Aug 5, 2013 5 min read

Punching a clock and strumming a guitar before cruise-ship audiences may yield a steady paycheck, but its creative boundaries are not exactly limitless.

“That’s beyond an understatement,” according to 36 year-old Stockdale resident Gary Antol. The Duquesne University music school graduate did his time plundering the Motown and big band canons on the high seas before eventually migrating back to this area and making music that is both more fulfilling and pays the bills.

Antol, along with Mt. Pleasant resident Andy Gregg, founded the three-piece bluegrass ensemble the Weedrags, and they’ve managed to attract notice around the region with their well-crafted songs, shimmering harmonies and nimble playing. Along with hosting an acoustic jam every Tuesday night at Rinky Dink’s Roadhouse in Amity, they’ve turned up recently at the Whiskey Rebellion Festival in Washington, at Jamboree in the Hills outside Morristown, Ohio, and at the Fayette County Fair in Dunbar. In the weeks ahead, they are booked at California’s Jozart Center for the Arts, festivals in Slippery Rock, Johnstown and Hickory and the Allegheny Country Club.

The busy schedule means “we got to quit our day jobs and this is all we do now,” Gregg, who is 27, explained.

Specializing in the kind of old-timey, Americana music that has received a second breath of life in recent years by artists like Alison Krauss and Union Station and the mega-selling “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack, the Weedrags came into being when Gregg and Antol were goofing around in a rehearsal room when they were part of another band that proved to be short-lived. Gregg began slapping an upright bass while Antol starting playing along on the guitar, and they decided they liked what they heard.

“It worked right out of the gate,” Antol said, and Gregg agrees. “We immediately started enjoying it,” he said. Third member and fiddle player Libby Eddy was added late last year.

“Getting to play with good people and playing good original material and to be able to have a full-time job doing what you love, you couldn’t ask for anything more,” said Eddy, a 27-year-old Morgantown, W.Va., native who grew up attending bluegrass festivals and square dances. The group’s moniker, which instantly summons up images of sneezing and wheezing, was coined during one of their maiden appearances. “Gary and I both suffer from terrible fall allergies,” Gregg said. “Fall of 2010 is when we started the band and, being vocalists, it plagues us for four months of the year. We went to an open mic (night), and the host asked what our name was. Gary wanted to say “The Ragweeds,” since we were both stuffed up. But he got it backwards with the Weedrags by accident, and we just stuck with it.”

All three members of the Weedrags come to the group with diverse musical backgrounds. Along with working on cruise liners and amusements parks, Antol was a member of the regional country band Ruff Creek; Eddy has participated in choirs and performed in musical theater and was a member of the band 600LBS of Sin, which played Southern-style rock in the mold of the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd; Gregg studied to be a recording engineer and was a member of a death metal outfit before rediscovering the country music he grew up on after he attended a 2005 solo show by Mike Ness of the punk band Social Distortion.

“He had an upright bass and steel guitar,” Gregg remembered. “I was raised on country, and I got back into it through rockabilly and came back to my senses.”

The Weedrags have an EP and an album to their credit. The long-player, “Deemston Hiccup,” is named after the tiny borough in the southeastern corner of the county, and many of their other tunes deal with life and working folk in the region. Antol said they appreciate the honesty of musicians like Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp, who have sung about hard times in their hometowns and they try to write songs “about things we know.”

For Antol and Gregg “to be able to be talk about where they’re from and what’s going on in their hometowns and be able to write it down the way they do, I think that’s amazing,” Eddy said.

What’s the next step for the Weedrags? They wouldn’t mind gaining greater exposure on the festival circuit, but feel some ambivalence about whether they would respond if a major music label came rapping on their door, or even an independent imprint like Rounder Records, which specializes in bluegrass and alternative country.

Citing the obligations you incur when you sign on the dotted line and are no longer the captains of your own destiny, Antol said, “I don’t know if the monetary payoff would be that great down the road. I’m not sure it would really help us all that much.”

According to Eddy, “As long as we keep playing and keep getting better and better and make a decent living doing it, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”