It’s common practice for bands to change their names out of superstition as members come and leave; but Mike Dillon and Trey Acklen of Gross Ghost have stuck to their original intention through all the coming and going of the band support.
“I was tired of being in bands where the name changes when members dropped out. Me and Trey were like, ‘If it’s always the two of us and we keep it like that and it’s understood,’ then when someone quits because something else happens, then we don’t have to just fold the band completely.”
Dillon and Acklen have been playing together as a band for two years. After Dillon moved from the Outer Banks to Raleigh then on to Carrboro , he decided to give the music he had been writing with Acklen a try as a two-piece band. This became difficult when all the instruments needed for the live show flow were challenging to attend to.
“We played a couple of shows as a two piece but we couldn’t move around. Trey [ Acklen ] was doing drums and running keyboard at the same time,” Dillon said. “We needed more hands to be live so we could even look up from our instruments and get the energy of the song out there.”
The experience was too much for the band and the Gross Ghost decided to bring in a lead guitar and drummer to supplement.
“That’s another reason why I always say it was a two-piece but now it’s a four-piece,” Dillon said. “We went through many different phases. We’ve had like three drummers, like three guitar players and now we’ve settled on a good group that wants to be in a band.”
After cycling through multiple line-ups of different artists to fill the void of missing noise in the band, they have recently come to a solid group. Although change might still come in the future, the new members–Rob Dipatri , on lead guitar, and TJ Maiani , on drums–are still extremely excited to be an active part of the band as it stands today.
“These guys could come in and kind of read our minds,” Dillon said regarding new band members. “One time at our first practice … we took up our instruments and they were like ‘let’s try this song’ and they just nailed it right off the bat. The band we have now, they actually offer to help with songs.”
Dillon said as a four-piece their band’s personality is able to come full circle.
“Half of our record is demos we were working that we took to a studio to get worked on and mastered, and the other half is with the whole band that we recorded live.”
The band plans to tour all of North Carolina along with trips to New York, Alabama, Georgia and the rest of the Southeast. They are extremely excited for the local show of the Double Barrel Benefit Set up by NCSU student-radio station WKNC . Dillon, having lived in Raleigh for nearly a decade, remembers being a part of the audience in the previous years of the fundraising event.
“We’re really excited. It’s really funny cause when I lived in Raleigh years and years ago, I worked at King’s Barcade and they had it there with Future Islands and other ones and I thought then ‘I wish I had a band going right now to play it’ and years later we’re playing it,” Dillon said. “WKNC has done a lot. I’m from a beach town so when you turn on the radio and hear good music, it’s a little different than growing up with beach music and Top 40. WKNC has always been around in the Triangle and just to be able to play and help out is awesome.”
