When Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band rolled through Pittsburgh last August, the night wouldn’t have been complete if he didn’t invite out the city’s own favorite son to join him and the band. Video of the moment shows the hometown crowd going wild as Joe Grushecky walked up with the band and they moved through a raucous and entertaining cover of “Twist & Shout.” Joe has been an Iron City rock staple since the 1970s, delivering a brand of rock that reflects the grit and ability to grind out wins that this town has become long known for.
While he is often compared to Springsteen, and the two have collaborated on a number of Joe’s studio outings, there’s an energy and vibe to his sound that is far more akin to The J. Geils Band. Like them, his Iron City Houserockers (later just the Houserockers) have always made their live shows a high-octane, energized affair, with a juke joint pulse that has long been their calling card.
In 1981 they released the third record, Blood on the Bricks. It followed their highly-acclaimed sophomore effort, Have a Good Time But Get Out Alive!, which found them getting national media attention and praise for their authenticity. (Copper covered the reissue of Grushecky’s 1995 debut, American Babylon, in Issue 147.) For this record, they were paired with famed guitarist/songwriter/record producer Steve Cropper, who had just completed work on records from Rod Stewart and John Mellencamp (the “Cougar”). After spending just over a week with the band in their hometown, they all made their way to Los Angeles and spent the summer at Cherokee Studios making an album that is defined by great songwriting, exceptional musicianship, and a cleaner approach to production.
Now, Omnivore Recordings is reissuing the record, remastered with previously unreleased demos and tracks from a 1981 live show later that year in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Like the Houserocker: A Joe Grushecky Anthology box set of Joe’s music that Omnivore released last year, this is a beautifully-packaged collection and sonically, it’s never sounded better.
Copper caught up with Joe to talk about the making of the record, and what the impact of working with a talent like Steve Cropper did to help he and the band rise to the occasion and become a best version of their already pretty perfect selves.
Joe Grushecky and the Iron City Houserockers. Courtesy of Barbara Freeman.
Ray Chelstowski: What was it like working with Steve Cropper?
Joe Grushecky: He’s a pretty laid back Southern gentleman and did everything with a sense of humor. If he thought anything might become “dicey” for me to present to the band, he would always sit with me before any decisions were made as to who was going to play on what. He wasn’t a taskmaster but when you worked with him you quickly learned how good he really was. He didn’t need to broadcast it.
RC: Whose decision was it to record at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles?
JG: Steve and Bruce Robb (Cherokee Studios founder) had just done John Cougar’s record Nothin’ Matters And What If It Did together. Once we agreed to work with Steve we pretty much let him decide where we would work, and being a bunch of guys from Pittsburgh, Los Angeles was like the Promised Land, so we jumped at the chance to spend the summer there recording.
The other great thing about Steve is that he came and spent about 10 days here in Pittsburgh [with us], so heading to LA, were pretty confident about everything.
RC: I can sense a specific kind of confidence in the recording. It’s got more polish than the previous two records but loses none of the edge your music is known for.
JG: Well, we wanted to come up to Steve’s standards. When he first came to Pittsburgh we put him up in this hotel in the Oakland section of town which was where the nightlife was at the time. We took him to the studio, which was about a 20 minute drive away and in an area that has seen better days. The studio was called Asterisk and was on the third floor of an old bank building. It had a freight elevator and there were no windows in the entire place. It was toward the end of spring and it was very hot, and he was just a trooper.
RC: It had to be a bit intimidating performing in front of someone with such a rich musical history.
JG: There are some pictures from the sessions where I don’t even have a guitar in my hands, which is very unusual for me. I never just considered myself a singer. So early on I was a bit nervous about playing in front of him. But he was such a pro that after a couple of days we felt very much at home with him. I just wanted to rise to the occasion and be regarded by him in the same way as Sam and Dave and Otis Redding were. As soon as everyone realized we were recording with Steve Cropper, they all kind of raised their game.
RC: How were you able to get [saxophonist] Jim Horn to play on the record?
It was all through Steve. He was an ace session player at the time. He had recently done some Rod Stewart records and was in real demand as a studio musician and producer, and as a result he knew all of the guys out there and who to call for what.
RC: Most people wouldn’t know it now, but being on the television show Solid Gold was a big deal at the time.
JG: We had the “Pick Hit Of The Week” actually. It aired early on Saturday nights, and in those days you didn’t start playing [gigs] until 10 o’clock. So we tried to watch it before we headed out to play. Soul Train was on earlier in the afternoon and those were only two music shows on TV at the time.
RC: Eddie Britt really delivered some tasty lead guitar parts on this record.
JG: He was an amazing guitar player. Once he got a part down he might do a slight variation here or here, but he wasn’t a doodle guy, which we loved, because as a band we play parts. Our songs were constructed. They weren’t meant for noodling. So many lead guitarists we’d audition would just come in and mess around. That’s not what we wanted. We wanted someone to play what was on the record.
RC: The bonus CD includes tracks from a live show in 1981. What set this performance apart?
JG: Well, for starters it was in the middle of a raging blizzard. It was in Cambridge which is a college town, and the people that were there weren’t leaving. It wasn’t a big crowd because of the storm but it was well-recorded and it was just one of those nights where we were just firing on all cylinders. It’s also probably the best live recoding I have of The Houserockers. I’ve been sitting on it for years. We never released it and I thought it would be a very cool thing to add to the reissue.
RC: Can you share the story about how you came up with the album title?
JG: “Jukebox Nights” is a song which I had at one point thought could become the name of the record. But it just didn’t sound right, and Steve wasn’t into it. When I got home I took out my guitar and with that line in my mind turned the song into “Blood on the Bricks.” The next day was the last day before Steve went back to Los Angeles and we rehearsed the song for almost the whole session.
We hadn’t played the song in years and the other night we did it and with this [current band] lineup it just smoked! It was just down and dirty rock and roll!
