JJ Grey & Mofro bring rockin’ swamp blues show to Rialto
From the days of playing greasy local juke joints to headlining major festivals, Florida-based JJ Grey remains an unfettered, blissful performer, singing with a blue-collared spirit over the bone-deep grooves of his compositions. His presence before an audience is something startling and immediate, at times a funk rave-up, other times a sort of mass-absolution for the mortal weaknesses that make him and his audience human. When you see JJ Grey and his band Mofro live – and you truly, absolutely must – the man is fearless.
Onstage, Grey delivers his songs with compassion and a relentless honesty, but perhaps not until Ol’ Glory has a studio record captured the fierceness and intimacy that defines a Grey live performance. “I wanted that crucial lived-in feel,” Grey says of Ol’ Glory, and here he hits his mark. On his latest album, Grey and his current Mofro lineup offer grace and groove in equal measure, with an easygoing quality to the production that makes those beautiful muscular drum-breaks sound as though the band has set up in your living room.
When he isn’t touring, Grey exerts his prodigious energies on the family land, a former chicken-farm that was run by his maternal grandmother and grandfather. The farm boasts a recording studio, a warehouse that doubles as Grey’s gym, an open-air barn, and 50-odd pecan trees that occasionally require Grey to go airborne with his sprayer.
For devoted listeners, there is something fitting, even affirmative in Grey’s commitment to the land of his north Florida home. The farms and eddying swamps of his youth are as much a part of Grey’s music as the Louisiana swamp-blues tradition, or the singer’s collection of old Stax records.
In anticipation of the upcoming Bozeman performance, The Rolling Zone dialed up Grey to talk southeastern inspirations and his brand of Everyman storytelling.
RZ: Hey JJ. You’re on the road this summer with Mofro, bringing a show to Bozeman’s Rialto Theater in mid-July. Can we hope for the soul-heavy rock show fans have come to expect?
JJG: Yes – [laughs] – yes. We broke in a couple new guys on the crew [and] had a bass kinda set we had to get down. Now we started floatin’ with different tunes in and out again, just enjoying it and looking forward to [the show], too.
RZ: We’re catching you amid an East Coast stretch, but you’ve performed extensively around the country and overseas. Have you noticed whether region plays a role in how your music is perceived? Or does a JJ Grey & Mofro show look the same regardless of locale?
JJG: Well, it’s different. You play in Germany and people sing the songs back with a German accent, it’s wild. I’ve noticed too that parts of some songs have different effects, but for the most part, people are people and I just want to get up on stage and share an honest moment with the audience. There’s a common thread throughout all of it. I love that.
RZ: Because this group spends a good portion of every year touring, what objectives do you have for your performances? On the other hand, what expectations might you have of your audiences?
JJG: You know, no expectations and I don’t try to do anything. I just wanna get lost in the moment, share that honest moment. No strings attached, no nothin’. We’re here, let’s do this thing, and let’s enjoy it. I look at it like this: if there’s 500 people there, then there’s going to be a 507-person orchestra doing the show. If there’s 50,000, there’s going to be 50,007 people doing the show. That’s what I like. I like the audience to sing and get down and do the whole thing with us.
photo by Jay Simon
RZ: I read you’re at least in the initial stages of making a follow-up to 2015’s Ol’ Glory. Tell us a little about what you’ve been working on.
JJG: Right now I’ve got about 40 or so different little ideas for songs, and in those I’ve got a couple that are just about fully, bona fide done. I’m still in that grab-bag phase when ideas come and go, and you just gotta wait until it all starts making sense to hit the studio.
RZ: Will you preview any of these new tunes come July 15th?
JJG: I don’t know yet, but I’m thinking about popping one or two of them in here soon, start trying them out live to see how they feel.
RZ: Of your “greatest hits,” so to speak, what are a few songs from your catalog you enjoy performing most? Are those synonymous with the crowd favorites?
JJG: The ones I like doing the most are the ones our audiences want most of the time. “Lochloosa,” “The Sun is Shining Down,” over to “Every Minute” on Ol’ Glory and – ah hell, that stuff changes as you tour and songs morph over a period of time. It’s crazy how that works.
RZ: Over the years, you’ve been referred to as some iteration of a “blue-collar storyteller.” Where do you suppose that comes from?
JJG: It’s kinda like talking – sometimes you can talk too much, and you don’t know it, but everybody else does. [laughs] I run my mouth because I’m from a family of people who shuck and jive and tell stories. At family get-togethers back in the day, if you wanted to hold the floor, you better be funny or saying something interesting. I seldom got any floor time, so I got beat-up in that realm a lot. If people think I’m a storyteller, they ought to hear my dad. He doesn’t sing or play music, but I grew up with a boatload of would-be comedians. None of them were professionals, but you wouldn’t know it when you got together.
