Q&A with JJ Grey & Mofro

(Credit: Alligator Records)

He grew up a country cracker 30 miles west of Jacksonville, made his bones in redneck bars, had his butt kicked by the road, but has survived and emerged as a cult favorite who has found favor on the jam band circuit. JJ Grey has four albums out, the first two under the name Mofro, the others, including last year’s estimable Orange Blossom, billed under JJ Grey & Mofro.

His voice has the kind of gospel-soaked soulfulness that can’t be taught; he writes music that’s an exquisite cross between Southern R&B a la Otis Redding and Southern rock a la Lynyrd Skynyrd. A talented dude. But if it wasn’t for the grueling, and sometimes harrowing, work he put in early on -- booking gigs, organizing low-budget tours, humpin’ a day job to pay his musicians, and driving, constantly driving -- Grey might still be just another guy singing behind chicken wire in hardscrabble rural bars a few miles from home.

He still lives in the same neck of the woods. Loves fishin’ and other outdoor endeavors. Speaks with a deep Southern twang.

JJ Grey and Mofro will play The Ritz Ybor Thursday night with Shooter Jennings and Earl Greyhound. Tickets are $23.50.

You seem to be an artist who records on a semi-regular basis, but most of your activity is geared toward touring and performing. Right now that seems to be the most viable career model for musicians out there…
I’d love to sell more records, but I don’t think very many people sell a lot of records these days. They probably sell less records than they claim. These days it’s: Will people come to see you play? And will they come back a second time?

Most artists love performing, but after awhile most artists aren’t so fond of the actual touring part. After so many years on the road, how are you holding up in that regard?
Everything has its limits. It might sound ridiculous, but someone could win the lottery and be sick of being rich. I’m not sick of touring, but the point is anything can become a curse if you let it. I enjoy playing and I enjoy going on tour, but like anything, there needs to be moderation. I don’t wanna live on the road for six to eight week tours, which sounds funny because back in the day Metallica was on the road for a over a year straight. They were all single, but you can bet that got to ’em. There’s nothing natural about waking up in a different place everyday.

So you’ve become a successful career musician but not a star. Has it worked out the way you’d hoped?
I’ve never regretted the path that I’ve taken. When I signed with Fog City (Records) years ago, I was happy with that decision. I’m happy at Alligator (Records). The fact is, there has never been a record label that has called me up and offered to pay me a lot, pay for all kinds of stuff, grease all those palms that need to be greased. A band can go from sitting in the garage to making a quarter million dollar advance, then they get ready to go on tour and they don’t really know what to do. I’ve never had that. I make one fan at a time.

Doing it your way generally leads to career longevity.
I hope so. A band that’s gotten the shortcuts, even if they’re a great group, if the whole thing is predicated on popularity, everybody knows that will always wane. There’s not enough to sustain a connection with a fanbase. But then there’s people like Ben Harper, who’s connected to his fanbase for years and years. He road-dogged it. Compare that to the 17-year-old singing sensation. He’s maybe played once every other weekend, then he goes out on tour and in three weeks he loses his voice. He’s scared and he doesn’t know what to do. Maybe he turns to the hard stuff (drugs, alcohol) to get through it. This is what happens, sadly, to some young groups. They get their a-- kicked, but some of them live through it, their a-- heals up and they come back ready to do it again. I think I remember Levon Helm saying that.

These days, you’ve been able to set up a touring schedule that doesn’t kill you. But it didn’t use to be that way, right? What was it like being a road dog in the earlier years?
At one point, for quite a long while, I slept maybe two, three hours a night. I drove continuously. (Mofro) was my project from day one. I owned the business, so to speak. I was responsible. And it was way harder than I ever dreamed. I went weeks and weeks with hardly any sleep. I was the booking agent, the manager. I wrote the songs, bought the equipment, negotiated this, that or the other.

Then going out and doing the shows. My biggest paying shows were 300 bucks. There were many times when we would play in Tampa and Orlando; I would drive down there and drive back, and I had these European guys I had brought over to be in my band and they were staying at my house. They’d go to bed. I’d splash some water on my face and drive straight to the lumberyard where I worked. I had to pay these guys to play, and the money wasn’t coming in from the gigs.

You paid them out of your day job money?
Yessir. I met them overseas. I had to pony up for visas and their travel over here. I’d be at work in the lumberyard booking a tour. I ran up thousands of dollars on my cell phone bill. I finally booked a tour over pretty much the entire U.S. The second time I booked a tour it was a lot easier, but the first time was brutal. The lumberyard people would cover for me. They were very cool about it.

