The Truth About Cover Bands, by Tom Dinard

Twenty summers ago, I was a Grateful Dead cover fan. I was a real Grateful Dead fan first, of course, but the group that packed football stadiums and had the real Jerry Garcia on guitar didn’t play a smoky shithole called the Right Track Inn two towns over from mine every Saturday night from 10 to 3. So on most weekends, it was the best we could do.

They were first called the Volunteers, they became the Zen Tricksters, they had a Jerry sound-alike guy named Jeff Mattson, a Bobby Weir sound-alike guy named Tom Circosta, a female singer named Jen who got hotter with every Miller Lite consumed and “White Rabbit” heard, plus keyboards, bass and drums. They even inspired a parking-lot scene in between their three sets where you could buy dimebags and occasional whip-it balloons. Here’s a clip of a show I probably attended:

Pretty good, right?

Good enough for my friends and me to keep coming back, and good enough that several members have gone on to jam with the survivors of the real Dead after Jerry’s death. Back then, their mimicry of the singing voices, on-stage banter and rock-star moves of Messrs. Garcia, Weir, Phil Lesh et al was humorous only in its uncanny likeness to the original – not because anyone felt these guys were pathetic for trying to pretend to be something they weren’t. The only lame thing about them was a large portion of the roughly twenty percent of their material that wasn’t Dead music — the bad twelve-bar blues covers (is “bad twelve-bar blues” redundant?) and dreadful original music.

Fact is, I was never ashamed to see the Zen Tricksters. I was never ashamed for the guy selling “kind veggie burritos” out of a cart in front of the Right Track. I was never ashamed to attempt to move to the rhythm with the same stoned white-boy gyrations that I employed on the two or three yearly occasions upon which the real Grateful Dead graced a stage in front of me. I don’t think I ever tripped on acid for the Zen Tricksters, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have if a young Rosicky Jones had walked in one night during “Bird Song” and squirted a liquid dose or seven on my hand from a dropper bottle.

The music might not have been “real,” but everything else was. The Tricksters were passionate about the material they were interpreting. They soared when they were supposed to soar, ebbed when they had to ebb, and delivered the key lines — “If you get confused, then listen to the music play” and “Nothin’ left do do but smile, smile, smile” and “The sky was yellow and the sun was blue” — in a true way, making the crowd of two hundred not only the Dead’s, but theirs.

Last week, while my wife and son checked out the bouncy-houses and undistinguishable deep-fried treats of a weekend fair in a mountain town not too far from our town, I wandered through throngs of pierced and tatted-up teens to a small stage featuring a Fleetwood Mac “tribute” band called Second Hand Newz. The band looked the part, with a Stevie Nicks impersonator that went as far as wearing flowing black witch clothes, hanging scarves and frilly, weird witchy things from the mic stand, and making me wonder if there were urban-legend rumors that she, too, employed a roadie to blow eight-balls of coke up her butthole through a straw — and if maybe it was a Krazy Straw. She didn’t sound very much like Stevie, but I didn’t care.

The bass player was hiding his bald head with a baseball cap and had a white beard, just like the real John McVie. The drummer was just a drummer. The lead guitarist looked nothing like Lindsey Buckingham and couldn’t sing, so the male lead vocal parts went to the keyboard player, a dead ringer for Helen Mirren playing Christine McVie in the Fleetwood Mac movie. As a longtime disliker of Ms. McVie, I was hoping to go at least one set without hearing her clone tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies (tell me, tell me, tell me lies!), but I suppose you take what you can get at a free fair.

And what did I get? Damn good guitar from the non-Lindsey, particularly on the Peter Green chestnut “Oh Well,” but not on “Big Love. ” The band opted for the 1980s radio saccharine-synth version, which meant our guitar hero made the wise decision to not even attempt this:

Yeah, there was too much schlock (“Everywhere,” “Gypsy,” “Seven Wonders”), but goddammit, when a decent sound system is feeding you the best songs from “Rumours” in a musically competent fashion and the sun is shining on the Pacific Northwest and you’re standing ten feet from the stage with a microbrew in hand, things could be worse.

That’s why I’ll always dig cover bands.

That’s why I’ll see these guys if I get the chance:

And that’s why I’d even see this guy:

And that’s why I’d rather see somebody doing serviceable renditions of songs I like than great renditions of songs I hate.

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