By John Tierney
If you had told me a few years ago that I’d be attending a performance by a Grateful Dead inspired band and being absolutely enthralled by it, I’d have told you that someone must have dosed your fruit punch with one of Timothy Leary’s microdots.
There was just no way.
My punk rock loving musical pedigree just wouldn’t allow it. I was always more ripped tee-shirts and safety pins than tie dye and Birkenstocks, more mosh pit than spinners. Loud, fast, MAYBE three chords and it was over in under 3 minutes. The Dead? That was hippie stuff.
I just didn’t get it. In fact, I actively resisted it.
I was never going to be the guy who could tell you which versions of “Help on The Way” were superior to others and refer to them by date of performance.
I was never going to be able to converse comfortably about the Dead in terms of era, keyboard player, or what guitar Jerry was playing at the time.
But that seems to be the place we find ourselves.
Hi, I’m John, and I’m a Grateful Dead fan. (Hi John!)
If you want to point any one reason how this came to be, look no further than Eric Wise, the sweet voiced (If you haven’t heard Eric sing “Sugaree” there is something missing from your life.) bassist of Syracuse’s Grateful Dead tribute Pearly Baker’s Best, who have been playing a Dead inspired show at Funk n’ Waffles every Monday since 2015.
“It’s like jazz players interpreting Coltrane or Miles Davis” Wise told me one sticky Monday night after PBB had just finished playing two astonishingly good sets of Dead and Dead adjacent music. Wise is right, what Pearly Baker’s Best does is take the framework of what the Dead did and play within it, just like a jazz band honors the traditions of the masters of that genre. The difference is, the genre of music that the Grateful Dead occupied was occupied by the Dead, and the Dead alone, uniquely American in its roots and nobody else sounds like them. Nobody.
Every music town worth its salt has its “Dead Night” and its “Dead band” but in the Salt City, PBB is something special, something that for the gathered fanbase, known as “The Monday Night Faithful” is more than just Dead loving musicians playing the expansive catalog. What Pearly Baker’s Best does better than any of those others is honor not only the music, but also the musical tradition of the Dead, or as Wise puts it “music created right in front of you” in the extended jams and solos each member takes within the songs before returning, unified, at the chorus.
Collectively they coax things out of songs that elevate the music. Wizard keyboard player Brian Lauri takes Dead classic “Truckin”, for one example, to a rocking new place that lifts him off his stool as the rest of the band turns toward him to see where he’s taking them. Charley Orlando’s guitar and vocals create a playful, feisty sound as a great counterpoint to Eric Brown’s soulful vocals and Garciaesque leads. The percussion section of Brian Welch and Tim Bergin add complexity and depth to the rhythm that weaves perfectly with the melody without being over played, not an easy thing to do and they pull it off perfectly working as one rhythmic unit with six string bassist Eric Wise.
The song selection is always thoughtful and in reverence to an authentic Grateful Dead experience, and not just playing the hits, the ones you know from rock radio, like “Bertha” “Don’t Ease Me In” and “Althea”, but also the deeper catalog, you know, the sometimes more obscure ones that Dead fans keep in their back pockets, the songs that are part of the larger syllabus of advanced Dead study.
The band prides itself on that unique Dead experience. Every show different, every jam unique. It truly is like watching a group of like-minded musicians practice a craft as much as it is a tribute performance.
Through it all, watching Pearly Baker’s Best is to watch a group of friends have a hell of a lot a fun and see the joy in their faces as the songs lift off. Ear to ear grins during the extended jams are not uncommon. “Musically we kind of chase each other around up there” is how Wise describes his band’s musical alchemy.
When things are cooking in that musical sandbox, as things often are for PBB, magic happens. Any fan of live music at all owes it to themselves to get out on a Monday evening and join the faithful stage side. Be careful though, with this music, even if you have resisted it for whatever reason, there’s always one song that gets its hook into you, when then happens, they have you for life.
If they can make a punk rock loving guy like me see it, the magic must be real.
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