Rock, reggae, country: 'Against the Grain' has it all

WASILLA — Murel Kidd has a very succinct piece of advice for anyone coming to catch his band at the Mug-Shot Saloon this month.

“Be ready to party,” he said.

Kidd said he isn’t just Against the Grain’s lead singer and lead guitarist.

“I’m dubbed as the party starter. I get things rolling. I talk to people, I make people laugh, joke, scream, holler, all that stuff,” he said. “It’s not just music, it’s entertainment as well.”

The shows run Friday and Saturday for the month of November from 10 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. The band has been together for about a year and, though Valley-based, usually plays at the Whaler in Anchorage.

Asked how he can keep it going for four and a half hours, Kidd said he and his bandmates have been playing music for decades. They have a very deep repertoire.

“Maybe I just wait until they get drunk and after the third set start it all over,” Kidd joked.

Kidd said his backup guitarist, Duane Herd, has also played with Alaska bands for years.

“And he’s just a shredder on that guitar. He just shreds it. It’s awesome,” Kidd said. “We call him Duane ‘The Shredder’ Herd.’”

And nicknames aren’t confined to just Herd.

There’s the drummer, who Kidd says he refers to as Michael “The George Clooney of all Drummers” Lashbrook, and the bassist, “Butch Porter, we call him ‘Mr. Cool.’”

Kidd says he’s played professionally in every state in the union except California and Hawaii, but Against the Grain is near the top of the list of bands he’s played with when it comes to quality.

“It’s awesome to stand on a bandstand with these guys,” Kidd said. “It’s an honor to play with these guys, really.”

Most of the band members are transplants. Herd is a former Californian and Lashbrook a former Canadian.

“I don’t know where Butch is from. We’ll call it Eagle River,” Kidd said. “I’m from the Black Hills of South Dakota originally.”

He said he’s got a pretty typical coming-to-Alaska story.

“I was supposed to come up here for a six-month job, met a woman, stayed, got married, got divorced, met another one, got divorced,” Kidd said. “This is the longest I’ve stayed anywhere.”

As far as what to expect — beyond, of course, a party — Kidd said that the band plays mostly covers.

“If you’re a bar band you’ve got to play a lot of covers. You can play some originals, and we do, but for the most part it’s cover tunes,” Kidd said.

And those covers, he said, run the gamut from country to rock to rock-country to reggae.

“That’s what’s so nice about this band is we’re not dubbed into one thing because we play everything,” he said.

Crowd favorites, he said, include Lynyrd Skynryd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” various Ozzy Osbourne tunes and Lashbrook’s “second-to-none” rendition of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Fishin’ in the Dark.” But the band’s favorites include songs like Green Day’s “When I Come Around.”

Kidd said that what brings him back to play in bar bands year after year is the chance it gives him to unwind.

“I’m a branch manager for Denali Alaska Federal Credit Union,” he said. “After a long week of doing that it’s really nice to have the release.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.