Love Your Local Band: Dough Knees

Good Times, Santa Cruz Arts Weekly, May 7, 2008

by the lovely and talented Amanda Martinez

And to think—Santa Cruz's newest and perhaps most true-to-form Grateful Dead cover band owes its inception to a mere pick-up gig. Late last year, Dough Knees founder and rhythm guitarist Scott Cooper had gone through all the trouble of scoring a slot at Henflings, only to find that his bandmembers couldn't make it. In true show-must-go-on spirit, Cooper put out the call to a few Bay Area veteran musicians, deciding that yes, not only would there be a great show, but there would be Dead tunes and nothing but.

"We're all Deadheads," says Cooper. "We got together for rehearsal and just ran through the tunes. I don't know how the other guys felt about it, but I was kind of surprised at how easy and good it was."

It helps that the motley, makeshift band just happens to have two guitars, a bass, keyboards and drums, mirroring the Dead's lineup of the early '70s, "when they were in their prime," says Cooper. Serious disciples all of their respective Dead members, Dough Knees' doppelgangers don't go so far as to recreate specific performances. But they do cover all the "signature licks." "Theo (Winston)'s got great Jerry Garcia tone," says Cooper, due in part to a damn decent vocal resemblance and the use of a similar effects pedal. "It's pretty obvious when you hear him play. He knows all the riffs." And conjuring Phil Lesh's tone comes as second nature to Roger Sideman who grew up listening to the bassist.

"Since I've started doing this, I've had to study up on my Bob Weir licks, which is actually a lot more difficult than I ever expected," says Cooper. "He's rarely strumming chords. He's playing these little riffs." In pursuit of authenticity, Cooper has done his best to consult the source. It just so happened that he recently found himself hanging out with Weir's brother at a recording session in Sonoma. "His brother said 'hey, if you want me to ask Bob something for you, I'll ask.' So I said 'OK, what are the two transition riffs that he plays in the middle of this song.' I never heard back from him," says Cooper. "Yeah, Bob doesn't know about this band that I'm aware of," he adds.

Rendering the tunes accurately is of utmost importance to the band, but so is the license it gets to take in paying homage to the Dead's vintage improvisational tangents. "There's so much free space within the structure of the tunes," says Cooper, "so it's almost like we're a Dixieland jazz band in the sense that we're all kind of soloing over the changes."

Cooper can trace his inaugural Dead experience to a show in Alpine Valley, Wisconsin in 1983, and he credits the good sense of his older brothers in leaving a copy of American Beauty lying around when he was a kid. He never gave his life up to the band, but says it's meant a lot to him in terms of "fun" and "roadtrips." "It's definitely an endless supply of musical inspiration and enjoyment."

If you had a hunch that the name Dough Knees is a pun on a bit of Grateful Dead lore, you're right. But did you name that tune? It harkens back to an old jug band tune the Dead covered consistently from the mid-'60s on called "Don't Ease Me In." "You know, 'don't ease, don't ease, don't ease me in,' " Cooper sings, revealing the melded consonants. In the '80s, he recalls seeing bumper stickers that featured a "Deadified" Pillsbury Doughboy, bearing the phrase "Dough Knees." "I always thought that would be a cool name for a Dead cover band," he says.

This Saturday's show marks only the third for the band, but its members are already positioning themselves as the obvious choice in musical entertainment for any grand opening celebration UCSC might throw to commemorate its newly acquired Grateful Dead paraphernalia collection. In the meantime, Cooper hopes to revive and perpetuate some of the Dead's vibrant sub-culture. "They were always really loose about their organization and I think people gravitated toward that looseness. It's a family, yet it's unstructured. There's a sense of freedom, certainly of fun and cosmic energy," he says. "I think (Dough Knees) means a great opportunity for Deadheads to go out and dance and hear Dead tunes and congregate with like-minded souls."