The Grisly Hand share the lessons they’ve learned ahead of Saturday’s farewell show

After 15 years of making music, Kansas City’s countrified rockers the Grisly Hand will play a farewell jubilee at the Ship this Saturday, May 11. The show will feature over a dozen guests, including all past members of the band, and looks to be a joyous way of celebrating a band we’re sad to see go.

Ahead of the band’s final performance, we asked its members about the one lesson they’ve learned from playing with the Grisly Hand. What they shared may or may not be true to life, but these stories are definitely true to the band’s sheer enthusiasm and sense of fun.

Mike Stover, pedal steel/bass

Several years ago there was a mysterious older guy who was coming to all of our shows, without fail. He had a really weird dancing style, very spastic with a lot of finger-pointing. He claimed to be a minor-league baseball umpire, and one night he gave us several sheets of lyrics, asking if we could come up with some music.

We later deduced that the guy was the notoriously anonymous author Cormac McCarthy, who heard our music “on the computer” and started showing up in and around Kansas City just to hear us. (I told him that Blood Meridian was one of my favorite novels, he said that he “didn’t mean for it to turn out so dark.” Weird.) His lyrics are in two or three of our songs, but I can’t tell you which ones.

Jimmy Fitzner, guitar/vocals

I often tell the story of one of our first real gigs at Mike’s Tavern in 2009. I had played in punk bands for years so I really didn’t take performing that seriously. I’d show up wearing whatever, plug in, scream, load out and on this night at Mike’s Tavern, the whole band, me included, continued that tradition. We were all in t-shirts and cargo shorts, ball caps and tennis shoes.

Lauren came in and her hair and make up looked great; she had on a beautiful dress. And we looked like dads on the weekend. None of us were even dads yet so we had no excuse!

Lauren, in her gentle but stern way, let us have it. “We’re The Grisly Hand…not The Grisly Shorts, guys. Get it together”.

I started dressing up for gigs after that and loved it. It felt right to look as good as we sounded. So, for me, playing music with Lauren, who is often the most playful person in the room, taught me to take pride in the presentation and to take ourselves just seriously enough because the music we were making together was worth it.

Ben Summers, electric guitar/acoustic guitar/mandolin

Before joining the Grisly Hand, I had a lengthy career as a stevedore. The experience of handling cargo from far-flung places inspired me to follow my dream of starting a company trafficking in the importing of high-end LED hula hoops and exotic horse meat (this was before I became vegan).

I returned to Kansas City in 2009 to pursue that dream. However, a series of unintentional but significant accounting errors found me serving a stint harvesting turnips in Kansas City’s Municipal Farm Correctional Facility. The experience inspired my song “Municipal Farm Blues.” After I started playing that song around town, I was recruited to join the Grisly Hand by a search committee headed by former mayor Kay Barnes. The rest is history.

From this experience, I learned to avoid committing white-collar crimes.

Jimmy Fitzner (again)

Just remembering the time we were out on the road and stopped at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere (somewhere far west and possibly north of here…South Dakota perhaps).

Chas, our first drummer, saw a newspaper stand for something called “Country Singles” a rag to connect lonely truckers to other wandering souls, usually rural or incarcerated.

He scrounged for five quarters, excitedly slotted all five, but the machine refused to open. Enraged, he kicked the plastic front out of the stand and grabbed a paper out. Ben, our ever-legal eagle, said “TIME TO GO” so we quickly saddled up, drove off, and spent many subsequent nights reading tales of unrequited love from inside prison walls and Peterbilt cabs.

Ben Summers (again)

I wish we could tell you some stories about the parties Johnny Rowlands used to throw on his “sky yacht” back in 2015-2016, but we’ll have to reserve those for a strictly off-the-record conversation.

Unattributed

If we ever write a Grisly Hand memoir, a good title would be “Wake Up and Start Yelling.”

In the band’s early days we spent many a weekend on the road, crashing in the spare rooms or on the floors of good friends and total strangers. One year we were in Austin for a SXSW showcase, where we shared floor space with 3 or 4 other bands—probably a dozen musicians sleeping off a weekend’s worth of Texas carousing. We threw it down as hard as any of our peers, but in the harsh light of day we were always the first ones up, raucously recounting last night’s adventures.

During our showcase that day, someone overheard one of our housemates talking about the Grisly Hand: “Man, that band…. they just wake up and start yelling.”

The Grisly Hand’s Farewell Jubilee is Saturday, May 11. Details and tickets here.