America's self-proclaimed "world's greatest bar band" who mixed rock, jazz, blues and Tin Pan Alley into gleefully unpredictable live shows for decades.
MOODS · playful · eclectic · spontaneous · unpretentious · genre-hopping · loose · warm · raucous · quirky · freewheeling
BIOGRAPHY
NRBQ formed in 1967 when Kentucky musicians Terry Adams (piano) and Steve Ferguson (guitar), veterans of a British Invasion cover act called the Mersey-Beats USA, relocated to Miami and joined forces with bassist Joey Spampinato and vocalist Frank Gadler from the R&B show band Seven of Us. Their eclectic 1969 self-titled debut for Columbia paired covers of Eddie Cochran and Sun Ra with tunes by Carla Bley and Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, setting the template for a genre-hopping career.
From 1974 to 1994 the band's classic lineup, Adams, Spampinato, guitarist Al Anderson and drummer Tom Ardolino, built a devoted cult following. The single "Get That Gasoline Blues" reached No. 70 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1974, and the group later appeared on The Simpsons and in the film 28 Days.
WHY THEY'RE COOL
NRBQ never chased the mainstream but earned admiration from Elvis Costello, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Bonnie Raitt and Dave Edmunds, among others, for a live act built entirely without set lists, letting the band swing freely between rock and roll, jazz, pop and blues in a single show. Critics such as AllMusic's Mark Deming praised their performances as stellar and wildly unpredictable, a rare combination of stylistic ambition and unpretentious, crowd-pleasing looseness that made them a beloved fixture of American bar-band lore for decades.
GEORGE'S PLAYS
George has played this artist 16 times.
PLAYED ON WOKE1
