Rick Grant: Jacksonville's music man

by anna rabhan
photo by daniel goncalves
If knowledge is power, then Rick Grant has been empowering Jacksonville and Northeast Florida for over 30 years. He has kept us informed about the music industry and introduced us to nationally known musicians, but he has also been our clearinghouse of local music news. He has promoted, through the power of his pen, local musicians and made sure we knew what they were about and where to see them play. But, as with most people who inform the public, he has been backstage his whole career. It’s easy to find Rick Grant’s articles online but nearly impossible to find any information about this man who has done so much to improve Jacksonville and keep us connected to our rich musical culture. Jacksonville, please welcome Rick Grant onstage.
Grant was born in Savannah and raised in Jacksonville. After a stint in the Air Force, he went to work for a large chemical company. But he was a musician at heart so, tired of corporate culture after a few years, he and his wife Elaine decided to open a recording and production company called Homestead Studio, Inc. In the late ’70s, when jazz fusion was all the rage, their major project was a band called Trayn whose record did well at jazz stations across the country. They then toured, which made for a lot of crazy road stories. Grant recalls, “We were on our way to a jazz festival – in St. Augustine actually – and the engine blew up. So we had to have the truck full of equipment towed to the venue and have it unloaded and then towed to a repair facility, but we played the gig!”
During that time, he was also Jacksonville Bureau Chief for a movie industry publication out of Orlando called Entertainment Revue. He went on location and wrote documentary-style pieces about the making of the films. “I was always a writer part time, and I did freelance work,” he says. After Homestead closed, Grant began working with the owner of the Southeast Entertainer, later called the First Coast Entertainer. After that owner passed away, the current owner took over and changed the name to Entertaining U. Grant reminisces, “I started getting busy with that for many, many years. I was pretty much doing everything. I was writing movie reviews, music reviews, going out on interviews. So it was a very busy time, and I really thrived on it because I loved the work. I just about covered everybody you can imagine.” In fact, he says, he covered most everyone in the North Florida Music Hall of Fame (www.larrycohenproductions.com/N_Fla_Music.htm).
The first band he remembers covering was the Dalton Gang. He’s interviewed everyone from Jim Graves, who came back to Jacksonville after playing with the Rossington-Collins Band, to Derek Trucks to Bonnie Raitt. Artists who hadn’t let their fame go to their heads were his favorite interviews. “The blues people [were] usually really nice,” he says. “They didn’t cop an attitude along the way. People like B.B. King and Koko Taylor – they were just the greatest interviews because they were down to earth.” As for the more recent interviews, he says, “JJ Grey and his band [Mofro] … they’re great because they never let any of the business affect them. They’re still the same guys they were before.”
All those thousands of interviews (over 7,000 by his editor’s count) made for a lot of unforgettable moments over Grant’s long career. He recounts, “You know, you say these things and people don’t believe you. It was Hank Williams, Jr. and he was supposed to have quit drinking and that was a big deal. He had gone through rehab and I go backstage and he has a glass of vodka and a bottle of vodka on the side and he was just wasted out of his…I don’t know how he went on stage. He did, and he played his set. … [Those artists are] very difficult to interview because they don’t want to see you really, but they think they need the press.”
This music business veteran has much to say about the Jacksonville music scene and the future of its artists. “The Jacksonville music scene is very vibrant and it’s always bringing in new talent with new ideas. Yellowcard was good. I always liked them and they’ve done well. … I was the first journalist to cover Conrad Oberg at 10 years old and he played at the London Bridge. He’s a true musical genius. … He’s gonna go far.”
Semi-retired since 2008, Grant has barely slowed down. He still occasionally contributes music and movie reviews to Entertaining U. He also has his own webzine (www.rickatnight.com) with opinion pieces, TV reviews and, of course, movie and music reviews. But, while this writer whose accumulation of pieces has been a guidebook of Jacksonville entertainment says he misses the hectic action of a magazine, “The things that are important are right here: my wife, my dogs, my writing. I’ve achieved Nirvana in that respect.”