Cody Scott, Adam Tobin, Justin Bisset and Vail native Brett Scott of The Runaway Grooms are performing $5 local shows at Belly Up Friday Nights.
Provided photo
Every mountain town has a beloved local band, the house band. For years in Aspen, it was the same and it was Jess Grue. In Telluride, it’s a joint point. Easy Gym is now the pride of Crested Butte. Since 2016, Bale’s band has been The Runaway Grooms.
The Grooms, as they are colloquially known in Vail, perform Belly Up Aspen Fridays in a $5 local show.
The Runaway Grooms are Adam Tobin (guitar and vocals), Justin Bisset (drums), Cody Scott (keys), and Brett Scott (bass).
Tobin is from a suburb of Worcester, Massachusetts. He grew up in a household where music was always playing. His uncles played guitar and bass and were in a band in high school.
“All that music influenced me growing up,” Tobin said in an interview with the Aspen Daily News. “There was always a guitar in the house. Jimmy Buffett, the Eagles were popular bands. Music was a rite of passage for my family. My mother sat me down and said, ‘Moby Dick’ (Led Zeppelin). )’s solo.”
Tobin’s younger brother played the guitar and his older brother played the drums. Tobin was forced to play bass to round out the trio.
In middle school, Tobin decided he wanted to write songs, so he picked up a guitar and began writing compositions and lyrics.
Tobin grew up across the street from groomsman Justin Bisset. He and his brother began jamming on harder punk rock music. There Tobin learned how to play power chords.
In high school, Tobin said, “I went from being a Red Head to being a Dead Head.” He also became obsessed with the music of Dispatch, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, and Sublime.
Tobin performed at talent shows and some older guys at school asked him to join their band.
“I went to rehearsal and their lead singer was there,” he said. “He had such a great voice, on the high side, but at the time I was singing a much lower, raspy voice, so they fired him on the spot. It didn’t feel right. He He was their friend.”
The band was called Serana. The guitarist was Shredder, in the tradition of Joe Satriani and Stevie Vai. They played classic rock songs from bands like Boston and Aerosmith. Tobin also wrote songs.
Tobin attended Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. He joined a close-knit group of artists and musicians jamming acoustic music outside his dorm. They lived in an old Victorian house on Quincy Street. It became known as the Quincy Kingdom. Popular groups that performed included the Head and the Heart, the Lumineers, and the Avett Brothers.
At this time Bisset was living in Edwards. Tobin went out to play and they skied a powder day in a foot of snow.
“I thought, ‘I can do this every day,'” Tobin said. “We moved to Vail in 2016, and Justin didn’t play drums, so we started jamming together acoustically.”
Tobin lived in employee housing in Beaver Creek, and whenever he heard people playing music, he would literally knock on doors to find people to jam with.
“One day I heard a really cool sound coming from this room,” Tobin recalls. “It was Zach Siarek playing the lap steel guitar. He thought I was a cop. He started jamming with me and Justin, and it became a group.”
A friend offered them a gig at Vail Brewing Company. When they asked Tobin the name of the band, he said Runaway Grooms.
“I always thought it was a cool name for a band. Not necessarily my band, but like someone else’s band that could play with anyone. I thought it was a good name for a band.”
Throughout the summer of 2017, the Grooms began to make a name for themselves. In 2018, they lost their home and were literally homeless.
“We lost our housing because our landlord didn’t think we had real jobs, which was about right. So we were homeless for a while. We would sleep inside, we would sleep on couches, we would literally rehearse in the parking lot. We used to hang out in the hills of Minturn. We were literally like runaway grooms because we had nowhere to go. It felt like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
In 2018, the band members found a place to live in Leadville. The landlord was a sound engineer and had him set up all the equipment in his living room.
Tobin has an extensive catalog of songs, and The Runaway Grooms went into the studio at the end of 2018 to record their first album, Tide to the Sun. They recorded the song at Evergreen’s Evergroove Studios with engineer Brad Smalling.
“I never thought I’d be recording an album and that all those songs would be band-style with drums, guitar, bass and keyboards. It’s a dream come true,” Tobin said.
The band decided to pursue a more upbeat, funky sound, and Zack Gillum and Cody Scott joined the band on bass and keyboards, respectively.
“They changed the sound of the band,” Tobin said. “We’ve gotten more funky, opened ourselves up to more modern jam band styles, and become less folky.”
That sound was reflected in the band’s second album, Violet Lane.
This band sounds like a fun and upbeat dance band. “We’ve been experimenting with a lot of music and we want it to be exciting and bring an element of surprise when we play live.”
After the pandemic ended, The Runaway Grooms toured the South for two months, followed by 10 tours across the United States over the next two years. Since then, the band has decided to focus more on playing in Colorado.
All four members of The Runaway Grooms are snowboarders, and the film “A Hard Day’s Night” is about a band living in the Colorado Mountains playing shows, snowboarding, living in a mountain town, and making music for people. ” is currently developing its own mountain version. People who do the same thing as them.
When asked what he hoped people would take away from watching Runaway Grooms, Tobin said: “We want people to have a good time and be surrounded by music and flow, just like we are.
“Live music is a place where people have a group experience, where people feel invited into the space, feel the dynamics of the different types of music we play, and feel present in the space and enjoy the music. I want them to be immersed in it.”
Doors open tonight at 7:30 p.m. The show begins at 8:30 p.m. Tickets and more information are available at bellyupaspen.com/events/runaway-grooms-2.