
he was he was not a fan of that particular
line of work, to say the least.

Speaker 1 (16:23):
At what age did he die after?

Speaker 2 (16:26):
After World War Two he became a Uh he tinkered
around with electronics for a while and then he settled
on fixing cars. He was a musician for a while, uh,
you know, a part time musician, and and you know
he played in uh one of the big joys of
his life.

Speaker 3 (16:45):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (16:46):
He was combat veteran World War two. But after World
War Two he was stationed in Paris, and he played
in a swing band in Paris for a couple of
months after the war ended. And uh, that seemed to
be like his you know, uh, most funny ever had
according to him.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
Okay, but we think of coal miners dying young. Did
your father die on.

Speaker 2 (17:07):
No, he did not. He was fortunately lived to be
eighty nine.

Speaker 1 (17:11):
Wow, my father died at seventeen and he was never
underground until he died. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:15):
Yeah, I'm fortunate. I have. You know, all my family
at pretty extended, extended runs, and they were all coal miners,
So yeah, I got longevity on my side.

Speaker 1 (17:25):
Okay, how many kids in your family?

Speaker 2 (17:28):
Two?

Speaker 1 (17:29):
You the older, the younger. I'm the oldest, and your sibling. Boy, girl,
I have a.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
Brother who's a retired school teacher.

Speaker 1 (17:42):
Okay, And how did your parents meet?

Speaker 2 (17:45):
They met World War Two. My dad was home on leave.
I was a song called nineteen forty five on a
coming home record. I have a special ed degree. I
was teaching a special ed at the time. In nineteen
ninety five, I guess ninety five, fifty years since the
end of World War Two. I decided that I was

(18:10):
gonna call my parents and interview them and get the
details on how they met, so I would say we'd
be able to pass that information that their story done
to my children. And so I interviewed them, and of
course my dad, you know, he was one of the
generations hard to get anything out of him. He didn't
talk too much about in the past. But my mother

(18:33):
gave me the story they met when my dad was
home on furlough before he shipped overseas for World War Two.
So I wrote a song called nineteen forty five, which Bruce,
you know, Bruce and I collaborated on. It's the truest
story I've ever written. It's about my mom and dad
meeting during the world World War two, and you know

(18:57):
how my thoughts of reuniting with her kept my dad
alive when he was fighting.

Speaker 1 (19:07):
Okay, you're a child of the fifties. What was your skies? Yeah,
fifties and sixties. Well, I mean, you know you're coming
of age. You're born in nineteen forty eight, so that
you see what was your experience rock and roll? Depending
on who we just you know, it is either fifty one,
fifty three de bandon who we decided it was Rocket
eighty eight, rock around the clock, whatever. But you know

(19:30):
that era. His scene is, you know, mostly people being oblivious,
having fun even though there was racism everywhere. What was
your growing up like before the sixties and all the
youth changes.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
Well, you know, I guess pretty pretty fifties sixty is
you know, it wasn't you know, music was a big
important part. Listen to music all the time. I was
in love with rock and roll and always listened to it.
You know, it was into Chuck Berry and Boat Diddley
and all that stuff. And uh there AM radio was

(20:10):
king here in Pittsburgh, and you would hear all the
top forty stuff on AM radio, but there was always
outlying stations that had these really unique disc jockeys, and
starting Friday night about six six or seven o'clock in
the evening, they would start trying to obscure each other. So,

(20:31):
you know, I grew up listening to the Stones and uh,
you know in the sixties of Stones, the Beatles, you know,
Motown and all that stuff. But I also was hearing
all these really obscure rhythm and blues rock and roll artists,
uh that were really big here in Pittsburgh. They were
called the Pittsburgh Sound. So I listened to everything I could,

(20:55):
and you know, went to school dances. Uh, you know,
not much of a socialite, pretty much introverted and lost
in the wilderness until I got a guitar, and then
I started realizing, I think I really like to do
this for the rest of my life.

Speaker 1 (21:16):
When did you get a guitar?

Speaker 2 (21:18):
I got a guitar, probably a couple weeks after I
saw the Beatles on it at Sullivan Electric Guitar, but
we did have an acoustic guitar at home that I
banged around on.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
Okay, so tell me the experience of watching the Beatles
before you saw them. Did you like them? They were
on three Sundays on Ed Sullivan.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
Tell me, well, somehow I was able. Jack Parr had
the original Tonight Show and my dad and I watched
the Beatles during a promotional clip of it She Loves You.

Speaker 1 (21:51):
I saw that too. No one seems to remember November.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
Sember vividly, and I thought, wow, it's really great. And then, somehow, miraculously,
again before they were actually on TV, I found a
copy of their album and uh, you know, they used
to sell where I had to buy records when I
was growing up. I was you know, basically country suburbs.

(22:19):
There was no record stores, but like at a five
and ten they used to call them five and ten
set store of wool Worse, and they all had areas
where you could buy records and listen to records. And
I found a copy of Meet the Beatles there before
they were on the Sullivan Show, so I was actually

(22:41):
able to hear their music before most people did, because
I just lucked upon this record. I don't know how
to this day they had it there, but they did,
and you know of course that you know, it was thrilling.
It was like, wow, man, I want to be part
of that. Yeah, And the part of it was, you know,

(23:02):
you saw guys that were close to your age actually
playing guitar and singing. Most of the bands around town
where I grew up there were rock bands, but they
were mostly instrumental bands, surf bands, the guitars, very few
vocal stuff. But you know, the Beatles were all self contained.
And then and then find out they're writing their own songs,

(23:25):
as wow, you know, man, what is this? And they
looked like aliens, so that made their appeal stronger. But uh,
and then what's still the deal for me was the Stones.
You know, because the Beatles were too perfect, too many chords.
They sang two pretty but the Stones stones. When I

(23:46):
heard the Stones, it's more like the music I've been
listening to. I think I could whack whack out a
couple of these songs. You know.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
So okay, So how do you get the electric guitar?
You beg your appearance? How to go down?

Speaker 2 (24:01):
I bought it myself. I always worked part time jobs,
everything from being a paper boy to working in a
to be in a caddie to working in a lumberyard.
And uh, I bought a guitar at Sears roebucks. I
think it was sixty some bucks, and uh there was

(24:22):
an amplifier built in the case, and that was it.

