By Jim Morrison
The fourth installment of Dead Air, a cavalcade of Grateful Dead covers that brings together artists from across the Commonwealth, had its roots in Cincinnati.
Mark Keefe, radio station WNRN’s program director, was a college student at Xavier University when he got the idea to program a benefit of Who covers called Who Cares.
The plan was for four bands to do four songs each in the radio station’s studio. But the idea blossomed into 24 bands, each doing a cover, one after the other.
As Keefe graduated and moved around, the concept followed. “It just got out of hand from there,” he said. “And they got bigger and bigger.”
He landed in Reno. There he did, a bunch of shows including Dylan for Dollars, Sympathy for the Radio, and The Bands Who Fell to Earth.
After coming to Virginia and WNRN more than a decade ago, he started thinking about doing something with the Paramount Theater in Charlottesville. In 2019, he was the ringmaster for the first Dead Air.
“I’m always trepidatious about calling anything that has to do with radio dead air,” he said, but they decided to go ahead with 22 bands to celebrate the station’s 22nd anniversary. “We obviously picked the greatest place in the world to do something like this because there’s a lot of Deadheads in this area, and it was a sellout. It was the second biggest bar night that the Paramount had ever had. I mean, everybody was just giddy. And people loved it. ”
The fourth iteration of Dead Air comes to The NorVa on Jan. 25 with about two dozen bands, including local favorites and past show alums for a dose of Dead goodness each playing one song. What started as who cares has become many care.
It announces the nonprofit station’s entry into the area on 102.5 in Hampton Roads and 103.3 in Williamsburg in addition to stations in Charlottesville, Richmond, Roanoke, Lynchburg, The Shenandoah Valley, and Nelson County, took place in Charlottesville.
Among the alums is Jeff Gorman of the duo Illiterate Light, which performed “Scarlet Begonias” at the Richmond show in 2022 and is looking forward to an encore. “It’s the coming together of three things. I love WNRN. I love the Dead,” said Gorman who saw Bob Weir’s RatDog with Black Crowes and Bruce Hornsby as a seven-year-old. “And it’s all Virginia artists, so I get to spend a whole day just hanging out with some of my favorite artists and some of my best friends.”
The song Illiterate Light did in Richmond wasn’t a room service cover. “We were definitely jamming, but we played it really heavily, and it was epic,” he said.
That’s what Keefe wants. A wide variety of artists putting their distinctive take on a Dead tune, much like the station, which plays a range of music rare in the radio and streaming world. “The hard part is to try to get a bluegrass band interested in doing this. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t,” he said. “We have some pretty cool artists lined up that hopefully, will do some crazy interpretations. We’ve had great ones.”
Gorman became a fan in middle school listening to live cuts and began learning the acoustic numbers. He dived into the Jerry Garcia bluegrass material in college. “They broke all of the rules and still break all of the rules, as far as, how to be a band, in the sense of, you know, it was about building community,” he said. “It’s really a long, strange trip. It’s about following this journey. They weren’t a radio band. They weren’t out selling records. They had tours that flopped. I love the music, but I love the history of the band.”
The lineup includes artists from across the state including Lucky 757, Berries, Logan Vath, Mekong Xpress and the Get Fresh Horns, Pitch’n A Fit String Band, Holy Roller, Will Overman, The Wilson Springs Hotel, and J. Roddy Walston.
“We’re a station that’s adventurous,” Keefe said. “We play a lot of new music, and we really go out of our way to find bands in the Commonwealth that should be on the radio.”
Illiterate Light fits that bill. “We funded our first record ourselves and sent them the tunes, and they started playing ‘Better Than I Used To.” They were the first radio station in the country to start playing our music and then one of the writers there, Desiree, did a piece on us and submitted it to NPR national music headquarters. We got some great publicity from that and that opened up a ton of doors for us in 2018 and 2019,” he said. “We owe a tremendous amount of our success and our music being spread and finding our fans here in Virginia to WNRN.”
Cory and Dan Spivey of Lucky 757 talked about their participation just before the band began rehearsal. The Dead, Dan said, is part of the culture. “I had the very first live album,” he added.
Their take on a Dead classic, “Alabama Getaway,” will have a twist. “We’re ready to rock it, man,” Cory said. “We want to take that song and give it a 1950s feeling. ‘Alabama Getaway’ already has a Chuck Berry type of feel to it so we’re kind of gonna amp that up a little bit and give it the Lucky 757, rockabilly rock and roll vibe.”
Chris Ledbury of Berries didn’t want to reveal their song, but it’s off “Aoxomoxoa,” their third album. “I’ve never been a huge jam band kind of person, but I do respect the Grateful Dead for their psychedelic sound,” he said. “They were the first ones to really go full in on that kind of thing, you know? And I feel like that album is probably one of their most psychedelic-sounding. I’ve always just really liked that album because of just how weird and different it is from their other output, like all the weird vocal effects and stuff they use. So the song we picked is off of that album and it’s always been a song that I liked a lot.”
Todd Herrington of Mekong Xpress and the Get Fresh Horns played at the Richmond show in The National. Like the other performers, he said it was a rare chance to get together made sweeter that it was coming out of the pandemic. “A lot of us hadn’t seen each other through the pandemic. To see the audience letting loose, and to really be able to hang with your friends also, all for a good cause, was just great. What a what a vibe.”
Herrington said he toyed with the Dead when he was younger, saw them a few times, and then fell in with people who revered their music. “It was almost like being delivered another Real Book, the different variations of the tunes and how they’re constructed,” he said, referring to the jazz composition series. “It was a wild world to get versed in quickly.”
He’s a bass player who has played with the late Dead bassist Phil Less at his July 4th concerts a few times. “It was mind-blowing, eye-opening, ” he said of Lesh’s playing. “It was just wild.”
“I was so blown away by a couple of things that he just did, these long-form phrases, these rhythmic phrases, that I just was like, God, that’s so crazy. Very orchestral,” he added. “It was great. And he couldn’t have been nicer.”
Covering those tunes is a challenge. “They’re not easy. There’s always a hairpin tournament somewhere, always, you know, out of the gate,” he added. “Those structures and forms are not simple, and it’s easy to train wreck those tunes.”
Performers, Keefe said, are paid $100 and WNRN keeps ticket prices low, especially for four hours of music. “This isn’t really a huge fundraiser for us,” he added. “We don’t want to lose money, but we try to make it so that we’re basically breaking even. It’s kind of a friend-raiser rather than a fundraiser.”
