Yes, they play Grateful Dead songs and yes, they attract a lot of former Deadheads to their shows. But don’t call the Dark Star Orchestra a tribute band.
“It’s more like performance art in a way,” says Dark Star keyboardist Scott Larned. “It’s more than performing the songs, it’s re-creating the whole concert. I think that by choosing to do it this way, we put ourselves in a different category.”
And that category has yet to be named, because what attracts hundreds of loyal fans to Dark Star’s shows every Tuesday night is a relatively new concept in musical homages.
Made up of former members of Uncle John’s Band, Citrus and the Deadbeats, Dark Star is not quite a cover band and not quite a tribute band. Instead, it has spawned a new kind of musical creature — one that studies tapes of specific Dead shows and re-creates them with as much precision and faithfulness to that moment as possible.
This successful concept may sound like a great idea now, but it wasn’t such an easy sell at the beginning.
“We usually only book bands with original material, so I was a little skeptical,” remembers Martyrs talent booker Ray Quinn, who now has one of the busiest Tuesday night music rooms in the city. But after hearing a tape of one of Dark Star’s early rehearsals, Quinn changed his tune.
The band’s next challenge, in an era flooded with post-Dead jam bands, was to persuade Dead enthusiasts that it was worth a listen.
“The first week it started with like 80 people,” Larned says of the band’s early shows last November. “But then it doubled every week and now it is about 350 to 400 each time.”
The crowds have grown so large that, last month, the Orchestra played a weekend show at the Park West — finally allowing an all-ages crowd to check them out — and traveled to New York to play the Wetlands Preserve.
This month band members are back in town playing their weekly gig at Martyrs, where we caught them in mid-groove on a recent steamy Tuesday night.
Upon entering the club, you’re struck by the youth of the crowd, the sea of blissful expressions and the room’s distinctively laid-back vibe. A glance at the floor reveals dozens of Teva- and Birkenstock-clad feet moving in disjointed unison, while up on stage, six regular-looking longhaired band guys are singing and playing just like the Grateful Dead. Back by the soundboard, fans have set up recorders to, yes, tape these replications of Dead shows.
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Unlike Elvis performers or Beatlemaniacs, Dark Star doesn’t attempt to replicate the Dead’s physical look (it would be especially hard for Larned, as Dead had seven keyboardists, including some with beards), but they do work hard to capture a verisimilitude of sound.
“We try to get as close as we can to the way they delivered the show,” he explained.
“There were instances where verses were dropped from songs or picked back up or where a different band member sang a verse, and we stick to that and we are pretty good about getting the same sound. For instance, John Kadlecik, who is our Jerry Garcia, uses different guitar tones for different years based on whatever equipment Jerry had at that time, and so maybe Jerry would have done a flute solo through a MIDI controller in some song in 1993 that he wouldn’t have done in 1992.”
These tonal, technical and lyrical details provide just a few of the clues that fans use to solve the weekly riddle of which show (or, at least, era) the band is re-creating. To those outside the Dead community, this may seem like an impossible task, but there are several factors in the audiences’ favor. First, the Dead never played the same set list twice; second, Deadheads are avid collectors of live show tapes; and finally, many fans have come equipped with a cheat sheet of sorts.
“There’s this book called `Deadbase’ and it is basically the encyclopedia of Dead shows,” Larned said. “It has all the set lists and all the songs they played and a list of how many times they a played a song and what shows they played it at. Just all sorts of little trivia like that. And so in our first few shows we would have people bring `Deadbases’ and then sit and with every song they could get closer to narrowing down what show we were doing, and finally after four or five they would know what it was and start calling out the song before we would play it.”
But it is more than the members’ vast knowledge of Dead songs that Larned believes separates them from the rest of the nostalgia groups.
“I think there is an aspect of celebration to the Dead’s music that supersedes (mere impersonator fare),” he said. “It takes a little precedence. I think a lot of people are hesitant to see us because they think we’re another Dead cover band, that we’re the same old, same old. But, from my experience, people that come once change their minds and come back a whole lot.”
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Dark Star Orchestra, 9 p.m. Tuesdays (through August, except the first week), Martyrs, 3855 N. Lincoln Ave.; $5. 773-404-9494.