by Jennaye Derge
There’s a local distillery in Durango, Colorado, tucked in the far back corner of an indiscrete parking lot right in the middle of downtown. It’s small, non braggadocious, but should be because that is where the Stillhouse Junkies were born. The Stillhouse Junkies is Durango’s beloved hometown bluegrass-toned band, playing original roots, blues, funk, swing, and bluegrass music, and made up of three members: Alissa Wolf on the fiddle, Cody Tinnin on bass, and Fred Kosak on guitar and mandolin. The trio clicked into place after serendipitously moving to Durango around the same time (Wolf and Tinning originally from the area and moving back), and meeting each other by playing at weekly social jams around town and at the Durango Craft Spirits Distillery. After they saw they had something special, they solidified themselves as a band, calling themselves the Stillhouse Junkies, in honor of the distillery in which they formed. “It happened super organically and it was one of those things that evolved without any of us setting out to start a project,” Kosak said of their formation. For a while, the trio played for fun and for the free drinks (although, ironically, only one of them actually drinks) about 85 or 90 times over the first couple years, and in the spring of 2018 they unanimously got more serious and transitioned from playing just for drinks to playing real shows. They stopped playing covers, and started to play Kosak’s originals. The band started booking tours regionally and nationally,
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and once they entered their first contest – the Telluride Band Contest in the summer of 2018 – and placed third, they knew they had something good. “That was a pivotal moment for us…and what it did for us was show us that we still had a lot of work to do, but also showed us that we have potential,” Wolf said. After that contest, the band started playing and rehearsing every day. They planned, by themselves, their first full national tour in 2019 “just to see if we wanted to do it,” Tinnin said. None of them had ever experienced life on the musical road, but they took a leap of faith by booking 25 shows and expecting to play for one person, maybe a few, but ended up playing for many more. Folks who heard their music were responding well to their original songs and the band was able to come out of that tour with a little pocket cash, and a lot of inspiration. “That was part of the affirmation that we needed to keep doing what we were doing and keep the momentum up. It made us realize that we could scale it up to something bigger and we could keep rolling with it,” Wolf said. And roll they did. After that first tour, they were able to find a booking agent, which opened up more doors for the band. They circled their way around the country a couple times in 2019 and had a big