7/22/11 - Rock on Rob!

 ROB GRILL & THE GRASS ROOTS

Well I am starting back to work and thanks to all who helped me to get to this point!

Although these updates will not be as frequent as in the past, I thought we should get back to them.  Last week we said goodbye to a legendary Pop Hitmaker, and he happened to be a friend who was part of the best time of my life. Rob Grill passed away at 67 and during my youth he was a hero to me as he frequently stopped by WRKO during the Top Forty years. Few people know him by name, but he was the lead voice behind all the super hits of "The Grass Roots" -  "Midnight Confessions" ; "Sooner or Later"; "Where Were You When I Needed You"; "Two Divided By Love"; "Let's Live For Today"; "Temptation Eyes"; Heaven Knows"  and a dozen more hits.  In the beginning, "The Grass Roots" did not exist and were a brainchild of Dunhill Records, but when a bunch of demos reached the label they recruited a small LA based local band called "13th Floor" to cut the tracks.  This is where Rob Grill took over and shaped the songs, the band and the top forty presentations into a slick operation. "The Grass Roots" got airplay on the best radio stations in the country.  He insisted that each show was structured with all the hits and no new music.  He wanted to give the fans what they came to see and worked very hard to make sure the live performances sounded exactly like the way listeners heard them on the radio. The band is still on the circuit, packing them in at oldies shows, because they bring back a part of yesterday and up until 3 months ago Rob was still doing lead vocals on the hits he helped to make part of American Rock History.  After 26 years I happened to see a show a few years ago and it was like it was 1970 all over again.  Rob was sounding good right til the end and as his famous line from their biggest hit, "Midnight Confessions" says, "I  Love  You"   LIVE MEDLEY ED SULLIVAN 1970

Their story is below along with a link to a classic performance.   "Rock on Rob"   

The Grass Roots is an American rock band that charted between 1966 and 1975 as the brainchild of songwriting duo P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri.  In their career, The Grass Roots achieved two gold albums, one gold single and charted singles a total of 21 times. Between 1967 and 1972, The Grass Roots set a record for being on the Billboard charts for 307 straight weeks. They have sold over twenty million records worldwide. Early member Rob Grill and a newer lineup of The Grass Roots continued to play many live shows each year. The band released a new live album chronicling their fourteen Top 40 Billboard hits titled Live Gold in 2008.  The group's third — and by far most successful — incarnation was finally found in a Los Angeles band, called The 13th Floor (not to be confused with the 13th Floor Elevators). This band consisted of Creed Bratton, Rick Coonce, Warren Entner, and Kenny Fukomoto and had formed only a year earlier before submitting a demo tape to Dunhill Records. Rob Grill was recruited into the band when Fukomoto was suddenly drafted into the army. The band was offered the choice to go with their own name or choose to adopt a name that had already been heard of nationwide.  In the beginning, they were one of many U.S. guitar pop/rock bands, but with the help of Barri and their other producers, they developed a unique sound for which they drew as heavily on British beat as on soul music, rhythm and blues and folk rock. Many of their recordings featured a brass section, which was a novelty in those days among American rock bands, with groups like Chicago just developing.  The bulk of the band's material continued to be written by Dunhill Records staff (not only Sloan and Barri). The Grass Roots also recorded songs written by the group's musicians, which appeared on their albums and the B-sides of many hit singles.  As The Grass Roots, they had their first Top 10 hit in the summer of 1967 with "Let's Live for Today", an English-language cover version of "Piangi con me", a 1966 hit for the Italian quartet The Rokes. "Let's Live For Today" sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. With Rob Grill as lead singer, they recorded a third version of "Where Were You When I Needed You." The band continued in a similar hit-making vein for the next five years (1967–1972).  The Grass Roots played at the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival on Sunday, June 11, 1967, in the "summer of love" as "Let's Live For Today" was at #15 and climbing. This music festival is important because it occurred just days before the Monterey Pop Festival but did not have a movie to document it for the ages (see List of electronic music festivals). On Sunday, October 27, 1968, they played at the San Francisco Pop Festival as their hit "Midnight Confessions" was peaking at #5 and then played at the Los Angeles Pop Festival and Miami Pop Festival in December 1968. In 1969, Creed Bratton left and was replaced by Dennis Provisor on keyboards and vocals, plus rotating lead guitarists Terry Furlong and Brian Naughton to form a quintet — the first of many line-up changes that the band was to be subject to. The Grass Roots with their new members played at Newport Pop Festival 1969 at Devonshire Downs, which was a racetrack at the time but now is part of the North Campus for California State University, Northridge. The group played on Sunday, June 22, 1969, a week before their hit "I'd Wait A Million Years" reached the Hot 100. In Canada, they played at the Vancouver Pop Festival at the Paradise Valley Resort in British Columbia in August 1969  In 1971, both of the band's alternating lead guitarists, Terry Furlong and Brian Naughton left, leaving the remaining the group a quartet for their latest album, Their 16 Greatest Hits, and the single, "Sooner or Later." However, drummer Rick Coonce and keyboardist Dennis Provisor left the following year (although Provisor was featured on the band's 1972 Move Along album) and were replaced by Reed Kailing, Virgil Weber and original member Joel Larson.  Rob Grill remained the point of focus in all these years.  Follow-up singles sold disappointingly or failed to chart. The 1976 single "Out In The Open" became their swan song, with the band having disbanded the previous autumn. The 1978 14 Greats album by Gusto Records featured Rob Grill, but none of the other original members, and consisted of 1978 versions of their hits.  Rob Grill remained in the music business and launched a solo career in 1979 (assisted on his solo album by several members of Fleetwood Mac). When interest in bands of the 1960s began to rise again in the 1980s, Grill reformed The Grass Roots and toured the United States and Japan. He continued to lead the band into the current millennium as The Grass Roots sole owner and made special appearances with the band until his death. In 1982, The Grass Roots performed an Independence Day concert on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., attracting a large crowd and setting a record for attendance at an outdoor concert.  However, in April 1983, James G. Watt, President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, banned Independence Day concerts on the Mall by such groups. Watt said that "rock bands" that had performed on the Mall on Independence Day in 1981 and 1982 had encouraged drug use and alcoholism and had attracted "the wrong element", who would mug people and families attending any similar events in the future.  During the ensuing uproar, Rob Grill stated that he felt "highly insulted" by Watt's remarks, which he called "nothing but un-American".  Since 2005, Creed Bratton can be seen as "Creed Bratton", Quality Assurance Officer, in the American NBC television situation comedy The Office.  He continues to write songs and has released several solo albums, including Chasin' the Ball, The '80s, Coarsegold, Creed Bratton, and Bounce Back.  In 2006, former manager Marty Angelo published a book entitled, Once Life Matters: A New Beginning which has numerous stories about his life on the road with Rob Grill and The Grass Roots back in the early 1970s.  Former drummer Rick Coonce died on February 25, 2011, and Rob Grill died on July 11, 2011.  During of summers of 2010 and 2011, The Grass Roots had heavy touring schedules throughout the U.S. both on their own and as part of the Happy Together: 25th Anniversary Tour, along with Flo & Eddie of The Turtles, Mark Lindsay, The Buckinghams, and Monkees member Micky Dolenz  .