Speaker 1 (24:27):
Okay, those were looked down upon the time, but then
it flipped and everybody was into those silver tone guitars. Yeah,
do you still have it?

Speaker 2 (24:38):
No? I wish I did, And I wish I had
a silvertone amp that I eventually bought too. But you know,
in those days, we traded traded guitars and amps like
we traded baseball cards. I wish I had my baseball
cards too. That let go. But you know, so, uh yeah,
but they're great, you know, a great sound and little

(24:58):
little things that there were four and everybody had one. Everybody,
just about everybody I knew went out and bought a guitar.
A lot of us kept it up a lot, a lot. Yeah,
I went into mom's cupboard somewhere under the bed.

Speaker 1 (25:14):
Okay, you go to Stiers, you buy the guitar. How
do you learn how to play it? Uh?

Speaker 2 (25:20):
Well, my neighbor was a little bit younger than maybe.
He had been taking guitar lesson since he was six
seven years old, so he was quite proficient when the
bells already hit. He taught me a bunch of stuff.
And my dad could play guitar, so he taught me
a bunch of stuff. And then, uh, there was a
bunch of teen nightclubs that go on a weekend. You

(25:42):
hear all. I saw obscure Pittsburgh Music, and you got
to see like Mitch Ryner and Detroit Wills and Bo
Diddley and Sam de Sham and the Pharaohs and Wilson Pickett.
You know, so all those guys, h Junior Walker and
the All Stars, and I make my way down front
and just watch what they're playing. And plus there are

(26:03):
all the local bands too. A local band, uh eventually
became a Tommy James band. It became to Shawn Delsa
from my home area.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
So when did you start forming bands? When did you
start playing outside the house.

Speaker 2 (26:20):
Uh, well, we tried right away. Uh. You know, it
probably took us a couple months to learn enough chords,
but uh, you know, as fast as I could. And
in high school, Uh, you know, I played dances. Uh.
We had I thing here in Pittsburgh called Swans's which
is a dance at a swimming pool. I played those.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
Uh wait, wait, tell me more about that. I've never
heard of that.

Speaker 2 (26:44):
Well, they have a swimming pool and in the evening
on a Friday night or or maybe a weeknight during
the well obviously in the summer, kids weren't in school
that you know that they have a band playing, uh
you know, somewhere in the refreshment area, and the kids
would swim and get out of swimming pool, dance and

(27:05):
even played a couple of bars. Back in the day
when I was growing up, down and Go Go dancers,
you know, the whole nine yards.

Speaker 1 (27:14):
Okay, you graduate from high school, then what.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
Then I went to college. It's not something I had
a burning desire to do. But I promised my father
since he had did not receive an education because he
had to drop by of school when he was twelve
years old, then went to sixth grade. But I promised
him I would go to college and went to college

(27:40):
at a okay California State College at his California, Pennsylvania,
which is a little mill town we called Harvard on
Demon and you know, it was like just you know,
I thought I was going to be going where everybody
had long hair and beatles songs, and it was it

(28:02):
was like a throwback to the fifties and it was
time work in a bad way. And so I was
not able to have a guitar in my dorm room
for a couple of years. So it was for boating,
no guitarist, no music, no fun. And after I moved
out of the dorm one summer, I went to spent

(28:25):
summer Atlantic City and bought my first telecaster to lay
away at a pawn shop and swear to myself I
was never going to quit playing. So I've been playing
NonStop since nineteen sixty eight. I'd you end up in
Atlantic City. I just went there to work for the summer.
What did you do any city racetrack? I was mostly

(28:52):
a bus boy. I didn't like being a waiter. I
preferred not to have to socialize with the with the
people who were ordering food or bartender. So I just
cleaned up and uh we found a niche at the
Atlantic City Racetrack, which served us well the following year

(29:14):
because they had the Atlantic City Polk Festival there. Pretty
much to run out of Atlantic City Racetrack because everybody
knew us, and you know, just went back to school,
formed the band and went at it. Try to try
to just playing as much as I could.

Speaker 1 (29:35):
So you're in college, is this being playing gigs?

Speaker 2 (29:40):
Yeah? I played bars. I played a lot of frat parties.
There were a lot of places to play in those days.
Live music was still a huge, huge thing. You could
play pretty much as much as you wanted to, and
h you know, the pay was you know, to hundred
bucks was like tops. If you got two hundred bucks,

(30:02):
you were really doing something if you walked out. I
was played in small bands, trios or quartets, but my
college band was a trio. So you know, if we
could make one hundred and fifty bucks, I was fifty
bucks each you live there for a couple of weeks
of fifty bucks on those days in a college town.

Speaker 1 (30:20):
Okay, if your band is a trio in nineteen sixty eight,
what are you playing? Cream songs? What are you playing?

Speaker 2 (30:26):
Yeah, well we did some originals.

Speaker 1 (30:29):
I did have.

Speaker 2 (30:30):
An audition with RCA Records.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're going to California State College.
How do you get an audition for OURCA Records.

Speaker 2 (30:41):
We had a friend who was a musician, and he
told there was a guy from Pittsburgh who worked with
RCA named Tom Causey, and he told him about us.
We're one of the few bands that were playing originals
plus the usual Beatles, Stones, Creamimi Hendricks, you know blues

(31:02):
stuff that everybody else is playing, long extended jams, you know,
really long hair, which is a bit dangerous in that area.
And anyways, we we did have an audition. I just
ran into the audition, ran in, just discovered the audition
tape for the studio. I work out all the time.

(31:23):
Uh the Tom had uh delivered to the studio having
transfer into the digital but uh, for one reason or another,
we never did. The guy showed up late. My band disappeared.
I gave him, uh the demo tape, never heard from
him again.

Speaker 1 (31:42):
Well, since you listened to the demo tape today, what'd
you think?

Speaker 2 (31:46):
You know what? I haven't been able to listen to
it yet because it was all real, the real stuff.
But uh, I gotta still track it down. I keep
bugging them for it. As I recall, it wasn't too bad.
There was a couple of good songs, but yeah, you know,
it was definitely a sixty sounded thing, a lot of
heavy guitar.

