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This was a lot of fun - marathon though - 30 tunes from 4pm to 10:30 with 2 breaks.
4 new tunes (to us anyway) with weddingish themes - Jack A Roe, How Sweet It Is (way fast!), They Love Each Other and She Belongs To Me.
I wish any party or even bar down here (mississippi) would want someone to play ONLY dead stuff. It is as if they never existed here. Blue grass/rock/blues fusion bands are around and they are surprisingly like the dead in many ways.
You guys sounded like you had a blast, 3 huge sets that's impressive. The Jerry guitar parts were a little low in the mix on a few songs, but the vocals were perfect volume and the bobby tone was spot on. I enjoyed the listen, thanks for posting!!
Yea even around here, suburban nyc, venues willing to have dead bands are a bit spotty. It's mostly rock or pop stuff that's preferred it seems. Kinda like you gotta find a venue owned or managed by a deadhead!
My volume was real spotty here and there in the first set. We miked my amp after a bit, from the back, but then it feel out of the holder and we didn't realize it for a bit. lol! I also accidently turned my tone knob, never touch the thing, and didn't realize it and must've gotten a spot in the pot w/ some dust or something cuz it ended up cracklin and seemed only to affect my envelope and the distortion settings, lowering the volume and in the case of the envelope lowering it to the point where it was muted or didn't 'turn over' and quack. It was driving me nuts during Stranger and Shakedown to the point where I just switched it off during the extended jam in Shakedown. I finally realized what was going on during Fire and pinned the tone back to the treble side - where it usually is.
Of infamous note we had a train wreck at the end of an otherwise pretty decent lovelight cuz I tried to get everyone to end it but everyone else was (rightly!) poised expecting me to segue into GDTRFB. Oops - big time - and factor in that I'd turned around and faced the band and now couldn't see my fretboard (it was an outside gig) and throw in a series of nice clams for good measure!!! Yikes!
recording sounds real good.........mk, DON'T CHANGE A THING ON YOUR WEIR SETUP. YOU ARE THERE!!!!!!!! (and I am jealous. we'll talk
now.......as far as finding places to play if you play all Dead, in my experience there are plenty of them. I don't think it is location driven (**see caveat below)or musical taste driven or anything else like that. It is a simple matter of economics. If you put people in a room the club will have you. If you don't they won't. Again in my experience club owners (and this is a generalization, there are always exceptions) could give two craps about how a band sounds or what they band plays. If you fill their room, you could fart into a microphone and the owner would be ecstatic. If you have an empty room you could be Hendrix and not be asked back.
I say this from first hand experience because we often do the Grateful Dead cover band equivalent of farting into a mic sometimes (hey no risk no reward I guess! and we have more rooms willing to pay our guarantee then we have Fridays and Saturdays in an 6 week span. (we rotate through a regular schedule of rooms that we return to every 6 weeks). There are rooms actually on a waiting list for us to get a free date to play there. We have rooms that demand (and pay extra for) that we don't play anywhere else in that immediate area.
Let me let you in on a secret . I have no illusion about us being better than any other Dead band out there. We're not...and we're not by a long-shot. We have our little niche and a couple things that are unique to us and I think we do those unique things well (on most occasions), but we are no DSO (and we don't try to hit stuff that closely anyway, we gave that up a long time ago, but if we did try to do it we couldn't, so it doesn't matter ).
I bet those club owners on our waiting list most likely have never heard us play, and we didn't send them a demo. They simply know that we bring people to bars. They don't care if we are covering GD or the Sex Pistols.
Bottom line, is that you cannot rely on the room to bring people. Very few rooms have a built in draw these days. If you get a date at a new room, Beg, steal and borrow, to get every person you can at that first gig and try to set a tone. A real good turnout will buy you credit for 2 future bad turnouts. If you start a 1st gig in a room with a bad turnout, it's over.
There is more to this, but I gotta get back to work.
**cavaet: Of course, there have to be deadheads in the area to support you (because non-deadheads arent likely to spend money at a bar listening to all dead!)
.......................................................have you heard the one about the yellow dog?
jeffm725 wrote:recording sounds real good.........mk, DON'T CHANGE A THING ON YOUR WEIR SETUP. YOU ARE THERE!!!!!!!! (and I am jealous. we'll talk
I bet those club owners on our waiting list most likely have never heard us play, and we didn't send them a demo. They simply know that we bring people to bars. They don't care if we are covering GD or the Sex Pistols.
