12/24/2025
I love this so so much!
It’s 7:30 on a Monday night, and Space Camp Studios, the home base of Loud and Heavy Booking, is thrumming with activity. Musicians who play in an assortment of local bands are scattered around two of the rooms, their instruments sitting atop old rugs thrown across the floor. 24-year-old Grant Fithen began the booking and promotion operation just two years ago come February, and he’s already been named 2025 Texas Country Music Awards “Booking Agent of the Year.”
Though he’s now a businessman, Fithen is a musician first. He became interested in music in high school and eventually got a guitar for Christmas. He tried to teach himself, but “quit very fast,” until a buddy of his who could play stayed the night and started showing him how. He fell in love with it and decided to pursue music in college, first attending Amarillo College for music basics, then West Texas A&M to learn the music industry. That led to an internship with 7th Planet Entertainment Group in the DFW area, and Fithen said, as soon as he started to get good at it, the internship ended.
“So I kind of want to still do this, and got my boss’s blessing to kind of start my own thing, and I’ve just been doing that since,” Fithen said. “Through that whole journey of college, I came into playing bass for a country band, and that’s actually how I met Brad from Ghosts of Gray County, and he was asking me if I could fill in. I filled in a few times and then decided to join and all that.”
Playing in bands for those years allowed Fithen to see an entirely different side of the music industry. He once thought local venues were stingy and didn’t pay as much as they should, but when he started booking and actually speaking to the owners, he learned how expensive it could be. Some of them had been burned by offering up-front money to bands who then couldn’t bring in the crowds to make it worth the booking fee. He had to explain to them what his dream for an Amarillo music scene was and what the city had the potential to become for aspiring artists.
“I always tell them, like, ‘Look, I don’t care if you work with me or not, but please listen to this. If you go do this on your own, we still have a music scene, and I’m happy.’ At the end of the day, that’s what I want,” Fithen said. “I want Amarillo to bring those guys here and send those guys out of here.”
Read more here: https://amarillotribune.org/2025/12/17/playing-on-a-dream-of-more-full-time-musicians-in-amarillo/