The night Pecos & the Rooftops wrote the song that gave them their breakout success, they really weren’t even a working band yet – just a bunch of friends who liked to hang out and jam to cover songs.
The quintet’s frontman, Pecos Hurley, had just begun writing songs, and he was playing the chords to one when magic struck: One of the other guys began singing a chorus to it.
“Damn, that’s good,” Hurley recalled saying during a phone interview for BandWagon. “Do you care if I try to finish it?”
Finish it he did, and the result, “This Damn Song,” was a smash hit.
When he’s reminded that he will open for Dwight Yoakam, who was country before country was hip the way it is now, Ian Munsick’s reflexive response is exactly what you’d expect from a rising young star: “Oh, man, that’s gonna be awesome,” says the Wyoming native. But then he pauses and chuckles when asked how he thinks the crowd will respond to him at the 99th annual Greeley Stampede. Are those nerves?
“It’ll be interesting,” Munsick tells BandWagon. Munsick, after all, is doing what he can to push the music beyond the traditional sound that made Yoakam and others like him a legend.
