Joe Grushecky & The Houserockers

Joe Grushecky’s music has stood the test of time. Since 1979, publications such as Billboard, Rolling Stone, Village Voice, No Depression, and countless others have hailed him as one of music’s most talented singer-songwriters all the while working as a special education teacher for 30 odd years in the toughest schools in Pittsburgh and raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity.

“In a better world, Joe Grushecky would live in a mansion down the road from Springsteen’s. Instead, this enormous talent spends his days teaching some of western Pennsylvania’s most troubled children….Who do you know who has made back-to-back great albums more than 20 years ago, and is doing the same thing now. There’s Dylan, Lucinda Williams, Neil Young, Springsteen, maybe a few more. He’s on that level.” wrote Jimmy Gutterman. Blurt Magazine had this to say about the band’s live performances. “Grushecky & The Houserockers performed like they thought they were damn rock stars and, on that night, they were indeed the greatest rock ‘n’ roll outfit on the planet.”

He has worked with such musical legends as Ian Hunter, Mick Ronson, Steven Van Zandt, Steve Cropper, and Bruce Springsteen. Joe and Bruce were co-writing partners for years. Springsteen produced the classic American Babylon record and lends his vocals and guitar on several of Joe’s albums.

At an age where most of his contemporaries have long given up the dream, Grushecky has recorded a new album, Can’t Outrun A Memory, that’s every bit as fierce, ambitious, and defiant as anything he’s ever recorded over the past 45 years. It’s the sort of populist message that Grushecky excels at, rock ‘n’ roll as balm for the soul that the Houserockers deliver with big beat rhythms, resonating guitar play, and fluid bass lines. Grushecky has long been lauded as a brilliant lyricist. The songs on the new record continue that tradition. Joe feels that it is some of his finest work.

The music of Joe Grushecky is the cinema of the American landscape – a raw, stripped-down version of a dream – of hope, loss, and renewal. “Do not go gentle into that good night, old age should burn and rave at close of day; rage, rage against the dying of the light.” – Dylan Thomas, 1947. If rock ‘n’ roll has the equivalent of Dylan Thomas’s famed protagonist, it would be Joe Grushecky.