Great Weir Tone!
Jeff's band packs them in! He knows of what he speaks.
Right on Jeff, read you loud and clear! This farting thing, is this what these youngsters are doing now a days all hopped up on their juice and rock n roll lifestyles? God, what ever happened to a well played polka and a killer clarinet solo?
I am going to make sure that even my dogs come to our next gig. We lucked out since my extended family, even my brother's ex wife showed up since it was a cool place we were playing for a change, wound up having a good turn out when it counted. Now, we are playing Fridays and Saturdays first of the month on schedule there. I just wish I could REALLY play Jerry though, not just a song or two with no real attention paid to tribute the real sound... I have put a bunch of craig's list ads to get a band started here, but most if not all only know a few songs like touch of gray and Truckin', Always in the end they just want to play more Skynard. I finally gave up, and what I'm doing now has the most promise in terms of playing out, and we are heavy on the originals, which is what I enjoy most anyway no matter the song list. I just envy some of you guys when I read the set lists around here... But, it does appear you have more dead heads in the NE. Even Texas and Georgia has a pretty good pool of musicians to choose from compared to here for that genre. Anyway, I still think I could get a dead band together easier in Mexico than here, that's the real hurdle i guess.
And without you all keeping it alive all the time, it would be even harder to find people. Have you tried to even get a good Wilson Philips tribute thing going? its not easy ANYWHERE these days .
Care to share any of your marketing strategies jeff? What else besides the usual things like band website, facebook, myspace, jambase etc.
What your saying is generally right, though some venues, unless they're hurting, choose acts based on their sense, right or wrong, on their clientele and what they thinks works. Just curious, what's your sense of how much you tap into the college crowd?
In the end, as you say, money rules the roost - it's just both getting that following and convincing folks that you should get a shot.
Billbbill wrote:Care to share any of your marketing strategies jeff? What else besides the usual things like band website, facebook, myspace, jambase etc.
What your saying is generally right, though some venues, unless they're hurting, choose acts based on their sense, right or wrong, on their clientele and what they thinks works. Just curious, what's your sense of how much you tap into the college crowd?
In the end, as you say, money rules the roost - it's just both getting that following and convincing folks that you should get a shot.
Bill,
I do have some thoughts on all of that. I am torn between saying lets talk on the phone (because it is A LOT of typing) or just trying to type it all up here because maybe others will have good feedback as well (and maybe others can benefit too). Probabaly doing both would be in order.
By the way, I am sure that you specifically and many others already know all this stuff, or a lot of it. I don't think I hold the secret key to any golden knowledge. I am sure I can learn as much from you and others as you can from me. However, I do think that opening a dialog on this subject may jar loose some good ideas from many different sources here.
I do know this: while there are some overall generalities about bands building a crowd that apply to all bands and all genres of music which should be and need to be discussed, there are also a TON of items about building a Deadhead crowd that are specific to Dead bands and/or jam bands and the type of crowd that populates these gigs. It is that specific area that I think I might have a little bit of insight to, just because I have been curious about how it works and how many changes I have seen in the 22 years we have been out here. And that is a huge point right there. Things have changed in the Dead cover band game, BIG TIME!
Also, I know you are just a little ways down i-95 from me. If you wanted to come up to a gig sometime and I guest list you and whoever else and we could discuss it over a beer, and I could actually show you what I am talking about at Toads Place in New Haven. We set up and sound check from 6:00-7:00 and then don't hit stage until 10:45 so we would have hours to discuss stuff/hang out . Toads Place is our ground zero,-home base- ...... Every band needs to have a ground zero home base. It is what you build your draw out from.
That is item 1 for aspiring bands that want to build a draw:
1) Find a cool club in your area that you can make your home base. Play there at least once every 8 weeks preferably every 6 , even if you have to operate at a break even or a slight loss, to get in there at first you sometimes need to make some sacrifices.
Also, make that place known as a place where you might do something "special".
