Jacksonite Thomas Grisell grew up in the sixties, when he watched the musical landscape transform. He picked up the electric guitar at age 12, around the time when Fender and Gibson were manufacturing their first Stratocasters and Les Paul’s. All was on-track until a school talent show, for which he had prepared a cover of Bill Justis’s tune “Raunchy.” A classic case of stage fright gripped his fingers.
“Don’t ask me what happened. I can never describe it, but it happened.” he said in a recent interview with KHOL.
That left the audience laughing in confusion. He picked up his amp and walked off, giving up performing for quiet woodshedding. But through the years he never lost his passion for music, playing privately.
“Guitar was always there, it was always my friend,” he said.
His latest endeavor aims to establish a space for senior musicians to relive their glory days through a group he calls “The Old Goats” (a reference to the acronym, standing for greatest of all time). There isn’t yet an established group. Grisell is asking anyone who wants to join to reach out to him.
It wasn’t until a visit to Panama in his 60s that he reconnected with live performance. It was there he received his first Djembe drum and discovered the art of drum circles, transcendental mediation and rhythmic healing.
This style of drumming took him to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapahoe tribes in the Lander area, eventually leading him to the Tetons. Grisell experienced the gravity of those intimate performances first-hand and was forever changed.
“I see a lot of spirituality in all music, but this is the primary goal of what the rhythm and the trance gets you into,” he said.
Grisell acknowledged trance percussion is not the music du-jour.
“It’s not what we’re doing at the Million Dollar [Cowboy] Bar,” he said.
Since moving to Jackson in 2015, he’s befriended over a dozen musicians around his age who are itching to come out of the woodworks. He said some need a little extra encouragement to get back to what they love.
“It’s a part of the music scene in Jackson that doesn’t get the attention that it should,” he said.
He’s even using Artificial Intelligence to write chord charts for his poems. However, there’s no substitute for authentic songwriting, he said.
“It’s from the heart, in the heart-mind coherence, and it’s just something that I don’t think artificial intelligence could duplicate because it’s something that’s lived,” he said.
He understands that these musicians have a gift that gives back even more with time. As Jackson’s music scene reaches new heights with growing audiences at Snow King Concerts, the free Rendezvous Fest, and a forthcoming expansion of the Mangy Moose onto the Town Square, he sees an opportunity to keep Jackson’s music traditions alive.
Listen above for KHOL’s full conversation with Thomas Grisell.
