John Furr
It wasn’t that long ago when John Furr seemed to have disappeared from the local music scene.
He was a central figure in Columbia’s ’90s alternative rock heyday as a guitarist in Blightobody, a band that was probably the closest thing the city had to a traditional grunge success (even if they were a bit odder than the norm). The group would win an AT&T-designated “Best College Band in America” tag, giving it a one-off record deal for a single and an appearance on Conan O’Brien’s late-night show.
Furr would go on to play a pivotal role in the sound and recording of the hard-touring Danielle Howle and the Tantrums up through their dissolution in the early 2000s. It was the end of that band, Furr says, that led him to step away from music for a few years.
“We toured the entire country, put out a couple of albums. We did all the showcases, South by Southwest, all of that stuff,” he recalls. “But that kind of died down and then Danielle went off in her own direction. And we were getting to that age where we started thinking about our lives, our careers outside of the dream of rock and roll.”
So Furr pulled the plug on music entirely in the late 2000s, devoting himself to his IT professional career. He went years without playing at home, going to shows, or even listening to much new music.
It was, interestingly enough, listening to electronic music on Pandora that pulled him out of his shell.
“I didn’t even touch a guitar for a couple of years, but what drew me out of that was electronic music production,” he explains. “I started learning soft MIDI [production]. And then I combined that with starting to play guitar again.”
Reinvigorated, he began accumulating new pursuits in 2013. Long a sort of independent recording engineer, first at Sound Lab in Lexington and later at the Jam Room and at home under the moniker Pow Pow Sound. He recorded his friends, like Milton Hall’s Coats From Japan project and the instrumental Modalcoda’s efforts. In addition to Hall’s group, he also started playing guitar with Stan Gardner in the wry country group Buck Stanley and, most recently and seriously, with Zach Seibert in the darkly sumptuous Americana outfit E.Z. Shakes.
And, perhaps most importantly, he also started making his own music again, both in electronic forms (Slow Arrow, SPF 6000) and as a rock musician again in what would become Grand Republic.
From the outside looking in, Grand Republic might seem like his central creative vehicle, but Furr doesn’t necessarily see it that way.
“It’s [just] an outlet for one of the directions that I’m interested in pursuing creatively,” he contends. “It’s really more about songwriting to me, and also collaborating with the people in the band.”
Formed with longtime musical partner Troy Tague on drums and eventually adding a host of other scene veterans, the band developed its own distinctively hazy sound that recalls guitar-heavy British avant-pop groups The Stone Roses, and The Charlatans, but also the ambling sprawl of Built to Spill and the sonic tinkering of Spoon.
“In all of the bands I’ve been in, I’m the texture guy,” Furr points out. “I didn’t come up playing along to Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin. And in the past, I did kind of bad ’90s alternative rock or pseudo-Americana. With the Grand Republic stuff, I wanted to do something that really was unlike what I had been before.”
Grand Republic is far from a consuming force in his mind, though. He says he would like to produce other groups as time allows, and he continues to make electronic music and tour a bit with E.Z. Shakes.
It’s his enthusiasm for Columbia’s music scene as a whole that comes through most, which is why he’s frequently spotted running sound for things like the Columbia Museum of Art’s Arts & Draughts or concerts at the First Thursday on Main art crawl, or doing things like taking up Phil Cook’s guitar role in the Lay Quiet Awhile reunion at State Street Pub on Sept. 15.
“There’s some seriously creative stuff that is still happening in Columbia. I think the music scene is strong and better than it was before,” he says. “I want to help everybody. The stronger everyone in the scene can be, the better it is for everyone.”
What: Grand Republic
Where: New Brookland Tavern, 122 State St.
When: Friday, Aug. 31, 8 p.m.
With: The Soul Mites (25th anniversary performance),
(not)Jebel
Price: $6 ($10 under 21)
More: newbrooklandtavern.com