RZ: Funny. Going back to your “grab-bag,” when do you decide a story or subject is worthy of making a song?
JJG: It just kind of materializes itself, so often that the songs that’ve stuck with me and the audience all these years are songs I didn’t intend to write about any particular subject or do anything with. Sort of stream of consciousness stuff happens and the song writes itself. Sometimes it’s only later on that I figure out what the song’s about. And other times I have an idea of what I want to sing about right then. With “Lochloosa,” I knew what I wanted to sing about. It was actually a musical intro to a song called “Florida” for a while, but I wound up singing over it and making up lyrics. “Lochloosa” became its own song, and they wound up on two separate records. You just never know what’s going to happen, how it’s going to lay out.
RZ: Otis Redding and Jerry Reed are two of your idols. How has being a longtime fan of these fellas seeped into your music?
JJG: Man, I don’t know. I hope it has though. God almighty, I hope it has. It’s always great when somebody listens to me and says I must be a fan of Jerry Reed. I’m like, “Hell yeah! How’d you know?” Most people don’t make that connection, or Otis Redding for that matter. I hope they show up. It’s kinda hard because I don’t know what I sound like. It’s like hearing your own voice on somebody else’s answering machine. You’re like, “That’s me?! That doesn’t sound like me. I don’t know who the hell that is.” That’s how I feel listening to [my music], trying to decipher what I’m doing. I have no idea what I’m doing, literally and figuratively. [laughs]
RZ: They say folks can be categorized as either mountain or ocean people. As a Floridian devoted to surfing, what are your thoughts? Do beach-dwellers crave higher elevations as we do warmer temperatures?
JJG: Sometimes. I can go and be anywhere, but if tomorrow someone said I had to go live in Montana or Wyoming or Colorado, I’d just do it. And who would argue with that? It’s beautiful out there. Whenever I finally come back home and get down to sea level [where] the air is so much denser and heavier and hotter, I just love it. And all my mountain friends are the opposite. They come and say how good it is to get out of that cold winter. Then they go back up there and they’re like, “Oh this crisp, beautiful air and these mountains. What was I thinking?” They come to Florida for a week and are ready to move there, but then when they go back home, there ain’t no way they’re moving to Florida.
RZ: Now answer me this, just what is a “Mofro”?
JJG: It’s what a sort of mentor used to call me at work. He’d be like, “What’s up Mofro?” So I just called myself Mofro for two records, then my grandmother kind of shamed me. She’s like, “What the hell does ‘Mofro’ mean?” I said it doesn’t really mean anything. She goes, “It doesn’t really mean anything? You’re singing about me and your grandad’s last conversation on earth. You’re singing about your boy Trey dying on OxyContin. You’re singing about your dad’s childhood, my childhood. Are you ashamed of us? You won’t put your own name on your music?” So way back in 2005 or whatever it was, I put “JJ Grey” on Mofro. But yeah, it’s slang for just about anything – “What’s up Mofro?”
RZ: You’re on the road this summer and into fall, then what? Where do you go from here?
JJG: Ah hell, I don’t even know. My house got flooded by Hurricane Matthew two years ago, [and restorations] will hopefully be done this fall. After that I can actually come up for air and figure out what in the world is going on. To be honest with you, I’ve always been busy doing something, whether I’m fixing the house from the hurricane or fixing a tractor – as soon as I come home I go to work. I’m used to it, and I don’t plan too desperately far out. I want to do another record, I want to tour another year, and then I want to take some time off and do some more family stuff that isn’t hinged on ten days off here, two weeks off there. It’s almost like you’re never home. But I’ve got a little ways to go before I get there.
RZ: You’ll be earning your time off when you swing through Bozeman.
JJG: We were in Missoula a little over a year ago, but it’s been a while since we’ve been in Bozeman. We’re looking forward to it.
JJ Grey & Mofro takes the Rialto stage on Sunday, July 15th with help from Los Angeles Americana soul duo Freddy & Francine beginning at 8:30pm. Advance tickets to this 18+ show are $35 at www.rialtobozeman.com, $39 in-store at Cactus Records, and also available at the door depending on availability. Doors at 7:30pm.
Learn more about JJ Grey & Mofro at www.jjgrey.com or find them on Facebook for updated tour details and band announcements, @MOFROBAND. Their latest album, Ol’ Glory, is available now. •
