Cody Scott, Adam Tobin, Justin Bissett and Brett Scott of The Runaway Grooms from Vail who are playing a $5 locals show at Belly Up Friday Night.
Every mountain town has a beloved local band, the house band, if you will. For years in Aspen it was Likewise and Jes Grew; in Telluride it’s Joint Point. Easy Jim is currently the pride of Crested Butte. Since 2016, that band in Vail has been The Runaway Grooms.
The Grooms, as they are colloquially known in Vail, are playing Belly Up Aspen Friday in a $5 locals show.
The Runaway Grooms are Adam Tobin (guitar and vocals), Justin Bissett (drums), Cody Scott (keys) and Brett Scott (bass).
Tobin hails from right outside of Worcester, Massachusetts. He grew up in a family where music was on all the time. His uncles played guitar and bass and were in a band when they were in high school.
“All that music rubbed off on me growing up,” Tobin said in an interview with the Aspen Daily News. “There was always a guitar in the house. Jimmy Buffett, The Eagles were popular bands. Music was a rite of passage in my family. My mom would sit me down and say, ‘you have to listen to this solo in Moby Dick’ (by Led Zeppelin).”
Tobin’s younger brother played guitar and his older brother played drums. Tobin was forced into playing bass to round out the trio.
In middle school, Tobin decided he wanted to write songs, so he picked up the guitar and began composing and writing lyrics.
Tobin grew up across the street from fellow Groomsman Justin Bissett. He started jamming with him and his brother on harder punk rock music. That’s where Tobin learned how to play power chords.
In high school, Tobin said he went from “being a Led Head to a Dead Head.” He also got into the music of Dispatch, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan and Sublime.
Tobin played in a talent show and some older guys in school asked him to come try out to be in their band.
”I went to the rehearsal and their lead singer was there,” he said. “He had a really nice voice that was on the high side and at the time I was singing a lower raspy voice and they fired him on the spot. I felt bad. He was their friend.”
The band was called Serrana. The guitarists were shredders in the tradition of Joe Satriani and Stevie Vai. They played classic rock songs by bands like Boston and Aerosmith. Tobin was writing songs as well.
Tobin went to the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. He fell in with a tight-knit group of artists and musicians who would jam acoustic music outside of the dorms. They lived in an old Victorian house on Quincy Street that became known as Quincy Kingdom. Popular groups that were played included the Head and the Heart, The Lumineers and The Avett Brothers.
By this point Bissett was living in Edwards. Tobin went out to visit and they skied a powder day in a foot of snow.
“I was like, ‘I could do this every day,’” Tobin said. “In 2016, I moved to Vail. Justin hadn’t been playing drums and we started jamming acoustically together.”
Tobin lived in employee housing in Beaver Creek and would literally knock on doors every time he heard people playing music in hopes of finding people with whom to jam.
“One day, I heard this really cool sound coming out of this room,” Tobin remembers. “It was Zac Cialek on a lap steel guitar. He thought I was the cop. He was playing this lap steel guitar that he had built himself that made this big ambient sound unlike anything I’ve ever heard. He started jamming with me and Justin and that became the group.”
A friend offered them a gig at the Vail Brewing Company. When they asked Tobin what the band’s name was he said The Runaway Grooms.
“I always thought it would be a cool name for a band, not necessarily my band but a good name for a band, like someone’s band that could play with anyone.”
Throughout the summer of 2017, the Grooms began to make a name for themselves. In 2018, they lost their housing and were literally homeless.
“We lost our housing because the landlady didn’t think we had real jobs — which was about right. So we were homeless for a while. We were sleeping in our cars, on couches, we literally had rehearsals in parking lots. We would play in the hills of Minturn. We literally felt like the runaway grooms because we didn’t have anywhere to go. It was like a self fulfilling prophecy.”
In 2018, the bandmates found a place to live in Leadville. The landlord was a sound engineer and he let the guys set up all their gear in his living room.
Tobin had a sizable catalog of songs and The Runaway Grooms went into the studio in late 2018 to record their first album “Tied to the Sun.” They recorded it at Evergroove studio in Evergreen with engineer Brad Smalling.
“I never thought I would get to record an album and that all those songs would get a band treatment with drums, guitars, bass, and keyboards. It was a dream come true,” Tobin said.
The band decided to pursue a more upbeat funky sound and Zach Gillam and Cody Scott joined the band on bass and keyboards respectively.
“Those guys changed the band sound,” Tobin said. “We got more funky, opened ourselves up to a more contemporary jam band style, and got less folky.”
That sound was reflected in the band’s second album “Violet Lane.”
In which the band sounds more like a fun, upbeat dance band. “We experimented with a lot of music and when we play live we want to be exciting, bring that wow factor.”
After the pandemic ended, The Runaway Grooms went on a two-month tour down south, and over the next two years went on 10 tours all over the country. Since then, the band has decided to focus more on playing in Colorado.
All four guys in The Runaway Grooms are snowboarders and they are developing their own mountain version of “A Hard Day’s Night,” a film about a band living in the Colorado mountains playing shows, snowboarding, living in a mountain town and making music for people who do the same things as they do.
When asked what he hopes people will get out of seeing The Runaway Grooms, Tobin said,”We want people to have a good time and get wrapped up in the music and the flow space just like we do.
“Live music is a place where people get to have a group experience and we want people to feel invited into that space and feel the dynamic of the different kinds of music we play and be present in that space and lose themselves in the music.”
Doors open at 7:30 p.m. tonight. The show starts at 8:30 p.m. Tickets and more info are available at bellyupaspen.com/events/runaway-grooms-2.
