Come on down to the Crosstown Lounge tonight in Grand Forks and celebrate the holiday season with two great bands from Minneapolis. Crowd favorites, both bands are offering up their talents to produce one kick-butt show. The show starts early at 9 pm, not the usual 10 or so, because both bands want to be able to play as much as they can for their Grand Forks friends.

Jon Wayne and the Pain will take the stage later in the evening and bring its reggae rock sound. They always get a crowd up dancing!

But before them Down Lo will open the evening with their urban sound. It’s taken several years for frontman Mark Grundhoefer to explore a variety of musical sounds, including funk, bluegrass, jazz, and rock and roll, before dipping a lyrical tongue into the waters of rap and hip hop. As lead singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter, Grundhoefer began collaborating with an Diego rapper Deploi, first as a guest at some of their shows and later as a shaper of the band’s new urban sound. This new path for Down Lo allowed the band to offer up something uniquely theirs but definitely Midwest grown. It is hip hop with the friendliness of Minnesota and details of the people of the region.

Though Deploi is spending his holidays back home in sunny Cali after coming off a huge East Coast and Midwest solo tour that sometimes intersected with Down Lo, the band is strongly entrenched in hip-hop in its own way.

The journey to this new sound was not forced. “It’s been a kind of a natural progression,” said Grundhoefer when he first collaborated with Deploi. But it clearly was his connections with the hip hop music realm that brought rappers to the Down Lo stage. “There’s a DJ that I’m good friends with, DJ Innovation, here in St. Paul,” said Grundhoefer. “I met him right after he moved back here from San Diego. He had lived there for a few years and that was where he met Deploi. So, DJ Innovation and I started doing some work together and promoting some shows in St. Paul. Eventually, it was kind of a no-brainer when he said, ‘I know a great MC from San Diego. Let’s bring him out.’ So, we flew Deploi out for a show and that’s when we first met.”

As Grundhoefer began to bring him out more frequently, Grundhoefer said. “It’s a creative brainstorming between all of us. We’re inspired by each other.”

That inspiration led to some serious collaboration between Grundhoefer and Deploi. A passion for music and a love of the region began to invade their writing. Both Deploi and Grundhoefer wrote about the snowy streets of St. Paul and the warmth of the people there, not about crime or drivebys. “It’s about good music, and it’s about breaking those boundaries. It’s about making something new without being restricted by the rules,” said Grundhoefer. “Hip hop doesn’t mean that you have to talk about guns and violence….The more we recorded, the more we wrote, the more shows we played, it became evident that we were making a pretty unique connection from the Midwest all the way to LA. It was almost two different worlds that we were mashing together…. Just because you’re from the Midwest, it doesn’t mean that you can’t play hip hop.”

As Down Lo ventured further from the Midwest, they found fans everywhere. “People are very excited about the new sound, even bands that are very far off from what we do, bluegrass and country bands,” said Grundhoefer. The White Iron Band even collaborated with Deploi.

Tonight catch both Down Lo and Jon Wayne and the Pain at the Crosstown Lounge in Grand Forks ND. The fun starts at 9 pm. $5 and a free beer.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 17th, 2010 at 6:17 pm and is filed under December 2010, Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.