Close the Club
Area musicians Rog & Glenn recently released an improvised album, 'Close the Club.'
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Roger Brandon and Glenn Hubbard have known each other since
they were kids living in Boone, back when they used to hang out together and jam on various musical
instruments for fun.
But real jobs and real life sent the long-time friends going in
different directions as the years passed.
Recently, however, Brandon and Hubbard reunited and
got together in a room with a couple of keyboards and began to jam. As they improvised, they
recorded the session, and out of that collaboration came more than 40 new song ideas.
Afterwards, they chose the best of the new sonic creations, reworked some of the tunes and
brought in a couple of studio musicians to add to the mix. The end result is the new album by Rog
and Glenn, called “Close the Club,” a quirky cross between progressive rock, jam band and dance
music.
“My parents have a condo down in Brevard, so we reserved the condo for the weekend,”
Brandon said. “Glenn has been doing a lot of improv sessions, doing a jam session and coming up with
songs. So, he thought it would be cool if the two of us did that, and we ended up going down there
with two keyboards, facing each other across a table with two microphones. We hit ‘record,’ and we
played.
“At the end of the weekend, we had close to 50 song ideas. With some of them, we
noticed a common theme. A lot of the songs on this album use the live tracks that we recorded
then.”
Hubbard has been in the media business for a long time. He is a musician, has worked
as an on-air radio newsman and is currently an assistant professor at the school of communication at
Eastern Carolina University. He learned a lot about music from his father while living in
Boone.
“My dad had played music for a living, and then got into other stuff,” Hubbard said.
“He did music early in his high school and college years. When he was in his 20s, he was a big band
musician in Miami. Then, life intervened, and like so many people, he never quit thinking of himself
as a musician. He always loved it, but he started doing other stuff and ended up being a professor
at App State, but not in music.
“When my brother and I were growing up, we were always
around music. Then, at some point, in 1980, my dad got the idea of, ‘Hey, I want my kids to have the
experience of being a professional musician like I was.’ So, he started a big band in Boone, and we
ended up gigging at the Green Park Inn in Blowing Rock for most of the 1980s.”
Fast forward a
few decades later, and you can watch a humorous new video made by Rog and Glenn on the streets of
Boone at their website, http://www.closetheclub.com. There, you can also stream the new album for free and
buy it from iTunes and CD Baby.
The other musicians featured on “Close the Club” include
Jeremy Cayton on drums, Shawn Roberts on percussion and Rusty Blanton on lead guitar.
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