Wake the Dead

Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #130 June/July 2007).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Wake the Dead

American Beauty

by Michael Parrish

In any major city in the United States, there is probably at least one band that makes its living covering Grateful Dead songs. In the Dead's home turf of the San Francisco Bay area, the fertile gene pool of talented musicians has spawned a hybrid that only this region could produce in Wake the Dead -- an acoustic quintet that seamlessly merges traditional Celtic fiddle tunes with Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's finest to create something original that appeals to folkies, Celtic-music devotees, and, inevitably, Deadheads. Before a February show at Redwood City's Little Fox Theater, the seven members of Wake the Dead spoke about numerous topics, including the band's mysterious and serendipitous origins, the previous exposure (or lack thereof) that the various band members had to the Grateful Dead, and the uniquely hybrid audience that the band has cultivated.

The genesis of the group was in 1999, when singer/songwriter Danny Carnahan, multi-instrumentalist Paul Kotapish, and harpist Maureen Brennan discovered that they shared a guilty pleasure in their offstage musical ruminations. Carhanan explained how the idea germinated. "We were all at a party one day and I was talking to Maureen's ex-husband about how I had sort of strangely started to play jigs and reels over Dead songs in the living room. He looked at me sort of funny and said, 'You should talk to Kotapish, because I just had the same conversation with him.' And Maureen, of course, plays all these beautiful harp tunes -- solo stuff at weddings and things for hours at a time. She would play O'Carolan tunes for a couple of hours, and when she figured no one was listening would slip in 'Dark Star' or 'Stella Blue.' There would always be one long-haired nephew or something who would swing around and go, 'Cool.' So she had been doing this for a while, too."

[cover #130]