The Binky Griptite Orchestra

The Binky Griptite Orchestra | Live at Groove | Sunday, December 14th | 6PM Doors, 7PM Show

Born June 25th 1966 just after midnight at Milwaukee County General Hospital. I'm the youngest of 7 and the 4th boy child thus breaking the tie. I've been listening to music actively since I was 5, so that's 1971. I was raised on a combination of black radio of the time and my older siblings' and mom's record collections, ranging from David's Funkadelic and Deep Purple records to Ann's Three Dog Night and Simon & Garfunkel records, as well as the bands I saw on Soul Train and American Bandstand and Midnight Special. On TV I saw Al Green, James Brown, Bobby Bland, The Edgar Winter Group, The Faces, so many artists. Even Hee Haw! Anything with music and especially guitar players in the shot.

Like, I remember when "Superstition" was the HOT NEW JAM by Stevie Wonder, stuff like that. Any music that happened after '71 or '72, I got to experience it in real time and I'm very thankful for that. This is what informs everything that I play.

My sister Ann's nylon string guitar was always around but the neck was too big for me for a long time so I mostly treated it as a toy until I discovered it made a pretty nice drum if I tapped it with my fingers so I truly started as a drummer. When I was first handed a set of bongos by my first grade music teacher I knew exactly what to do with them, thanks to my experience drumming on the guitar and from watching I Love Lucy. Thank you Ricky Ricardo!

Then my brother Ted showed me how to play Smoke On The Water by Deep Purple because one of his friends showed him. He didn't play guitar either but the beauty of the riff is that anybody can play it! I was 7 when that came out, so I had that to play for a while but I really didn't get on the path to playing til I was 12 or so.

The Funkadelic album Cosmic Slop also came out when I was 7 and has been my favorite record ever since. I wanted to do that, to be that. I decided to be a musician long before I was one. My brother David took me to P Funk shows at Summerfest in Milwaukee starting in '75 I think, and I became a Bootsy fan.

David bought me a bass when I was 11 or so but I had no one to teach me so it laguished for a while and eventually disappeared from the house under mysterious circumstances. I found it in a pawn shop some months later and it was rebought. I took a few lessons and it got stolen again when I set it down at a bus stop on a cold day.

It was replaced with an electric guitar. Still without a teacher I was intimidated by the 6 strings and thought bass would be easier so I traded it for a bass. Then I became intimidated by thinking "I'll never be as good as Bootsy so what's the point"

Round about this time I happened to see Devo on the TV show "Friday's" (wannabe SNL by ABC). I fell in love with the guitar Bob Mothersbaugh was playing. It was a brand new looking thing I'd never seen before and I wanted one. I wanted to play be a guitar player and I wanted THAT guitar.

The very next day I went to the music store I frequently loitered in and I found it, they had a cheap knockoff of the sparkly blue Ibanez Iceman that I wanted! The Lotus version was the wrong color and made of plywood but it was as close as I could afford to get to the real thing. It took a few weeks but I musta begged and traded or whatever to get it and it got got. That was the guitar that finally got me started at 14.

42 years later I have a lot of guitars but I still don't have an Iceman.

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