Speaker 1 (32:13):
How do you start writing songs?

Speaker 2 (32:16):
Well, I originally started writing songs probably that was it
wasn't good enough to copy. I was never never my
forte sitting down and copying somebody else's stuff. No perfect
like a lot of my friends could do. So, uh I,
plus the Beatles and the Stones and everybody else is writing.
You know, everybody's playing originals. So you know that's what

(32:39):
you inspired to do. You put you wrote originals?

Speaker 1 (32:42):
So you graduate from college? Then on.

Speaker 3 (32:46):
And then I.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
Didn't do anything spectacular for a while. I worked in
a mental institution, uh I noticed is not politically correct,
but they call it a mental institution for the mentally
retarded at that time. I was the first wave into
the mental institutions when they opened them up to public

(33:09):
schools and I had a class there. The kids rolled
in cloth diaperson when I got there, Lena on the floor.
Nobody was torely trained, nobody could eat themselves, nobody could walk.
And we sort of stayed there for a couple of
years and more young kids come in. I was very

(33:31):
young at the time, in my early twenties. We transformed
the place, changed these kids' lives, and I was young
and single. I was saving up all my money and
got a band together in Pittsburgh, was rented a house,
bought a PA and we started recording demos in my
basement and rehearsing every night with the idea that we

(33:53):
were going to make a record one day. My partner
for many years is our Deani and I started to band.
We called ourselves the brick Ally Band. At the time.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
Okay, let's go back. What was your calling that you
wanted to work with a mentally challenged as they say.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
To that, Uh, well, my calling was uh kel State.
Kel U was a teacher's college at that time, and
I was to stay in school. I had to transfer
out as liberal arts into to UH education and UH

(34:37):
why did you have to do that to stay in school? Well,
because it was the height of the Vietnam War and
they were canceling all liberal arts deferments. And I promised
my father I was going to graduate from college no
matter what. I was there for a couple of years,
doing really well, and then I UH to finish school,
I had to transfer out of what I was doing.

(34:59):
So UH me and a couple other my buddies, we
were at a loss for words. We didn't know what
we were going to do. And uh kel you was
a very tiny school at the time, and uh during
the registration drive were we found out our the pharmacy

(35:20):
had be canceled, and couldn't decide what we were going
to do with our lives, and and made the decision
on the line. The special ed was the shortest line,
so we went over there to register, just to get
it done and over with it.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
And then I grew up.

Speaker 2 (35:37):
My best friend had had two uh disabled brother and sister,
and I had an uncle who was several policies, so
I had I had a a feeling, ah that I
might be able to help some of these kids and uh,
you know, I once I went into the to the

(35:59):
Western Center, which was the institution I worked at, after
the shock of being there and seeing the conditions, I
really really loved working with those kids, so that it
was probably the best job ever had. Yeah, so how
did you end up avoiding the draft? I've finished out.

(36:21):
I ended up getting a federal scholarship to study special education,
and then my number I was one fifty. I was
gonna get drafted anyways. Then I got a federal scholarship.
My last year teaching under federal you know, everything paid

(36:45):
full both as a special ed was a new field
at that time, and they needed people to go and
work and work with these kids. And the next year,
you know, the country decided that the whole Vietnam experience
wasn't that a great idea, and the draft went down significantly.

(37:08):
So I went back into the draft pool, but my
number wasn't high enough to be drafted.

Speaker 1 (37:14):
Okay, so you have this brick Alley band. What is
the status of that band?

Speaker 2 (37:21):
Well, the status of that band was we were playing
clubs after well, we were rehearsing and writing religiously that
for about a year and we just finally decided, you know,
we better go get some gigs because otherwise we're never

(37:42):
going to get out of the basement. And we try
to learn some covers top forty stuff just to work,
because in those days Pittsburgh was pretty much the top
forty song type of club scene. You played ten o'clock,
went to ten forty, he took twenty minutes off eleven
eleven forty. There were strict rules about what you could

(38:06):
do and not do, and we were terrible, terrible Top forty.
We sucked. I mean, I couldn't stand this. We didn't
We weren't very good at it. Our hearts wasn't in it.
And we found a guy who was named Marty Pizzano
at a club on West Liberty Avenue and we uh

(38:29):
talked to him in and letting us play there, and
I guess she wasn't doing too well, so we said, hey,
you know, can we have a night and we'll just
take the door, let us do anything we want to do,
and he said yeah, And within a short time we
built up a big following there and at the same

(38:50):
time Cleveland Entertainment Steve Popovic got one of my demos and.

Speaker 1 (38:58):
A little bit slower Okay, you're a bad top forty band, right,
what is building the following.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
Uh, Well, we went in and just played whatever we
wanted to play, and we have been rehearsing for a year,
so we're a really good band and we play one
set of original material. We were determined to make a record,
so the music that we were playing in those days.

(39:27):
Eventually it became our first record, Love So Tough, on
Cleveland International. So at the same time that we were
playing I was we were making demo tapes and sending
them out and Steve Popovich.

Speaker 1 (39:38):
Before we get to pop there's a different era. Everybody
doesn't have a laptop. You go into the studio to
make these demos.

Speaker 2 (39:47):
Oh yeah, yeah, there was no home recording, you know.
And so who's paying for that? Well, I was because
I was teaching. I had any money. I would say,
my rock and roll career was financed by special ed.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
And then if you're not doing any gigs, it's hard
to keep a band together. So how'd you keep the
band together?

Speaker 2 (40:09):
Well, after the first year, we decided we were going
out and play play some gigs, and we caught on
this club called the Gazebo, and we started working almost
immediately after people. I don't know. It was just like
one of the seismic things that happens in music in
a particular down. People just got got tuned into what

(40:30):
we were doing.

Speaker 1 (40:32):
Okay, how many demos had you sent out before Steve reacted?
Only two? You remember what happened with those two?

Speaker 2 (40:43):
Uh? Well, the second one we got a record doing.
The first one wasn't very good. I got a couple
of rejection records. And Steve, you're familiar with Steve Pofferman.