What was the time frame for this particular hellish period?
Oh, about 2001 to 2003. I booked the whole first two years. Then I got into a bad car crash with me and my wife. It was a two-helicopter crash on the second gig of the second tour. I was messed up and couldn’t go play. So I stopped everything for nearly eight months, then had to start all over again.

After awhile (the touring situation) got better. I’d run into some young bands and they’d say, “Hey man, how come you’re getting all these gigs?” Like somehow I didn’t earn it. So I’d say, “My dad pays for it; he’s rich.” You tend to think that once you get signed with a booking agent, they’ll get all your gigs. But managers and booking agents can’t get you things people don’t want you for. They can’t force you on everybody. You can’t wait on a booking agent.

So you started to see the light at the end of the tunnel at some point. Have you now passed through the tunnel?
I’m out of the tunnel, as far as I’m concerned. I’m able to do this, and I’m able to sleep. I climb in a bunk in the bus and wake up somewhere else. Man, there’s nothing worse than not getting any sleep. But there for a while it seemed like any time anyone else drove and I slept, something bad would happen. One night in ’03 I was driving and decided to stop around 5 a.m. in a rest stop near St. Louis. It was snowing. About 7, I heard a buddy who was out on the road with us get behind the wheel and start driving. He drove a half a mile and the engine in my Caterpillar RV blew up. We had no heat. It was 10 degrees outside. I almost quit touring, almost said “no more.”  I was so weak, my immune system was so bad, I was so beat up. But from that point on it started to get better.

When you were in this depleted state, did it affect you on stage?
Yeah, it affected me. I gave everything I had at the time. Everything I’d ever done, I was the singer. And that was tough.

When I’ve seen you, you played keyboards and some guitar. But you started out as the frontman with the microphone?
I would write the songs and hire guys to play the parts that I’d written, and I’d have the microphone and sing. I ended up playing instruments along with it. When I first started playing guitar, I sat in a chair for a while, because I couldn’t afford a guitar strap. I was scared to death of breaking strings ’cause I didn’t want to spend the money to replace ’em.  Now, with the (musicians) I have, I don’t have to say s---. They just play it. If the song changes (during a set) it comes out equally cool or better.

When I saw you some years ago, I was catching a hippie vibe from the stage. Last year it was more of a higher energy R&B thing.
I never understood that. I thought hippies were strictly a ’60s thing. When people would show up and look like hippies I thought they were kidding around. But then I realized that there were, like, modern hippies, I guess you’d call them. And those hippie-type kids responded to our music, came out to our shows in force.

I grew up 30 miles west of Jacksonville, still live here, and the only thing here is people with huge rebel flags on the backs of their pickup trucks and Florida Gator football stuff. But when I go on the road, our audience, I don’t see arguments at shows. When I grew up playing, I was 17 or 18 and they hadn’t changed the liquor age to 21 yet. We’d play local gigs and sometimes there’d be chicken wire in front of us. The Gazebo in Normandy. TJ’s Tavern. It was heavy biker club and it wasn’t “will there be a fight tonight?” but how bad was someone gonna get hurt. Nowadays, I don’t ever even see an argument. I’ll take that.  I will say that even in the old days no one ever threw nothin’ at us. As long as you played “Born to be Wild” and a Skynyrd tune or two, they loved ya.

You might expect a guy from your neck of the woods to go in a real country direction. How did the R&B part find its way into your music?
My dad’s from Baldwin, which was about half black and half white. Right behind my grandfather’s little trailer park was KD’s Nite Limit, a little juke joint frequented by black people. We’d pick up bottles and if we took ’em to my uncle’s grocery store he would shortchange us. So we’d go right back to that little juke joint and sell ’em. They’d give us barbecue. They’d be playing “Who’s That Lady,” by the Isley Brothers. My cousin Jerry and I would be up there hangin’ out and that’s where I heard my first taste of that kind of stuff.

I always loved Stevie Wonder. I’ve heard our music described as a cross between Lynyrd Skynyrd and Stevie Wonder, and that’s close enough for me. There’s a dash of other stuff here and there, but the main course is between the two. And I actually hear a relationship between Skynyrd and Stevie Wonder. On the Skynyrd song “Things Going On,” if you put a clavinet there instead of a guitar, it could be Stevie.