The Steamboat Pilot & Today

Damon Wood is well aware that to ask something like, “So, what’s the difference between playing bars in Colorado and touring with James Brown in Europe?” is to ask something extraordinarily stupid.

But he plays it off, and answers the question in the friendliest possible way.

“We don’t play for nearly as many people,” Wood said on the phone from Las Vegas, where he’s hanging out for a few days before starting another leg of a continuing regional tour. On Saturday, he’ll be in Steamboat Springs with his three-piece band Harmonious Junk for a show at Mahogany Ridge Brewery and Grill. The band’s second record is due out soon, and includes a guest appearance from original J.B.’s bassist Fred Thomas.

Up until about two years ago, Wood played guitar for the Godfather of Soul’s rotating band, and has credits with the caped crusader of funk that include a Bonnaroo performance, a spot on a Black Eyed Peas record and the guitar lines on Brown’s last studio recording with the Soul Generals, an unreleased track (available on MySpace) called “Gut Bucket Funk.”

Wood talked about how he ended up on tour with the hardest working man in show business, how that tour got him into jazz and funk, and how playing Colorado mountain towns measures up to all that.

4 Points: Tell me something about Harmonious Junk.

Damon Wood: We kind of mix up funk and some blues, rock and jazz … so we’re kind of semi-improv. I used to play with James Brown, so we mix with that sort of jam band, rock improv kind of thing.

4 Points: How did you get hooked up with James Brown?

DW: I actually was playing in some short-lived band in Las Vegas and somebody (in the band) kind of got noticed by him. I ended up sort of being in his opening act — he had this act he was kind of managing.

4 Points: So how did you end up in his band?

DW: We were already with him, and we already had passports and stuff like that, and I got a call one day that somebody couldn’t make this Europe tour.

So of course I got a lot of world touring experience, did some recordings with him and some concert DVDs with him.

That was really cool. The James Brown Band was a really cool learning experience. I learned a lot more about jazz and funk coming from that band — before that I had more of a rock background.

4 Points: How did Harmonious Junk come together, and how did you end up in Colorado?

DW: I started it in Vegas, and there was just kind of no place to play (in Vegas). … There was just no place for an original band. It seems like you can only play a couple times a month in Vegas.

I ended up kind of getting hip to Colorado and some towns there, and now instead of playing a couple times a month, we’ve got like 28 gigs in a month. And it’s all pretty close to Denver — we’ve worked a couple of spots like Mahogany Ridge that are only a couple of hours away, and we always see the same kind of people.

We can hit a lot of these places every two or three months, and it’s a really good mix out there.

4 Points: What can people expect to hear at the show?

DW: We’re going to be a three-piece when we play in Steamboat. Sometimes we have keys and sometimes we have sax when we’re closer to Denver, but we’re mostly three-piece this year. We do maybe a little more than half of the originals now, and we kind of do our own takes on the covers we do.

We do stuff from Zappa to Ween to Grateful Dead. We do some old blues stuff, some old funk stuff; we do a couple of James Brown tracks. And a little “Sanford and Son” theme.