Speaker 1 (40:55):
I knew Steve well.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
Steve was originally from western Pennsylvania. And uh, you know
Popovich a Serbian name. I had Papovich relatives. You know,
there was just a connection to what we were doing
and and and you know his his personal life, and uh,
I guess you heard something that he related to and

(41:21):
he invited us. We were playing at this point, after
a year in my basement, we were out playing pretty
pretty regularly. We're starting to become more and more popular
around town. We had found this after the gazebo. He
sold the gazebo, Marty was sold the gazebo. We found
a herm turf in the College section of Pittsburgh. Oakland

(41:44):
called the Decade, and we were immediate success at the
Decade and we played. We had a Thursday night residency
for a long time and a lot of a lot
of weeks we played Thursday and Saturday. So Uh. At
the same time, we were making demo tapes. And one
of the tapes, UH, Steve put out say Goodbye to

(42:05):
Hollywood in full page Addam Billboard Magazine, Ronnie Spector Billy
Joel song produced by Steve van Zant, recorded by the
street band Cleveland Popovich. It just seemed like a you know,
uh a place I should send the song stick and UH,

(42:29):
so I headed out the door one one Friday, I
believe we had a out of town gig. And I
got a phone call and Steve and he liked the
demo tape.

Speaker 1 (42:41):
I sent him.

Speaker 2 (42:42):
Advised us up to Cleveland on the following Sunday. He
said he's having a little get together, a little uh picnic.
So we make our way up to Cleveland, me and
a couple of guys in the band, and UH find
our way to Steve's house and Water's house outday out
the suburbs. Uh Cleveland. Knock on the door, door opens

(43:05):
and there's Ronnie Spector in a fluorescent purple bikini almost
fell over right right there on the spot, and it's
very friendly invites us in. Uh ron back, she said,
go on back, Steve will be here pretty soon and
then we're gonna have a little picnic. So go around back.

(43:26):
And a little while later, a big tour bus pulls
up and I jumped Steve Popovich, Marty Mooney, uh By,
Jukes Side, Johnny and the Juice Southside went there. But
the Jukes were there and bos skags. We had the
number one country song in the country at the time,
the Silk Degrees number one record. So in the middle

(43:48):
of this party, we're sitting there, you know, being total
totally uncomfortable because you know, we're such outsiders and we're
all with all these heavy hitters, and uh Steve throws
on demo tape and you know, of course we're cringing,
and Boss Guys walks over and says he really liked

(44:09):
it and shakes my hand and said, you know, yeah,
hook up with Steve. He's still do good bye you.
So yeah, a little while later, we had a private
meeting with Steve, and you know, I always say to
people that he sent us back to Pittsburgh with a
pocket full of hope. He decided he was going to
finance our demo sessions and we went back to a

(44:33):
couple more demo sessions, signed us to Cleveland Entertainment, Cleveland
National Management, and a production company, and then eventually signed
signed the band. UH placed the band on mc A.

Speaker 1 (44:50):
Okay, so now it's time to make a record, right
so you know.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
We play Thursday night. Well, Steve and Marty Mooney were
the de facto producers of the first record, and there
was a club in Cleveland, the Agora Club, very popular club,
and above the club they had a recording studio called Agency.
So a lot of knights would play Thursday night, get

(45:16):
up Friday, drive to Cleveland, record Friday, sometimes take Friday
night off, sometimes drive back and play Friday night. But
we recorded basically our stage show at the Agency without
you know, no more than one day at a time.
We never did two days in a row. We never

(45:38):
stayed overnight. We drove up, played come back. A couple
of weeks later we would go record a couple more songs,
and Steve Popovich placed us on MCA Records, and right
when the record was getting ready, to come out. They
decided to remix it and do some over So I

(46:01):
went to New Jersey, to the House of Music in
New Jersey and did some overdubs and some lead guitar,
and then eventually the record came out in May of
seventy nine, and it was very, very critically acclaimed. People

(46:23):
loved it. And by that time I decided I was,
you know, I was going to through my hat and
a ring and go full time musicians. So, you know,
just felt like I was never going to get that chance,
probably never going to get that chance again. So I
took it and went played.

Speaker 1 (46:40):
Okay, a couple of questions, So you stop working in
special education? Right? How did the name of the band change? Oh?

Speaker 2 (46:49):
Well, Uh, brick Ellie was a name of an infamous
red light district here in a section of Pittsburgh called
McKey Sport. And uh he Steve hated the name, and
my mother hated the name too, by the way, but

(47:11):
that's a whole different story. But uh, he hated the name,
and uh he want us to change it. Uh, So
we came up with Houserockers, and uh, not too long ago,
I discovered that Steve Poffovich with Steve van Zandt decided
to christen us ourn City House Rockers because they were

(47:35):
really into the regional thing at the time and wanted
us to be a regional band be accepted in our
own part of the world. So he dubbed us the
Honest City Houserockers.

Speaker 1 (47:48):
And you know, we.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
Probably whined and cried about a little bit, but not
too much because we were just happy to have a
record coming out.

Speaker 1 (48:06):
So the record comes out, gets positive reviews, but it
doesn't sell.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
It didn't sell too much.

Speaker 1 (48:14):
Now I did that.

Speaker 2 (48:15):
They made the sixty seventy thousand copies at the time,
which are still pretty good. We got read up and
Rolling Stone. I think it's surprised a hell lot everybody
how well it did. Actually, And in those days, you know,
you had to come up with a follow up really quickly.
So we were back in this We put that out

(48:37):
in seventy nine. We were back in the studio in
February of nineteen eighty to record the follow up come.

Speaker 1 (48:44):
Out in May. Did you have all of those songs ready?

Speaker 2 (48:49):
Yeah, well we had a lot of them ready. You know,
that's all I was doing, right, So I was playing
they're not playing We had the misfortune of trying to
monitor tour during the first real gas shortage. When you
get gased, like if you had an odd number, even number,

(49:13):
determined whether you had enough gas to go anywhere. So
it's very, very difficult to tour. And I had it
turned out to be a cancer scare. They found a
tumor in my throat and I had at an emergency
operation which turned out to be benign, thank god, so
that not be off for a while. So our first

(49:35):
record we did not tour much. We played probably from
May to October a lot, and then then I had
to take a couple of months off and used it
to write a lot and then we're back in the
studio in February.

