Matthew Grimm is an award-winning journalist and journeyman rock musician best known as a pioneer of New York’s roots rock scene, still renowned in some sub-strata of the music world for his ribald, disrespectful, right-wing-eviscerating and inevitably hook-y songs. Grimm currently fronts the band the Red Smear based in Iowa City, IA, a city that has reputedly blacklisted him from public performances.

Grimm burst onto the New York rock scene sometime in the mid-1990s — as much as one can "burst" while playing vaguely hillbillyesque rock in succession of crappy East Village starter clubs. He and his band, The Hangdogs, morphed into a raucous roots rock outfit, melding punk-rock-ish live energy and volumes with Grimm's irreverent songs. Within a few years, The Hangdogs had become New York's preeminent entrant into the roots rock/alternative country wave then threatening to become an American music genre. Establishing themselves as mainstays at the city’s long-running mecca for American roots music, The Rodeo Bar, the band became a Gotham institution, cited as one of the city’s attractions in no less than The New Yorker, even mentioned as a runner-up in an MSNBC.com story determining the “best bar-band in America.” As the respected New York music blog LucidCulture summarized on the occasion of a 2008 Hangdogs Rodeo Bar reunion: “For a substantial chunk of time in the late 90s and early zeros, there was no better New York band than the Hangdogs. Watching them evolve from overamped, politically incorrect honkytonkers to a magnificent, lyrically-charged Americana rock unit with a national following was one of the most satisfying things a concertgoer here could have witnessed — and countless did.”

Steadily, however, family and dayjob priorities winnowed the band’s original line-up away, eventually leaving Grimm the only original Hangdog touring with the band. Along the way, he honed his sound, losing much of the twang, sharpening his populist lyrics into a distinctly, often fervently progressive political voice and pushing the band’s sonic ethos more towards something verging on punk and powerpop. Grimm’s own family issues led him back to his native Iowa in early 2004. The next year he went to Southern California to make his first ostensible solo record, Dawn’s Early Apocalypse, produced by his manager, major label A&R veteran Peter Lubin, and multiplatinum producer and guitar great Pete Anderson. Of the record, released in the spring of 2006, The Pulse of the Twin Cities would aver, “Like the venerable yarn spinners who share his last name, Matthew Grimm utilizes common, everyday situations to bolster the effectiveness of his personal tales of terror and injustice in a world that’s already become horrific enough to no longer need fairy tales.” Grimm put together rotation of musicians both from Iowa City’s dynamic music community and former Hangdogs from the New York metro area, called it the Red Smear, and began touring from coast to coast, and to quite near the point of financial exhaustion.

Grimm in 2008 reunited with a compatriot of his New York days, Jason T. Lewis, former frontman of Star City, relocated to Iowa City for the University of Iowa’s prestigious Writer’s Workshop and, additionally, built a home studio to professional caliber, which he dubbed Sad Iron Studio. There he, Grimm and a Smear line-up including guitarist Jason Berge, bassist and multi-instrument threat Randall Davis and drummer Bill Neff made the follow-up Red Smear album. The fruit of their collaboration, The Ghost of Rock & Roll, will be released in May 2009 by Grimm and Iowa City’s own Mud Dauber Records, likely to the meager sales that have long been a hallmark of Grimm's career as the notion of rock & roll has been sold off to three soulless douchebags in suits who have deftly applied their MBAs to the music business in the same way enterprising denizens of the financial industry used theirs to help bolster America and make everything swell for everyone.

Smear members past and present

Jason Berge - guitar
Mick Hargreaves - bass
Randall Davis - bass, mandolin, steel, guitar
Dave Stengel - kit
Bill Neff - kit
Eric Straumanis - bass
Matt Winegardner - kit
Jason T. Lewis - guitar, back vox, percussion, synth
Matt Azzarto - guitar
Jeff Sale - kit
David Henderson - guitar
Lyle Hogue - bass
Dave Lumberg - bass
James Robinson - kit
Jim Viner - kit

Studio Smear members and special guests

Nate Basinger - B3 - The Ghost of Rock & Roll
Sarah Cram - back vocals - The Ghost of Rock & Roll
Pete Anderson - guitars - Dawn's Early Apocalypse
Josh Day - kit - Dawn's Early Apocalypse
Teenage Rob Douglas - bass - Dawn's Early Apocalypse
Michael Murphy - keys - Dawn's Early Apocalypse
Charlton Pettus - guitar - Dawn's Early Apocalypse
Dusty Wakeman - back vox - Dawn's Early Apocalypse
Doug Pettibone - back vox - Dawn's Early Apocalypse