As far as specifically targeting college students, we don't, but WE DO specifically target people of college age. Lets face it, the people who actually have seen the Grateful Dead aren't our customer base anymore. At minimum, the age of someone who has actually seen the Grateful Dead is well over 30 years old. In my experience people in their 30's and 40's do not go to bars and clubs in anywhere near the frequency they do compared to people from between 18 (fake ID and all ages gigs)- and 25 years old. We have always been a better than average drawing local band over the last 15 years, but over the last 5 years, things have really snowballed because we actively started cultivating a younger crowd.
Here is a screen cap from a few weeks ago:
Also, and this is HUGE HUGE HUGE. You have to totally, totally totally find someway to get a little steady core of younger females to consistently come to gigs. Guest list them, make them feel special, do ANYTHING, but get them there. Younger women are like Shark chum. The guys are the Sharks. If guys know that young women will be at the gigs, then the guys come out in droves. If you have a band who just appeals to or just draws guys you are in trouble, because it is hard to recover from the "sausage fest" perception. I know of a great band in our area who are simply incredible and just about made it nationally, but slowly disintegrated and one of the reasons was that the draw was a 15-1 guy to girl ratio. Over time, that will KILL you.
Check this out.
I had my ipod nano in my pocket at the end of a gig and took a little 20 second video clip.
Keep in mind this is 3 minutes AFTER we had finished the gig and we were packing up with the houselights on. Also notice the predominant gender of the people in the first couple rows.
And finally on a lighter note, at the end of the clip, listen and see my wife pull me off the stage saying "its time to go home"
<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Dii5k1_Ya3k&hl ... ram><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Dii5k1_Ya3k&hl=en_US&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>[/youtube]
OK, back to work.......
I will follow this up with the strategies on getting those girls there, and other ways to make a Dead band work in a bar scene. We are just starting to get to the meat of it here, I have only outlined 2 items and those items need to be expanded upon.
Plus there a couple more.........
.......................................................have you heard the one about the yellow dog?
mkaufman wrote:You bring your wife to the gig??? That's your 1st mistake! You only need to do that when you don't draw a crowd.
That's so funny, and so familiar.
mk
haha.......many potential issue having a significant other at a gig for sure... However overall I would say I am very lucky, in that my wife is pretty tolerant and also a huge Deadhead. The first week we were a couple was on the last leg of the summer 95 tour. So she comes to gigs to have a good time rather than keep an eye on me (although she is good at multi-tasking)
She doesnt get out to all of them or even half of them though because we have a daughter at home and baby sitters are expensive! (that is when granparents come in handy, but crazily enough, my parents and her parents go out, party, and have a good time more than we do!)
.......................................................have you heard the one about the yellow dog?
I'm all ears jeff - thanks for the offer, I think I'll take you up on that!
As far as whether you continue here or over the phone that's up to you - it is a great topic that we all don't spend nearly enough time going over. And maybe others will chime in as well. I bet there's a wealth of ideas on this board.
You really hit on it - it's important to get a young, and to a certain degree attractive or 'happening' audience. Makes me think of the scene from fast times when the cool guy is explaining to the nerdy guy how to act in front of his date - " Where ever you are, it's the place to be - 'Isn't this great!'"
I think we will continue here, as I would love to hear others opinions as well.
Fast times! Love that movie and the quote from that movie is spot on. That is the exact feeling we try to convey.
The next toads gig is August 13th. If you guys dont have a gig or other plans, come on up! If you get there at the end of soundcheck we can go out for Thai (there are a couple great and cheap Thai places right near toads) if you like Thai, or we can go to the legendary Wooster street pizza places (Sallys or Pepe's, both are great, and that pizza is pretty much recognized as the best in the world! seriously)....
So anyway, we can hang, have dinner, go back to Toads and hang for a while before we go on. maybe even possible a scenario for a sit-in, but I cant promise that, yet at least.(we'll talk)........
I will continue this in a minute
.......................................................have you heard the one about the yellow dog?
we'll talk 
(hey no risk no reward I guess! 
. I have no illusion about us being better than any other Dead band out there. We're not...and we're not by a long-shot. We have our little niche and a couple things that are unique to us and I think we do those unique things well (on most occasions), but we are no DSO (and we don't try to hit stuff that closely anyway, we gave that up a long time ago, but if we did try to do it we couldn't, so it doesn't matter ).
