"David Jacobs-Strain and Bob Beach blew me away last summer….As we say at home, they knocked my hat in the creek. I can’t envision the audience that could fail to take them from the first chord to the last. Hear them yourself as soon as you can."
- TOM PAXTON
DAVID JACOBS-STRAIN & BOB BEACH sit side-by-side on the stage. A Pogreba guitar, built by the man who built the cannon Hunter S. Thompson was shot out of, sits loosely in David’s hands. Bob adjusts the distance to his 1940s RCA microphone then leans over the box propped open at his side and grabs 2 harmonicas. They’re calm. Poised. The crowd has no idea what they are in for next.
They’re a multigenerational, bi-coastal duo who have come together for explosively wonderful concerts since 2010, including here at The Step. They currently perform between 70 and 100 shows a year on both east and west coasts, delighting and bewildering roots music lovers.
David Jacobs-Strain, song poet and fierce slide guitar player, comes from Eugene, Oregon with a deep love of blues and roots music shining in every one of the songs he writes. Once immersed in the music of masters like Robert Johnson, Taj Mahal and Jackson Browne, he now plays his own sound and his own stories with a virtuosity uniquely and powerfully his own. As a teenager he played street corners and farmers markets, buying his first steel guitar with quarters he saved up. Later, when he dropped out of Stanford to play full time, he had already appeared at festivals across the country, often billed as a blues prodigy and fighting against being pegged as a novelty act. “I wanted to tell new stories, it just wasn’t enough to relive the feelings in other people’s music.”
He has wowed audiences at Merlefest, Telluride Blues Festival, Philadelphia Folk Festival, Hardly Strictly, Bumbershoot, and Blues to Bop in Switzerland. On the road, he’s shared the stage with Lucinda Williams, Boz Scaggs (more than 60 shows), Etta James, The Doobie Brothers, George Thorogood, Robert Earle Keen, Todd Snider, Taj Mahal, Janis Ian, Tommy Emmanuel, Bob Weir, T-Bone Burnett, and Del McCoury.
Bob Beach plays harmonica with calm fierceness. A mouth-harp maestro who swaggers into a solo like The Marlboro Man, he then quietly leaves the set - while the rest of us wonder what just happened and how such a tiny instrument could possibly sound that haunting. As a working professional musician for more than 40 years he’s brought harmonica, flute, and vocals to a broad scope of genres.
A native Philadelphian, Bob worked in bands and musical projects from 1976 to 1997 while based in Pittsburgh. He has recorded or performed with acts such as; Ollabelle, Langhorne Slim, The Avett Brothers, Pat Wictor, Beaucoup Blue, Fruit and many more. Beach was also a sound engineer at The World Café Live music venue for 15 years. Bob Beach is a working musician who carved out his own career on his own terms, raised a daughter, stayed married 40 years, and is still playing for the love of it, the heart of it, and the fun of it.
A powerhouse together, David and Bob play unrestrained and straight from the heart. They’ve been playing The Eighth Step since we first heard them almost a decade ago - if you haven’t heard them LIVE, it’s way past time!