Monday, Oct. 8

 

Over the last few weeks, G. Love and Special Sauce have been working to record several new tracks for the Long View Farms and Down and Dirty sessions. The band will hit up its national tour on Saturday, Oct. 20 at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, and will continue to play at venues in Durham, New Hampshire; Burlington, Vermont and Troy and Ithaca, New York, to name a few. What’s the secret behind this band’s success - Read more to find out.

Learning to play guitar at age 8, Garrett Dutton had hit the streets in his native Philadelphia by high school, playing solo the songs he had written under musical influences Bob Dylan, Run-DMC , the Beastie Boys and Schooly D.

In 1993, Dutton met Philadelphia-raised drummer Jeffrey “The Houseman” Clemens and began working as a duo, until they met bassist Jim “Jimi Jazz” Prescott - also a Philly native - a few months later and the three formed what is now popularly known as G. Love and Special Sauce. It only took a year for the group to produce their first self-titled album with Epic Records, which featured the songs “Cold Beverage,” “Blues Music” and “Shooting Hoops” and sold more than 350,000 copies in the US alone. More than a decade - and seven albums - later, the group is still going strong. In an Aug. 2006 interview with Mp3.com, Dutton, a.k.a G. Love, said he sometimes can not believe how far the band has come.

“In a sense, it’s a snapshot of that moment in time when you?’re making a record,” G. Love said. ?But it?s also a lot more than that. And these days every time you drop a record it is going to be a dictating factor as to how the next year and a half or two years of your life is going to go, career-wise. So it’s important to just, when you get in the studio, just try and make the best record you can.”

This year the band released a new single, “Beautiful,” from its 2006 album “Lemonade,” and is embarking on a national tour through September of this year. G. Love and Special Sauce tickets are available for venues from Arizona to Virginia.

As the group continues to grow and flourish, their unique sound ? which has often been referred to as hip-hop mixed with soul-funk an blues ? has started to evolve and become more mature and intricate while keeping with the same overall playful mood that most G. Love songs take on.

As for the future of the band, G. Love told Mp3.com he feels confident it can handle anything thrown their way - even excessive fame, which could very well be a possibility given the recent attention the group has been receiving from the release of “Lemonade.”

“No one can really say anything about us musically because we?ve proven ourselves,? G. Love said. “And I think we have our two feet on the ground as musicians. Whether we got a big record or not, you couldn’t say that we were sell-out or one hit wonder or anything like that.”

Always wanted to see G. Love perform live in concert? Check out the band’s official Web site to learn more about tour dates.