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Gosh, there’s just so much to unpack here. There’s just no way to fully put this all down on pixels, but I’ll try to touch all the bases.
Back when I was on tour managing nero we hit a particularly disastrous coming together of negative forces that culminated in the band playing a gig somewhere on Vancouver Island in front of an audience of exactly one. That one ended up being a girl who had just quit her job, and she enjoyed her private nero show so much she used her newfound freedom to jump on tour and she saw the band several more times on that run, and in a surprising turn of emotional events I became quite smitten with the girl.
Going for a beer run in her Volvo station wagon one afternoon I noticed the dash was littered with tapes of a band I had not yet heard of: Dark Star Orchestra. DSO was a Grateful Dead tribute act – and to just “touch on the bases” I’ll say only that my overall longstanding distaste for tribute bands was instantly peaked/piqued when considering the sad fact that someone(s) would make a career of aping such an iconic band as the Grateful Dead. And I was quite shocked that someone (else) would collect recordings of a tribute act, especially when live recordings of the original act were so readily available.
It made me look at this person a bit sideways, but my smittenness with her soon forced me to let it go. Ah, to go back in time.
Anyway, not long after I returned home from that tour this lady contacted me with news that she was coming to Ottawa and gentleman that I am I offered up my apartment as a possible destination. She took me up on the offer and pretty soon we were dating. Or so it seemed.
Now, it turns out that she and her ex-boyfriend were DSO fans together, and they went to so many Dark Star Orchestra shows that they became chummy with the band and when things started taking off DSO hired her ex to go out on the road with them and sell their merchandise.
It also turns out that she and her ex were still quite close (if you know what I mean…I certainly didn’t at the time), and when they happened to find themselves together in the same town (which was surprisingly often) they would re-connect (if you know what I mean).
Their attitudes were so free-wheelin’ that it didn’t take me too long to discover what was what, and when I did, phrases like “unique situation”, “soul mates”, and “until we die” got thrown around quite emphatically. I even got her ex on the phone one evening to confront him and he was so nonchalant about the whole affair(s) that I swear I could hear him shrugging through the receiver. It made me pull my hair out.
December 8th, 2002 fell in that tiny pocket of time where I was innocently ignorant of the facts behind this pending drama, and when I was gleefully under the mistaken impression that she and I were an item whilst she and he were merely on “good terms”. I was out with nero on a tour through the northeast US and we found ourselves in Northampton with a night off. A phone call or two later and Mr. Ex put us all on the guest list for a Dark Star Orchestra show at the Calvin Theatre.
When we pulled up I instantly noticed a crowd gathered outside re-enacting a mini Shakedown Street. There was a dude with a Coleman stove selling grilled cheese sandwiches and everything. I can’t really explain why this bothered me so, but if you’ve ever actually done any travelling and then visited the “permanent World’s Fair” at Disney’s Epcot Center you might have in inkling of my discomfort with it all.
In retrospect it doesn’t surprise me that there was a snafu at the box office…for some reason the three guys in the band were on the guest list but my name was missing. No worries (I naively thought), in no time it got figured out and we were in.
I watched about half of the first set surrounded by about 900 twirling tie dyes and I had to admit that the band sounded great and they looked great too. They made a point of using period equipment and man, the guy they had doing the Bob Weir parts was more Bobby than Bobby. As far as fake bands go, these guys were the real deal; the fakiest of the fake.
(Which to me is kind of like taking the number zero and multiplying it by a thousand. It still equals “zero”.)
At some point Mr. Merch came and got us and took us on a tour of the band’s caravan, which consisted of a sizeable straight truck for all the equipment, a smallish motor home that was shared by one of the band members and his wife, and a massive, glittering full-on tour bus with all the trimmings for everyone else. Then we went to the lush dressing room backstage and pulled on the band’s frosty beers while they were busy onstage finishing up the first set.
Now I will remind my audience that at the time I was wholly unaware of the ongoing transgressions that were occurring under my nose, so when I say that after purveying the luxury that the band was clearly enjoying on tour – mind you, this was a band that had yet to write an original song and one that had latched on to the drawing power of a group that had spent almost forty years forging a path of their very own – I hope you’ll understand that my disgust was genuine and not just a case of sour grapes. Sure, there was a heavy dose of jealousy involved, but who could blame me for that? Here we were travelling the land in a small handicap bus with makeshift bedding and no bathroom, bunking down in Wal-Mart parking lots and slugging it out for tiny crowds in nameless bars, trying against hope to sell a new sound and build a following in a climate of nostalgia. When it turns out all we really had to do was find a popular band and learn a bunch of their songs, right?
When Dark Star Orchestra finished their set onstage we were so busy drinking their beers in the band room that we didn’t even notice the music had ended, when suddenly here comes the band barging in to the green room all sweaty and tired only to find four plucky upstarts sitting in their chairs and enjoying their rider. They were nice enough about it though. “Hi, I’m the Bobby,” the Bob Weir guy said, extending his hand with a smile (I kid you not). If I’m not mistaken John K. (who ended up playing a benefit show for my not-for-profit about fifteen years later) did the same thing, “HI, I’m the Jerry.”
That didn’t help. Not one bit.
I don’t remember the second set at all but that doesn’t matter, I know how I felt about it and I’m sure you do too.
I do recall quite vividly however, a couple of years after this show, when my smitten-girl impatiently told me yet again that yes, of course she had…and why can’t I just get over it? I put my foot down. I was done, I was out, I was quitting her cold-turkey no matter what.
And you know something? I met m’lady for the first time the very next day. And the rest is history in the making.
(The funniest thing about Dark Star Orchestra is that their gimmick is re-enacting a different original Grateful Dead concert each night by mimicking the song order from a particular Dead show. So their big hook is that they don’t even come up with their own setlists. I mean: geez.)
Todd Man Out 