Red's Blues

Name: Red's Blues
Start: 2025-10-19T14:30:00-0700
End: 2025-10-19T16:00:00-0700
Location: The Back Room

Sun, Oct 19, 2:30pm - 4pm PDT

The Back Room

Berkeley CA, United States

The Back Room

3970 followers · Contact host

Event description

Red's Blues is back for another great roots and original Americana Blues show, featuring Beth Reid-Grigsby, aka Sacramento Red, (lead/harmony vocals), RW Grigsby (bass), Doug Crumpacker (guitar), and Tim Wilbur (drums).

They’ve got new songs and a lot of favorite old standards and originals to share. Red’s Blues was founded by RW and Beth Grigsby in 2012, but all members have been playing and performing for decades. All of the band are members of the Sacramento Blues Hall of Fame, and RW is a Blues Music Award recipient from the Blues Foundation. They are members of the Sacramento Blues Society, the Blues Foundation, the Santa Barbara Blues Society, the Golden Gate Blues Society, as well as the North Central Florida Blues Society, and have released four CDs to date.

Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 at the door. Children under 12 are free. Advance tickets are available at the link below, or you may purchase your tickets at the door the night of the show.

Doors open one half hour before show time. We accept cash or Venmo only at the door.

The Back Room is an all-ages, BYOB (for those 21+) space, dedicated to (mostly) acoustic music of all kinds. You are welcome to bring your own food and adult beverages with no additional corkage fee. The venue is ADA accessible. If you need more information or have any questions, please call us: #510-381-1997.

To join our mailing list, please click here. Thank you for your support!

Please note: Although masks are no longer required, we strongly encourage their use to keep everyone safe in our intimate space.

Tickets for good, not greed Humanitix dedicates 100% of profits from booking fees to charity

Hostinformation

The Back Room

3970 followers

Contact host

View profile

When, as a young man in 1981, Sam Rudin moved from his native Philadelphia to the East Bay, he quickly fell in love with the Freight & Salvage, Berkeley’s quirky little 87-seat concert hall.

Filled with comfortable thrift store furniture and an informal ambience of appreciative attentiveness, the Freight was a perfect fit for performers of modest renown and acoustically-based music.

As a solo (albeit high-energy) pianist, Sam’s music fit the bill, and the Freight became Sam’s home base. In the absence of other Freight-like rooms, Sam turned his solo performer attention to the outdoor fair and festival circuit, and later started the jazz/blues band Hurricane Sam & the Hotshots.

Now, maybe it’s all the energy he put into becoming a master piano teacher, or maybe the fair and festival circuit just doesn’t have the right ingredients to nurture a high-profile career. Whatever the reason, despite critical acclaim, four CD’s, and a whole bunch of happy audiences, years later Sam was still a performer of modest renown, and he missed that great little room.

As the Freight grew and expanded, ultimately arriving at the gorgeous 420 seat theater that it occupies today, Sam started to feel that maybe it was up to him to recreate that wonderful small space. No longer a young man, it would be his late-life adventure.

Eventually, he found the perfect spot: a beautiful space with brick walls and vaulted wood ceilings right by the Arts District in downtown Berkeley. As of April 2016, it is open for business, complete with the requisite thrift store furniture.

The space is actually the back room of a larger building, so of course it is called The Back Room, and the tag line on its logo says it all – “an intimate place for music.”

The site, at 1984 Bonita Ave., also functions as Sam’s teaching studio, so if you’re looking for “The Piano Lessons You’ve Always Wanted,” now you know where to find them.

Get tickets

Sun, Oct 19, 2:30pm - 4pm PDT

The Back Room

Berkeley CA, United States

Hosted by The Back Room