Local musicians look back to the music of their past
"Jessica"
"Magic Woman"
The stereotypical jam band is a college-town staple. Paying homage to the rock 'n' roll of the '60s and '70s, there are plenty of bands whose members were decades away from birth when the Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers were setting the music scene on fire.
Iowa City residents are some of the lucky few who have a jam band with musicians who are old enough to have experienced the music during its heyday. That band is the Beaker Brothers, and it will play at 9 p.m. today at the Mill, 120 E. Burlington St. Admission is $7.
The members of the band are Steve Grismore on guitar and vocals, Dan Bernstein on guitar, Jim Dreier and Dan Hummel on drums and percussion, John Shultz on keyboard, and "Uncle" Ed English on bass and vocals.
Grismore and Dreier, both faculty members at the University of Iowa School of Music, had talked at length about starting a classic-rock band.
"We thought it'd be fun if it were mostly older guys who were all from the same generation," Grismore said. "So we started calling some people up, figured it out, and finally got a band together."
The name of the band came from one of English's favorite radio shows, "Beaker Street." Hosted by DJ Clyde Clifford, the show aired from 1966 to 1977 on KAAY, an AM radio station in Little Rock, Ark.
"Beaker Street" was actually a reference to LSD, a psychedelic drug that was created in a laboratory beaker, and the show, fittingly, featured a type of music called acid rock. The jam-band style of music that the Iowa City band plays eventually evolved from th is music genre.
One of the guys' favorite groups to cover is the Allman Brothers. Grismore often spent hours listening to the group, and it inspired him on the guitar. He was even lucky enough to catch the band twice in Iowa City, once before guitarist Duane Allman died and once after.
Though the group is a cover band, the nature of a jam band means the performers improvise on most of the songs. Sections may extend anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour during a show, which makes for some long jams and segues into other songs.
English finds this particular form of rock 'n' roll fun to play because the musicians can stretch out parts of the song in jams.
"Every time we play a song, it could be somewhat different because of the improvisational nature," he said.
Grismore also thinks it's fun to play music musicians can jam out to.
"There is a freedom to that that's fun," he said. "It's not pop-oriented, it's more jam-band-oriented."
The group will sometimes change a song based on how the tune is going, English said. But when something is working, the band keeps it. For example, when a solo is really grooving, the group will turn the soloist loose, letting him play as long as it works.
Unlike a traditional cover band, the Beaker Brothers doesn't attempt to play songs note for note; instead, it tries to recreate the spirit of the original recording. For the band's members, it's not about making it big, it's about appreciating the music they all grew up on.
"People will ask us 'Do you have records for sale?' " Grismore said. "We always tell them to go back to the source documents."
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