Two of my favorite North Carolina boys.
Today, Luke Combs was the guest on Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s podcast, The Dale Jr. Download, this week, and it was a great and lengthy conversation that details Luke’s childhood in Asheville and Huntersville, North Carolina all the way through his college years in Boone and ultimate country music superstardom.
And of course, Jr. had to ask Luke about his time in college at Appalachian State University, which Luke admits was more about having fun a lot of the time than it was about doing school. Actually, Luke also mentioned that he hopes to go back eventually and finish his degree, which is really cool and something I think he’ll do when he has a bit more time.
Right now, he’s busy playing stadiums and being the father to two boys under two years hold, so yeah, he’s got his hands pretty full…
Anywho, he told the fascinating story abut how his first gig in Boone didn’t come the conventional way. In fact, Luke was a bar bouncer at Town Tavern (now called Ale House), which is almost on campus, located on Rivers Street in Boone.
He was learning to play guitar at the time, teaching himself, and asked his boss, Justin, if he could start playing some there too:
“The bar I was working at, I asked my boss Justin, I was like ‘Hey man, I’ve been learning to play and stuff, can I play a show here?’
He was like ‘Well, in the lease, we’re not supposed to have live music because there’s apartments upstairs.’ And so I said, ‘Well, I live upstairs, and I know everybody else that lives upstairs, there’s only seven apartments up there… if I play, we would all be downstairs.
He was like, ‘Well, it’s too much of a risk, because if I lose my lease, I’m screwed. I go out of business.’ I could understand that, I’ve got respect for that. I was bummed out, of course, ‘cuzI wanted to play.”
And Luke, being the ambitious young musician he was, had another idea. While hanging out at a bar called Parthenon Cafe (which is sadly no longer there) with some of his rugby teammates, Luke asked the owner if he could play a show there instead:
“The owner of Parthenon was awesome, he was a total wildcard, just kind of whatever… just whatever happens he was down with. And I asked him the next week, ‘Hey man, can I play a gig here?’
He was like ‘Yeah, whatever, just go over to the calendar and put it on there.’ Like that was how my first show happened, you know? I wish it was that easy to book shows the rest of the time after that.”
He picked a date, the owner charged $1 cover and gave Luke some free and he wound up borrowing a guitar and some other equipment from some friends. 200 people came to the show, where he played mostly country covers, and Luke made $200 during first show.
He used that as leverage to get Justin to let him play at the bar formerly known as Town Tavern, which was a brilliant move and set him up for major success… also pretty damn risky and badass for someone that really hadn’t proved themselves aside from that one show:
“I used that show, I went back to the bar I was working at and I said ‘Hey, I had this show across the street… I mean it couldn’t be a quarter mile from each other, if that.
If there wasn’t buildings in between you could see the bars, they were that close. And I said ‘Hey man, I played a show over here, and 200 people came out to the show.’
And I said, ‘I can either continue to do that over there, or I could do that over here, kinda up to you.’ Justin was like ‘Yeah man, what the hell, let’s do it.'”
And the rest, as they say, is history… Luke was a massive hit in his college town, and not many years after that, he was on his way to Nashville after released a hit single we all know as “Hurricane” (which was also filmed in Boone).
Magical times…
“Hurricane”
