Matthew Grimm, frontman of New York's most famous obscure rock & roll band, the late-ish, great-ish Hangdogs, returned to his native Iowa a few years back to found his new equally obscure band, though less famously so, that quickly became the state's most blacklisted rock & roll troubadours.

Matthew Grimm & the Red Smear have proven themselves time and again, on their website and myspace page, the enemies of all things good, pure and proper. A revolving co-op of Iowa- and New York/New Jersey-based musicians — currently centered around the core line-up of Jason Berge (guitar), Bill Neff (drums) and Randall Davis (bass) — the Smear plays the punk-inflected powerpop rock & roll music liberally peppered with obscenity, salacious inuendo and treasonous invective that has more recently proven categorical truth versus dissembling propaganda with which the Assholes In Charge have furiously bombarded the Republic. In 2006 the band issued its first record, Dawn's Early Apocalypse, helmed by the multiplatinum producer Pete Anderson (Dwight Yoakam, Michelle Shocked, The Mavericks), and in early 2008 released a digital single, produced by Grimm, now quietly earning a buzz among progressive netroots and labor communities.

Though recent years' cross-country touring of an oil industry-raped economy, from New York to Texas to LA, nearly bankrupted him, Grimm is intrepidly still scheming as to how to get the Smear's second record made. He spends his spare nights seeding his ultimate legacy as a world-class leftist rantmonger and a filthy-mouthed, prophetic barroom sage, as well as counseling young people on their laughable "relationships."