PORT ANGELES — The singer ignored that rule about not getting romantically involved with a bandmate.
But this woman Rose, as the story goes, did become Paul Givant’s sweetheart. She sang harmony with his Los Angeles-based band.
But then the harmony quit; Rose did too. She took the band’s gear to a pawn shop.
This was about five years ago, Givant says, and it gave the bluegrass-rock-punk-country band a name that stuck.
Rose’s Pawn Shop has since crisscrossed the country, its five men spreading music they call a “wholesome mishmash of creek mud, rusty nails and your mom’s cookin.’”
That’s the tale from the Rose’s Pawn Shop website, anyhow — and listeners will have the chance to hear for themselves Saturday night, Aug. 24. The band, with Port Angeles-born fiddle player Tim Weed — will pull into Olympic Cellars for a concert at 7 p.m.
“I’m told Rose’s Pawn Shop pairs nicely with a dark red wine,” Givant said in an interview this week.
That pairing makes for a dance party, his experience has taught him. The band will be pouring on the songs from its forthcoming, as-yet-untitled third album as well as from its CD “Dancing on the Gallows.”
Gates at Olympic Cellars, 255410 U.S. Highway 101, open at 6 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $13 in advance via www.Olympic
Cellars.com until 4 p.m. that day. At show time, they will sell for $15.
About that Rose incident: It gave the band something it needed, Givant said, since the group had “really bad, embarrassing” names before.
Givant, at 35, is one of the older Rose’s Pawn Shop players. He fell madly for bluegrass music — “anything twangy” — in high school. And though the drums were his first instrument, he later learned the guitar and then the banjo.
When assembling a band, Givant ran a posting on Craigslist and had the good fortune of attracting Weed, a classically trained violinist and 1996 graduate of Port Angeles High School.
In an interview with Examiner.com, Weed touted his public-school music education. The program here was strong, he said, adding that he went through high school playing in the orchestra every week.
He studied classical violin in college. It wasn’t until after college that fiddle and swing music wooed him.
Weed added that finding Roses’s Pawn Shop on Craigslist was quite the stroke of luck.
“Looking for a band to play with on Craigslist is pretty hit and miss,” he told Examiner.com. “So I feel really lucky to be traveling the country playing this music with such a fantastic group of musicians.”
Saturday night’s concert will benefit Clallam County’s Parenting Matters Foundation, which runs the First Teacher program for parents of young children. For information, see the Parenting Matters-First Teacher page on Facebook. For more about the winery’s summer concert series — which wraps up Aug. 31 with Polecat from Bellingham — see OlympicCellars.com or phone 360-452-0160.