Speaker 1 (49:56):
Okay, Now, when you're back in the studio, is it
still one day on the weekends or is it more
conventional where you're there for a few weeks.

Speaker 2 (50:06):
Now, we were, we were living the high life. Then
it was New York City s I R Studios actually
rehearsing and uh Steve and his partner Marty Moody. Steve
Poppas and Marty Mudy were really loved music, really really

(50:27):
good music guys, but they could not put their ideas
across they weren't musically adept enough to describe what they
wanted us to do. That I guess it made any sense.
So one day, the first day in the studio, Steve

(50:47):
Puppovitch shows up with Nick Ronson. Uh, it's because he
had signed Ian Hunter and Hunter Ronson band at the
moment that uh the record that Ian did Cleveland Rocks
along with a schizophrenic And so mc ronson came in

(51:08):
and start working with us, and then one day we
had about a week or ten days of rehearse person
at si R eight ten hours a day. Would usually
rehearse in the morning by ourselves, then McK ronson would
come in and work with us in the afternoon, and

(51:28):
one morning Steve Papa shows up with Steve van ZANDT.
So Steve van Zant would start working with us in
the morning, and then mc ronson would come in in
the afternoon. And then we went in the studio and
sometimes Steve was there, sometimes Mick was there. Sometimes we're
both there. And then Steve left to work on the River.

(51:51):
I told he was working with the River was with
Bruce and Ian Hunter started showing up. Mick Ronson, so
There was a whole cast of characters contributing to that
record have a Good Time to Get Out of Lives
And Mick Ronson was responsible for so many arrangements. Steve

(52:15):
an Zant was responsible for some of the arrangements, Ian
Hunter was responsible for some of them, and and some
of them were the band We were just transferred from
what we were doing at home.

Speaker 1 (52:28):
Okay, So what was the special sauce of each of
these individuals?

Speaker 2 (52:33):
Well, uh, first of all, uh, you know, they were
the first rock stars we ever met. Uh, you know,
we knew nothing about the music business. Uh and we
we didn't even know anybody who worked in a record store.
So they were pretty phenomenal. I mean we were raw
as raw could be, and each of them had you know,

(52:59):
they were all really good musicians obviously, and you know
they were able to take a song and like rock
Ola that closed the record. We went intoto that session
with it being the fastest song on our in our

(53:21):
repertoire that we were presenting everybody and just couldn't make
it work. And Mick Ronson, who was a very good pianist,
whatever and start playing the song as a ballad and
completely transformed the song, and oh man, you know, how
do they do that? You know, it just gave us
a whole different perspective of how songs were written. And

(53:43):
Steve van Zander did the same thing with the song
that Ronson worked on. It was very slow called old
Man's Bar and van Zane heard it and he changed
it into Junior's Bar, which was one of our more
popular songs to get played on the underground. And just
watching this guy's work and how they arranged the the

(54:06):
instruments and uh, you know, what not to play just
as important as what to play. Give us some spaces
and stuff, so you know. And then Ian come in
and you know, he did the same thing. He just
he took took one song and had nothing to do
with the way he eventually, uh guided us through a

(54:30):
song called Hypnotized, and it was just a germ of
an idea and watch these guys just create something on
the spot like that was. It was very very inspirational
and educational.

Speaker 1 (54:42):
So tell me about the title track, have a good
Time to get out a Lot.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
Yeah, well that's one we pretty much uh brought in
from Pittsburgh. Well we're playing the bars in Pittsburgh in
those days, it was a pretty rough time. You know,
it's still it was still a lot of still workers,
really tough. You know, the steelers were tough, the bars

(55:07):
were tough, and some of the guys, Uh, we were
drawing these really big crowds, and night after night it
would break out in fights. And uh, during one of
the uh riots when we were playing, you know, I
stopped singing and trying to calm everybody down, and just

(55:27):
a phrase just come out of my mouth. Hey guys,
you know, I have a good time to get out
of here alive, you know. And for some reason I
got home that night and uh, I saw I'm basically
just reade itself. Yeah, just one of those gifts that
come to you occasionally.

Speaker 1 (55:42):
And what about Pumping Iron?

Speaker 2 (55:44):
Pumping Iron was the same thing. It was just about
the local guys that we were hanging out with. And uh,
you know, those those were two that pretty much stayed
the same from the demo sessions. Uh. We did a
two CD release of that on Cleveland not too long ago,

(56:06):
and we put all the demos of those songs on it.
So I don't know if we put the demo Pump Now,
but Pump Now didn't change much there's pretty much what
we were doing.

Speaker 1 (56:17):
Okay, you talk about the demos. A lot of people
can't find the tracks from hit records. Are you a
pack rat and you kept all this stuff or you
have to look for it? I kept.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
I kept everything that I could get my hands on
it through the years. You know, when we were doing
Have a Good Time to Get Out Alive. It was
forty years, and we transferred a lot of stuff from
cassettes because that was like the main thing I would
come home from the studio with. I had a good

(56:50):
cassette player, and I didn't want to reel the real
I didn't have one, so I'd come home with cassettes.
But I did keep old, real copies of most everything
I did so so I was able to be forcing
enough to keep keep keep just about everything I've ever recorded.

Speaker 1 (57:12):
Okay, the album comes out gets a lot of ink,
a lot of positive reviews. What was it like from
your side of the.

Speaker 2 (57:18):
Fence, Well, it was one of those things were all
of a sudden we were legit. You know, we were
being talked about in the same breath as the Clash
and Leonard Skinner and Bruce and Jay Giles and you know,
all the guys that you know, we were big fans of,

(57:38):
so it was it was a bit transformational and uh
to realize that, you know, we're connecting in that fashion
with a lot of people is very gratifying.

Speaker 1 (57:54):
Okay, so what's the process of that album coming out,
going on the road, and then going back in the studio.

