Junction 299 is:

Greg - barker (bio)
Marc - Les Paul Deluxe (bio)
Steve - guitar (bio)
Rob - bass (bio)
Marty - drums (bio)

A brief history of the Junction (Or how to make 1+1+1+1+1 = 299) by Marc Howell

It started off when a band Marty & I were in, Clementine, seemed to go into an especially long hibernation after a big outside gig at the now defunct Fox-n-Hound in Cary. We usually took a *long* time off after every gig (at least a month). This time the break stretched into 3 months, then 4.

Around the same time, Steve, Marty and I had taken to getting together and just jamming, and after a while we decided to make a band out of it. We pulled in Marty's brother-in-law, Tom, to do keys. I was then doing vocals/bass, with Steve on guitar and Marty on drums.

The original concept was to do hard driving roots-based rock; 'Rockabilly on steroids'. Tom had that honky-tonk keyboard thing *going on*, and gave it a really cool twist! My personal goal at the time was to play Sleazefest someday (and kinda still is). Anyway, we tried that lineup for a while, and it soon became very apparent that I couldn't play bass and sing at the same time without either the vocals or the bass going down the toilet.

So… Marty asked Rob to join us on bass so that I could get back to playing guitar.
(Rob and Marty used to work together.) As you'd expect, Rob fit right in. Since he could sing he also took on some of those duties. In addition to being an awesome bassist, I though he was a *much* better lead vocalist than I, so we promptly divvied up all of the vocal duties. We did that for a long while, but Rob and I both still had trouble singing lead and playing our respective instruments at the same time. Also, I wasn't taking on any leads for songs that I sang on because I couldn't handle the stress of singing and playing lead in the same song. (That's why Steve plays lead on most of the old songs in our repertoire.)

This lineup was working a lot better than before, but still wasn't quite there.

One day Tom got an offer from the Longbranch house band, and parted ways with us. We tried it for a while without him, but the sound was radically different! That's when we decided to get a vocalist and free me and Rob up to concentrate on our instruments and the backing vocals (to fill in the gaps left by Tom).

Marty (our go-to guy when we need fresh blood) knew Greg and knew that Greg claimed to be able to sing (though Marty'd never actually heard him), so he called Greg up and asked him if he'd want to come by and give it a shot. Greg showed up, sang, and we were sold. We hit on the name "Junction 299" and began playing out as often as we had a chance. (We soon had more chances than we wanted, and opted to play out only as often as we feel like it.)

Through all of this our sound has evolved from honky-tonk rockabilly to incorporate roots rock, metal, contemporary rock hits and the odd country number or song from a Saturday morning cartoon. (We're especially fond of the ones that deal with math.)