It’s a chance to rub elbows with celebrities and enjoy an intimate concert, all while raising money for an important Lucas County charity.
On March 23, Bob Guiney, one of the most popular bachelors from the ABC show “The Bachelor,” and Scott Grimes, an actor from NBC’s “ER,” will take the stage in Toledo. The concert benefits Food for Thought, a social justice organization dedicated to feeding the hungry with a mobile food program.
“We are really hopeful people will come out,” Guiney said. “They are trying to raise as much money as they can for Food for Thought and hopefully people will see the value of that and come and hang out with us.”
Guiney and Grimes teamed up about a year ago. They tour together and play a many charity shows.
“We are doing it for causes that we believe in and causes that we think the money is really
going to go to a really good place,” Guiney said. “Plus, it’s an advantage because he is my best buddy and we get to hang out and play music together and all the while we are doing something good for someone else.”
Guiney and Grimes met after playing in Band From TV, a group of actors that has a passion for music and charity. They tour together and all the money raised at their shows goes to the actors’ favorite charities.
“It’s been the most rewarding thing because we do it all for charity,” Guiney said. “We have raised $3 million for charity during the past seven years.”
But with so many actors’ conflicting schedules, it’s hard to tour often, so Guiney and Grimes started their own band.
“What actually ended up happening is Bob and I were itching all the time to keep performing,” Grimes said. “So we said, ‘While we are on break, let’s do a very scaled down version of Band From TV,’ which ended up being something more original than Band From TV, because we don’t just do cover songs. We do our own stuff.”
Guiney added, “We were itching to play more and were anxious to put our creative minds together more and write some more real songs.
Because Band From TV is more about playing cover songs, and we love that, but we both had the desire to get up there and play our own stuff too.”
Guiney’s TV career began when he was an eligible bachelor not chosen by Trista Rehn (Sutter) on the 2003 season of “The Bachelorette,” before taking the lead on “The Bachelor.” He has hosted several TV shows, including HGTV’s “Showhouse Showdown,” as well as contributing to “Today.”
“My whole life, before I was on ‘The Bachelor’ or anything, I signed a record deal and I was a musician,” Guiney said. “I played Toledo several times. I was in a band called Fat Amy,
which we started back in 1991 and started touring with bands like The
Verve Pipe, Matchbox Twenty and The Smoking Popes.”
Grimes was also a songwriter and solo artist before his acting career took off in movies like “Robin Hood” and TV shows such as “Party of Five,” “Band of Brothers,” “ER” and his voice
work on “American Dad” and “Family Guy.” Both have a collection of original work they play at their concerts.
“We play our own original music that we played before we met,” Grimes said. “But we’ve noticed that accidentally we’ve changed our own stuff to combine what he loves and I love. The music that I’ve written before I met Bob is kind of changing as we sing together and has changed into the music that him and I sing together.”
Both men said the show will have people dancing to the music.
“We are a couple of guys with guitars who bang out a bunch of fun songs,” Guiney said. “There are a bunch of songs you will recognize, there are some songs you might recognize from back in the day that got a lot of radio play like my song ‘Girlfriend’ and Scott’s song ‘Sunset Boulevard.’ We like to mix songs that we like to play and the crowd likes and keep things moving and have some fun with it.”
Grimes added, “There is no pretentiousness about it; it’s nothing but fun. People are welcome onstage anytime. It’s a good old-fashioned pub show even if we are playing at a giant place. It’s really intimate and anything goes.”
The event is part of Free From Hunger 2013, a yearlong initiative spearheaded by Columbia Gas of Ohio, Toledo Free Press, WNWOTV and Moms on the Go and supported by Hollywood Casino Toledo, Wells Fargo Advisors and WSPD. All the money raised at the Guiney and Grimes concert will benefit Food for Thought, a social justice organization
dedicated to feeding the hungry with a mobile food program. The concert
will be at 7 p.m. March 23 at Forrester’s on the River in The Docks. Tickets are available online at http://store.feedtoledo.org and are $40 each.
“What we are doing for Food for Thought and Moms in Heels and these events in Toledo is awesome because instead of just sending a check from a show from a thousand miles away and hoping it helps, we are actually raising awareness,” Guiney said.
In addition to raising awareness, this concert is a homecoming for Guiney. He is a Detroit native who worked in Toledo years ago, for a phone book company.
“I love Toledo. There were some great restaurants and I even worked
in Bowling Green for a while,” Guiney said. “We are very excited. I’m excited
to introduce Scott to some people in the Midwest. We will give them a
great show and shake hands and meet people and have a lot of fun.”