Speaker 2 (58:02):
Well, we played for as long as we could, and again,
you know, we're doing an album a year. So it
came around to the spring and Steve Popovich was very,
very instrumental in our career and uh, you know, I

(58:24):
don't want to second guests or think what those guys
were doing, but they became, to my knowledge, they became
embroiled trying to do a follow up about a bad
out of Hell. It was a very very painful process
for him. There was a lot of infighting and we
were sort of left by the wayside, and we decided

(58:47):
to go on our own and and just record the
record because nobody was responding to us. So Denny rosen
Krantz was our connection in Los Angeles, and he flew
me out to l A and uh, he suggested we
use Steve Cropper, and uh, you know, I took him

(59:10):
up on it immediately because you know, a chance to
work with all time greats, how could you pass that up?
So we went back to Pittsburgh, wrote some songs Steve.
Steve came in and sat with us for a week,
ten days rehearsed, and every day went a couple of gigs. Uh,

(59:30):
you know, just a real Trooper, and went out to
Los Angeles and recorded Blood on the Bricks, our follow
up at Cherokee Studios. By the way, on nov Our
Records just did a two CD release re release of

(59:51):
Blood on the Bricks, completely remastered in a CD of
demos and live songs included in it, which really really
great sounding compilation. And you know that really put a
new shine on some of the songs.

Speaker 1 (01:00:13):
So what did Cropper bring to the studio?

Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
Well, Cropper. You know, when Steve my first thought that
I was playing with Steve Cropper, of course I was
thrilled beyond belief. But when he actually showed up the rehearsals,
I sat down room. I was so nervous, my hands
were shaken. I barely play guitar. But Steve just you know,
he had a sense of rhythm and timing that was
just impeccable and uh uh arrange arranging, you know, he

(01:00:45):
he he he. He deferred to us if I was
really adamant about doing something a particular song went to
keep in. But you know, I just think, you know, uh,
he brought out the best in the band because we
were all so in all of them that we picked

(01:01:06):
up everybody picked up their game as far as musically,
just trying to show Steve we were worthy of playing
with them.

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):
Okay, what was the consequence of that album coming.

Speaker 2 (01:01:20):
Out, Well, we had a remember Solid Gold. We were
pick hitter a week on Solid Gold with Marilyn McCoo
and Andy Gibb were the the co host. We recorded
the Solid Gold the night the Dodgers won the World

(01:01:41):
Series I think in nineteen eighty It was nineteen eighty
one in La We were there that night and we
were afraid that we weren't going to be able to
get to the airport because the whole city would be
going crazy. I Meanwhile, it barely made a blip on
the map because when the Parts won the World Series
in seventy nine just destroyed the city. The fans.

Speaker 1 (01:02:05):
Okay, the album comes out, it doesn't quite make the
mark of the previous record.

Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
No, well again, Steve, Steve Puffett, we had no management,
were rutterless, and it was very disheartening. And you know,
in retrospect, you know, maybe we shouldn't have made that record,
Maybe should have waited till we had our our act
a little bit together, more together. But you know, we

(01:02:34):
were young, and you know, we wanted to go. We
want to keep going. We didn't want to just sit
around and do nothing.

Speaker 1 (01:02:43):
And then you make one more record for MCA.

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
Right cracking under pressure. I think they dropped us like
three days after the record come on, and it wasn't
a record we wanted to make anyway. So it's one
of those things less said about it the better.

Speaker 1 (01:03:00):
What do you mean you didn't want to make it?

Speaker 2 (01:03:02):
Well, it's you know, we were using it was very
eighty sounding. In retrospect, we should you know, we should have,
and we were getting pressure from the record company to
sound a certain way and you know, try to come
up with a hit song and et cetera, et cetera,

(01:03:22):
and you know we should have probably just again not
it recorded that particular record, but we were impatient.

Speaker 1 (01:03:32):
Okay, but you know, the big gets dropped and then
the band breaks up.

Speaker 2 (01:03:36):
Right, the band breaks up then, So what was that
like for you? Well, everybody, it was very, very frustrating.

Speaker 3 (01:03:44):
And then.

Speaker 2 (01:03:47):
Art and I, you know, and jeff O Simmons is
still playing with me. We put a band together and
decided I wasn't going to go by Krisheky because I
was tired of people butchering. I went by my childhood
nicknamed Joey G. So we went back to Joey G
in a Brooke Alley band. We had a local hit

(01:04:08):
here in Pittsburgh, the very eighties sounded thing again, and
and then that sort of ran its course and I
was able to get back to the basics and got
a record do with Brounder, and I decided from now

(01:04:30):
on I was going to be uh put my name
out front, uh just in case, you know, started losing
band members again, because when I went from Iron City
House Rockers to joe Brishecky, a lot of people did
not recognize my name. I mean a lot of people
knew who the Iron City House Rockers were, but people,

(01:04:51):
unless they were fans in the band, didn't realize, you know,
it was me.

Speaker 1 (01:05:04):
Okay, but you've been to the mountaintop and now you're
back in the Valley.

Speaker 2 (01:05:09):
I've been to the mountaintop, oh Man, Big Valley, Big Valley.
But you know, we were played locally. Yeah, we're from Boston,
d C. New York City at Cleveland, so we had
a you know, four or five state area that we
played in pretty regularly.

Speaker 1 (01:05:30):
But it's not like today today. You know, it's hard
to have a hit that everybody knows. Everybody's regional. Back then,
it was about being on MTV, being on the radio,
and if you didn't have a major label, that couldn't
even happen relevant what you recorded.

Speaker 2 (01:05:43):
Yeah, you're you know, we were playing because we love
to play basically.

Speaker 1 (01:05:50):
Well, how disillusioning was it that you came so close
but it didn't happen for you.

Speaker 2 (01:05:59):
I was bitter for a while, for a long time,
maybe a good five six seven years, especially because during
the Blood of brick Are we had a uh, we
were having conversations with Freddie demand. You know, Freddie is
sure with ultimately work with Madonna. Yeah, yeah, he wanted

(01:06:21):
to sign us he could, and we had a hard
time getting free of our old contracts, and you know,
he went on signed Madonna and we got one way
ticket to the Lucaville.

Speaker 1 (01:06:35):
So well, how did you ultimately make peace that it
wasn't gonna happen for you?

Speaker 2 (01:06:40):
Well, you know, I got married, remarried, start having children
and realized that, you know, music is just part of
my life. It wasn't my whole life. And uh, you know,
realize if you have kids, you got to take care
of him. They were more important than having a hit record.

