Maybe it’s an occupational hazard, but it can be a little unsettling listening to Damon Guerrasio talk about the real Pink Floyd, the subject of his Denver-based band’s letter-perfect tribute project Wish We Were Floyd.
He keeps referring to them in the present tense. (“ ... they have three women up there handling backup vocals”, “ ... they do all this layering with their keyboards ... ”, etc.)
Pink Floyd don’t actually exist in real time, of course; a couple of them aren’t alive anymore and, apart from their 2005 Live 8 reunion gig, they ceased being anything like a live act sometime during Clinton’s first term, the critical mass of their work centering a decade and half earlier than that. Even by classic rock radio standards, Pink Floyd is a shockingly vivid presence three to four decades after their prime, a band whose life and afterlife appear seamlessly blended together.
Well, maybe that’s overstated; after all, despite the daunting proposition of taking on of rock’s most enduring catalogs, WWWF actually started modestly — by first staging the thing at Red Rocks.
Nothing like starting at the top.
“It was really an assignment, for Film on the Rocks,” recalls Guerrasio. “Eric Dyce and Jay Ruybal were putting together shows for the Film on the Rocks stuff, having bands come out and open up each show. So one year (2006) they decided to show The Wall. Jay asked us to put something together, gather a bunch of local musicians to see if we could do this. It started off with a bunch of different people, a bunch of different singers. I think we had like 16 revolving members in the show at one point, but eventually we whittled it down to the core eight members we have now.
“I don’t think we really talked about keeping it going at the time, but a few weeks later we said, ‘Y’know, that was kind of fun, let’s see if we can do that again at a smaller venue.’”
Seemed like a shame to go through all that rehearsal time for one gig, didn’t it?
“Yeah, that was my ‘summer of Floyd’,” he recalls. “I listened to nothing else. And I was a fan, to be sure, but nothing like the diehard fans who are coming to these shows now. I loved The Wall, and I knew Dark Side, but other than that I really had to do my homework. So, I listened to nothing else that summer on my CD player but Pink Floyd, watched nothing except videos. Just to inundate myself. ”
The band now centers on vocalist Guerrasio and former band mates of his in Savage Henry – guitarist Stuart Miller, guitarist Glenn Esparza and bassist John Jeffers – with keyboardist/effects wizard Dave Wruck, keys/reedman Kurt Morehead, Ruybal on drums and vocalist Kate Shoup (“screamin’ diva”.)
The band is no fulltime obsession for its members – several of the members work in theater, film, production or other bands, and the band plays out anywhere from once to half a dozen times a year – so the project exists more or less at this point a bit like an ephemeral staging of performance art. Or… musical theater.
“Absolutely. The whole demands some theatrics, I think. A lot of the tribute bands I see – and most of them are great, don’t get me wrong – but they kind of just stand there. A lot of these guys have the production - the lights, the lasers, a lot of the video, big budget stuff – but we started out not having a lot of that stuff. … We had to add our own theatrics. Even doing prop stuff. I remember the first gig we did, the Red Rocks show, we brought a chair and a lamp out for me to sing ‘Nobody Home.’”
And of course, playing in a tribute band can mean choosing between loosening up on the original material a little, stretching and (gasp!) re-interpreting, or aiming for cellular-level precision. There’s that whole “artistic satisfaction” thing happening in the former path, of course, but also a fine and discreet discipline to the latter, which Guerrasio will admit is usually the band’s primary mission. Pink Floyd is sufficiently burned into the consciousness of two generations of listeners (someone estimated that one in every fourteen people in the U.S. under the age of 50 owns a copy of Dark Side) that you better have your stuff together if you’re going to tribute this material with a straight face.
That means everyone knows the material, and the true-fan, note-taking completists are likely to be savagely unforgiving.
So, we wondered if there were any tunes that the band has had to walk away from.
Guerrasio laughed.
“Y’know, I remember the very first setlist when it was brought out, when I was learning all these songs for the Red Rocks show. ... ‘Echoes’ was on it. And we never even tried that. I think it’s something we’re always thinking about trying and coming back to.
“But, it’s a fine line. You want to do those deep cuts, you want these diehard fans to know that you know these songs and know this band. But there are a lot of people out there who only know the stuff they hear on the radio. So you don’t want to alienate those people who don’t know those older songs. It’s a hard decision to make.”
On the bill: Wish We Were Floyd are playing the Fox Theatre on February 12. Doors open at 8:30 p.m. All ages. Tickets are $12.50 in advance, $15 day of show plus $2 for under 21. 1135 13th St., Boulder, 303-443-3399.
