Photo of The Grift in 2000... Ben, Rian, Jeff, Clint and Chris

Onto the second installment of The History of The Grift, the year 2000. With the dawn of the new millennium, The Grift (called Sunday Slide at the beginning of 2000) was starting to take shape. We were able to catch up with Clint and Jeff with some memories of 2000... Also - take a look at the video on the History of The Grift page from the year 2000. We were able to record a Zoom between Clint, Jeff, Ben and Rian where they recounted some memories as well!

CLINT - The millenium NYE show was EPIC.  We played at Sherpa & Yeti’s in Breckenridge, CO.  We sold it out and the tickets were $75 a piece.  Still perhaps the most expensive Grift show ever.  But man, what a night.  I remember playing a lot of “Solid Gold” era tunes around this time.  “Treat Her Like a Lady” by The Cornelius Brothers comes to mind.  May have even ended the night with Purple Rain??

We were just starting to get immersed in the Boulder music scene.  We all had “real” jobs.  I was at Howard Brinton Star Power Systems, a real estate education company.  I only worked 4 days a week so we could play Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.  We were playing a variety of places like CU, Herman’s Hideaway in Denver, The Redfish in Boulder, and of course, up in Summit County (the Goat in Keystone, etc) as well.

JEFF - At this point we were still calling ourselves “Sunday Slide”, named after one of Clint’s early songs. We knew it was just a temporary name, but we used it for quite a while. We were growing a fanbase and even had a group of friends and fans who would follow us to every show. We started calling them the “MFU (Mobile Fan Unit)”. It was great to have that support in the early goings.

CLINT - We recorded Hotel Gillaspie in 2000. Some of the recording was done in the basement at our house. Some was done in the Warren Miller Warehouse.

JEFF - We named the album after the band house on Gillaspie Drive. We had a string of visitors and people crashing there and we started calling it Hotel Gillaspie as a nod to our nosy neighbors who complained we were running a hotel.

CLINT - Throughout the year, we would come back East for pretty extensive tours.

JEFF - We did two tours that year as Sunday Slide. One in the Spring and one in the Fall. As well as we were doing in CO, a lot of our connections were still back East. We realized we could book pretty full, semi-lucrative month long tours there and expand our fanbase on the road. We finished our first EP, Hotel Gillaspie, right before the Spring tour, and couldn’t get it sent to us in time to leave for the tour. We ended up having the CDs sent to a hotel in Harrisburg, PA and drove straight from CO to PA to meet it.

CLINT - I remember receiving the Hotel Gillaspie CDs and putting them together in their jewel cases in a hotel room in Harrisburg, PA before we started a multi day run with Dispatch.

JEFF - We spent the night stuffing our self-printed artwork and CDs into jewel cases and finished with just enough time to get a few hours of sleep before driving the next day to play at Princeton with Dispatch. Thus beginning the first of several multi-day runs with Dispatch. The Spring tour was with Pat on drums and the Fall was our first with Chris on the drums.

CLINT - We definitely rode their (Dispatch, formerly One Fell Swoop, formerly Wood River Bandits:) coattails and that’s how we started playing all the boarding school shows (which was our recipe for success in those early years).

JEFF - Sadly, in the Fall of 2000, we had move out of Hotel Gillaspie because the owner was selling it. However, not before we threw an epic moving out party!

That concludes our memories of the year 2000! Stay tuned for the next episode, when we move on to 2001. Sunday Slide changed their name to The Grift in December of 2000, but Jeff will get into details for the next installment. And, of course, now for the pictures we were able to find... the last picture of Clint and Jeff was from a trip back to the old stomping grounds