Speaker 1 (01:06:59):
So when did you start working a day job? Again? Uh?

Speaker 2 (01:07:03):
Did rod eighty eight?

Speaker 1 (01:07:09):
And how did that come together?

Speaker 2 (01:07:12):
Well? I had a teaching degree, so I went down
in communities uh uh community uh center in McKees Rocks,
Pennsylvania and started teaching uh people to get their g
e eds General Equivalency diploma.

Speaker 3 (01:07:30):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:07:30):
And it was very successful at it got hundreds of
people their their high school diplomas and also did a
little bit English as the second language. And but yeah,
and then uh, you know, Johnny came along, and then I,

(01:07:51):
you know, I was having the kids were having some
health problems. I had no health insurance, so I had
to get a job of some health chores. So I
went into uh the special ed thing again.

Speaker 1 (01:08:06):
Okay, I mean is it tough emotionally or because you
have a family. You say this is superior or do
you feel like, as you say, bitter, how do you know,
as I say, it's got to be really tough. You
know a lot of people are musicians. You had a
number of major label loubums. We're hanging with rock stars.

(01:08:27):
Now you're back in Pittsburgh, right, Well, I just live
with it. You know where it went.

Speaker 2 (01:08:35):
You know, we had our shot, we didn't quite make it,
and you know I wanted to keep playing music. I
just found a way to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:08:43):
I mean.

Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
When I uh, you know, we did a couple of records,
and we were going nowhere fast, and I was start
teaching special at again, and I was working with again.
This is a misnomber of kids who were called socially
and emotionally mal adjusted, were violent, A lot of violent kids.

(01:09:07):
License to restrain. We're working there and still teaching ged
at night. So I taught. I worked all day, taught
G G D night, had a steady Wednesday night gig,
and then we tried to playing most Fridays and Saturdays
and some I still did a record called end of

(01:09:28):
the Century of course man slightly out of time or
end of the century. It was nineteen ninety two, and anyway,
it was about it. I was about the end of
my rope. And that's when my wife suggested that I
give Bruce a call and turned into American Babylon Project,

(01:09:50):
which gave me a new lease in life.

Speaker 1 (01:09:53):
Do you ever make any money as a house rocker?

Speaker 2 (01:09:57):
Uh? No, occasionally occasionally nice payday here and there, But yeah,
I worked at Bay Gig til I was seventy five
years old.

Speaker 1 (01:10:06):
So much kind So at this point any royalties, Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:10:15):
I don't know. Wait waiting for that big boat to arrive.

Speaker 1 (01:10:18):
You know, so obviously the kids are out of the house.
What kept you working until seventy five?

Speaker 2 (01:10:27):
I like put food on the table. I got to
the point where I had a serious back injury. It
made it tough to to travel, and you know, just
get used to a certain level of income. And you know,
in a way it was very free because for some reason,

(01:10:50):
you know, all these years of teaching, I was still
able to write all these records. And my first year
I had off as a retiree, I didn't write a
song the whole year. You know, I just found a
way to do it, maybe because I don't want to

(01:11:10):
give up and you know, I always love playing music,
and even in uh the worst of times, you know,
it was it was something I always wanted to do.
And my son started playing with me, and uh, I
can remember one gig and I'm thinking, what am I?

(01:11:31):
You know, I'm getting old. I'm up there killing myself
as people even care what I'm doing. And I look
over and he's to my right and he's just bashing
away on a guitar and he's having the time of
his life. And I think, yeah, you know, that's why
I started doing this. So I always try to keep
that in mind.

Speaker 1 (01:11:51):
So how do you finally decide to stop teaching?

Speaker 2 (01:11:54):
Well, I got offer for a buyot for health insurance, uh,
you know, and I was getting up there in age
so and I never had easy jobs. I had always
worked in rough neighborhoods with really tough kids, so it
was the easiest thing in the world to do.

Speaker 1 (01:12:12):
So if these kids are prone to being violent, how
do you manage them? What do you how do you
teach them? What's the key?

Speaker 2 (01:12:20):
Well, you have to be consistent, uh, you know, you
have to set expectations and try to get them to
live up to it. And you've got to show you
care about them, and and uh, the ones that buy
into that you have some results. And some of the
kids are so damaged by the time you get them.

(01:12:41):
You know that you just hope that they have some
kind of decent life ahead of them. But yeah, you know,
I run into kids all the time, now, you know
that I tip back in the day, I just got
an email from from somebody on LinkedIn, so vice president
of the company, and he said, you know, thank you,

(01:13:03):
mister chief for helping me out. You know, I had
a bunch of kids that I was really really close to,
and you know, I'm still contact with them. They still hey,
mister G. You know, we love you, mister G. And
one guy said I was the father he never had.
So yeah, so I mean it's worth it, you know,

(01:13:25):
less time in purgatory for me in some work, guys.

Speaker 1 (01:13:29):
You know, Okay, So how rewarding is that work compared
to being on stage and having an audience response.

Speaker 2 (01:13:41):
Well, they're both rewarding in different ways. Having the audience
response immediate, it's right there, boom boom boom. You know,
some of these kids, you work with them for years
before you see any kind of progress, and you know,
it's it's it's it's really you can't compare you of them.
They're they're too far apart. There's too they're so completely opposite.

(01:14:04):
I mean, you know, as an artist and a musician, uh,
you know, it's sort of like a you know, I
don't give a ship, you know, when when you're gonna play,
when I get there, when I feel like it, you know,
what are you gonna do? I don't know. Let's make
it up as we go along. But as a special
ed teacher, with the kind of kids I worked with,

(01:14:24):
you had to be very structured. You know, you had
to be on the ball.

Speaker 1 (01:14:29):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (01:14:31):
You know, I used music a lot. I did a
lot of a lot of music with some of the kids.
You know, we did some great, great shows when I
started working at a high school with some of the
kids that I worked with, we did a motown review
one time. It's terrific, and uh, you know, it's just

(01:14:52):
two completely different parts of the brain at work. And
I'm really right side. And for me to be organized
and a teacher requires way way more effort than we
get out and playing guitar.

