The Good, The Dad, and The Risk of Singing The Grateful Dead

All dads can’t be rock royalty. But, God, we all really, really want to be, right? At least for a one song.

Well…some of us have tired of waiting for destiny to find us on its own. We have taken our dreams of being worshipped (or at least hit with a knowing “sup, bro”) in every weed/vinyl/t-shirt shop from the desert of the Coachella Valley all the way to the off-the-books nanny-strewn shores of Malibu into our own hands and made them tangible. We are, as of today, one of the top 387 cover bands in Orange County…aka, a proper dad band.

Why this foolishness?

Well, for starters, we do all like music. It’s got to start with that, right? When I say “like” I mean more than singing in the shower. For example, one of our guys makes Garageband-mixed videos on the weekend for fun. Another sang with a popular regional band in New York back in the day. I have a list of my 25 favorite Prince songs saved on my phone….not a playlist, but a grocery list of song titles that I obsessed over on a plane trip not long ago. I thought a lot about what other people would think of the criteria that I used, or if I was putting too much weight on the popularity of Prince’s better known songs versus the weight of my personal opinions (for example, is the live version of If I Was Your Girlfriend better than the album version? The answer has to be yes, though both versions are on my top 10 on my list and ranked above everything on the Purple Rain album except The Beautiful Ones). The fact that I spent this much time burrowing so deep into a list that no one would ever see gives you an idea of what I mean by “like.”

Second, we have enough skill to produce culturally recognizable noise. This is less important than you think but a useful feature for explaining things to wives and other people.

We also have enough disposable income to afford gear…probably too much gear, quite frankly, but that’s part of the oeuvre, too.

And…this is probably the biggest factor…we seem to get along well enough with each other to work through putting together a set list and deciding who is gonna sing lead or back up. Both of these tasks are among the more politico-religious endeavors a group of guys who are otherwise only bound by common zip codes and beer choices can take on.

But, listen…let’s be really real here. As a bunch of 40 - 50 something year old dudes, the highlights are going to be scarce in the coming years. More ominously, the only one where we will be the star of the show is the final act, and no one is ready for that yet. So…look at us, please, maybe even listen, and know that we are sincere in our need for attention and won’t take up too much of your time with this.

In a May 2018 excerpt from Steven Hyden’s book, Twilight Of The Gods: A Journey To The End Of Classic Rock that appeared on the pop culture website Uproxx, the author defines “A dad-rock band is a band composed of dudes who are old enough to be dads.”

Well…yeah.

But Tyler adds depth to this definition by saying, “(Its’) tricky, because a band can start out in stark opposition to dad rock in one decade and then age into dad rock in another decade. Sonic Youth was not a dad-rock band in the ’80s but became a dad-rock band in the ’00s. Yo La Tengo also became a dad-rock band at that time. So did Pavement. Sleater-Kinney became a dad-rock band in spite of being made up of women. This is all just a function of the space-time continuum.”

Tyler goes on to posit that while the origin of the term was meant to deride bands who unrepentantly carried the torch of nostalgia into their present day efforts, eventually all new music is derived from, or at least inspired by, some older piece or form of music. This cannot be a bad thing…unless you are hellbent on hiding your perpetually depressed smirk behind an ironically retro hipster beard well past the age at which those things are even remotely permissible and never being happy with any song more than once in your life.

Our band is relatively unencumbered by such angst, though I will keep an eye out for any Grateful Dead suggestions. Some lines cannot be crossed.

Our current set list reads like a who’s who of late 70s - early 80s dad rock canon. We cover the Stones and the Beatles. We have the Cars and The Pixies and The Cure…cuz covering their 40 years old songs show that we still have edge, bro. There’s a blender of margaritas that we drink when we are calling Jenny and running down a dream. It’s a fun and culturally benign list at this juncture, and we are happy keepers of the flame, dammit. So save your disdain for someone who cares. I’m a believer.

And I guarantee, when we play at the block party gig we are planning for this coming 4th of July there will be a moment in the set that I will catch my wife’s eye as she is dancing and smiling and twirling in front of me. She’ll give me a hot wink that will far outweigh the look of bemused disgust from my teenaged sons standing nearby her. That look is that will make it all come together…right now, over me. And in that moment, I will reign.

Image credit to Natalie Metzger www.fuzzyslug.com