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Dru Lombar Recalls Grinderswitch, Joe Dan and the Seventies

© Michael B. Smith

Jacksonville, Florida may be best known for some other well known rock and roll pioneers who busted out of the orange groves and beaches to rise to fame and fortune, but there once was another guitar player lurking in the shadows of Duane Allman. A guitar player who possessed a heart full of soul and lightning fingers on the electric six-string. A man whose voice and guitar work would front a band called Grinderswitch, one of the rockingest bands to call the South home during the peak days of Capricorn Records, The Allman Brothers Band, The Charlie Daniels Band and The Marshall Tucker Band. Dru Lombar.

Lombar has been around the world, several times, backing Bonnie Bramlett, performing with Grinderswitch, and opening shows for the Brothers, Charlie, Tucker and countless others. He's written a peach truck full of great songs, and recorded and played with the best of the best.

Today, he fronts his band of ten years, Dr. Hector and the Groove Injectors, based out of his Florida home offices. We sat down for a friendly chat with the guitar slinger just a few weeks before the tragic death of his brother of the road, Joe Dan Petty. What follows is that interview, in it's entirety.

How did you form Grinderswitch, and who was originally in the band?

I went to Macon in December of 1972. I had heard that Joe Dan Petty, who was working with The Allman Brothers Band was going to put together a band. So I went up there to see about that, and I hooked up with him. And with Larry Howard and Rick Burnett had come up from Aburndale, they were friends of Les Dudek. We ended up living in this house in the country where we lived and rehearsed, and wrote and played twenty-four hours a day. We lived off of $25 a week Joe Dan would pay us. He was the only guy working, as a crewman for the Brothers, so he was keeping us in cigarette, beer and food money. We did that until Paul Hornsby came along and listened to the tunes, and he got Phil Walden interested. Then we went into the studio, and off we went.

What was life like on the road during the seventies in a rock and roll band?

When you're 21 years old, and you're out there playing for ten or twenty thousand people a night, you know, you're just loving it, man. And people loving it, getting off on what you do, it was just a good, high-energy, positive situation. It was work, I mean. Like when we toured with the Brothers, they might have a day in between each gig. We'd spend that day driving. Say they were in Greensborro one night, and the next night they might be in New York or Atlanta. They'd get on their plane. They had a jet they chartered, and they'd pop right up. Us, we'd get in the van and hit the road. But we didn't care, you know? We spent most of out time on the road. When we weren't playing with the Brothers, we were playing with Skynyrd or the Tuckers or Charlie. We did a lot of dates with Charlie Daniels and Marshall Tucker. I mean a lot of dates. And we did the stuff with Wet Willie, and the clubs, of course, where we'd get to headline our own rooms.