Speaker 1 (01:15:12):
Okay, you've done a certain amount of charity work. Parkinson's
tree of life. What's the motivation and how much of that.

Speaker 2 (01:15:19):
Do you do? Well? We've literally done hundreds of charity
gigs over the years, and my parents always, you know,
taught me to give to others less fortunate than yourself.
And you know, the House Rockers, we always felt we're

(01:15:42):
part of the community here in Pittsburgh. Whether everybody thinks
that or not, we do. And as part of being
good citizens, to give back to the community and personally,
you know, to help others less fortunate than yourself, I
think is something everybody should do. I mean, that's sort
of a no brainer, right, everybody should do that. Why

(01:16:03):
wouldn't you if you could, why wouldn't you help you
fellow man?

Speaker 1 (01:16:08):
So if you leave the house and you go around,
to what degree are you recognize in the Pittsburgh area, Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:16:17):
Various degrees. All depends the age group. Not so much
with the youngsters, you know, probably under forties, under thirties.
But you know, I mean everybody. You know, I go
to the grocery store, people knows me. I go to
the post office, you know, gas station, the mechanics pretty

(01:16:37):
much buddies with with all of them. You know, Pittsburgh
is a small city, but a big town. And uh,
you know, there's always a small degree of separation. You
know if you go to another town. You know, my
son is over in Rome, and you know he runs
into a musicians parents Rome. Hey, I shouldad doing, you know.

(01:17:03):
And so you know it's Pittsburgh. Everybody is connected pretty closely,
especially the musical community.

Speaker 1 (01:17:14):
So what is it about Pittsburgh. Certainly in the sixties,
you know, you had the Pirates, you had Bill Masarowski.
Then at the end of the decade the seventies, the
steel mills closed. Now Pittsburgh is very hip again. I
mean it used to be that Pittsburgh might as well
have been Iowa City.

Speaker 2 (01:17:35):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:17:35):
What is Pittsburgh like and how has it changed over
your lifetime? Uh?

Speaker 2 (01:17:40):
Well, it used to be a lot tougher.

Speaker 1 (01:17:42):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:17:43):
It was you know, a shot and a beer steel mill.
You know, still those twenty four hours a day, terribly
smelling dirty, and it has progressed into it and then it,
you know, the hard time set and it had lost
the world a lot of people. You know, we during
the Iron City Houserocker era, we lost a third of

(01:18:05):
our population here in Pittsburgh and a lot of our
fans had to move out to uh find employment elsewhere.
I don't know what it is about Pittsburgh. It's it's uh,
it's it's community, neighborhood, family oriented people here, you know,

(01:18:29):
pretty always sort of friendly once you get to know everybody.
Everybody's kind of friendly and very few errors about. You know,
nobody has a feeling of superorit superior superiority, being from
uh you know, Lawrenceville Homestead, and.

Speaker 1 (01:18:52):
You know it was a lot of.

Speaker 2 (01:18:55):
Immigrant roots and people bomb together. Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:19:00):
You know, the town I grew up in.

Speaker 2 (01:19:02):
Was a small still uh, the coal mining town, and uh,
there was nobody there but Serbians and Italians and the
mixed marriage was a servant Italian and you know my
grandmother could a Serbian man, could she cook good Italian food?
Just because she was friends with everybody, and uh, you know,

(01:19:23):
it was a rough time, but everybody sort of had
your back. And uh, I think the Steelers when Pittsburgh
was coming out at the uh the steelmalls collapsed and
the Steelers and the Pirates sort of epitomized that. That's
why the town became sports crazy, because it gave the

(01:19:46):
town and identity. Hey, you know, we're tough, we're gonna
we're gonna persevere, and we're gonna come out on top.
That was always sort of the you know, people were
not afraid of hard work here.

Speaker 1 (01:20:01):
So what's the status of your music career today and
what were you playing writing?

Speaker 2 (01:20:05):
Well, my status is we signed to Omnivore Records. Last
year we put out house rocker at Joe Grasheki Anthology,
which was thirty six remastered tracks with a booklet and
all the recording information. Extremely proud of that particular project.

(01:20:26):
If I was going to say, hey, what were you
doing for the last forty years, well here, yeah, listen
to this. I'll tell you very very pleased with the
results and sounds terrific. The music sounds, for the most part,
sounds very current, like it could have been recorded and
played that day or even written today. Then we put

(01:20:49):
out a record called Cannot Run a Memory, which I
think is one of my finest records we've ever done
with a new band that we have Arnie Grosheky on
guitar and helped produce it, Danny Gackner on guitar, Jeff

(01:21:10):
Garrison on bass, and Jeff Jeffrey Jeffers Simon is on drums.
He's been with me since nineteen eighty four. And Rick
Wakowski is our producer all around jack altrades everything from
vocals to keyboards and guitarist percussion. I still have the

(01:21:31):
same road crew I've had for thirty years or more,
Bryan Coleman, Rick U Black or a couple of new
guys Mikey O'Toole and mikey Rita. Very fortunate have very
loyal carrying band members. Blooding the Bricks came out, the

(01:21:54):
Steve Cropper double CD we just put out, and a
couple weeks we're going to release a new single called
Living in a Blues Song, which is a statement on
gun violence. Ah, we're getting ready to drop that, hopefully
beyond two or three weeks. And we're working on a

(01:22:15):
new record. So we're still going full speed ahead.

Speaker 1 (01:22:19):
And to what degree do you still have the dream
or hopes? Are you're just saying this is what I do?

Speaker 2 (01:22:26):
Well, you know, this is it is what I do?
You know? And like you say, people ask when I
am not I can say well, I'm a musician before
I say well, I'm a musician and a school teacher.
Now I'm back to being a musician. And you know,
I'm always thinking the next one I write is going
to be the one that's gonna you know, put me
on Easy Street, We'll buy the new Lexus. So you know,

(01:22:49):
there's always that hope that so I'm always shooting for it.
You know, I want that one big song, Bob.

Speaker 1 (01:22:55):
You know, well I hope you get it. Joe. I
want to thank you so much for we're telling your
story to my audience.

Speaker 2 (01:23:03):
Well, thank you for having me. It was great fun.

Speaker 1 (01:23:06):
Until next time. This is Bob left Sid