Boulder Weekly, Grateful Web and Z2 Entertainment are proud to present DeadPhish Orchestra and Private Gripweed: A Tribute to The Dead, Phish & The Beatles to the Boulder Theater on Saturday, April 20th, 2013. Tickets will go on sale to the public on Friday, March 15th, 2013 at 10:00 am for $8.00 in advance and $10.00 day of show.
The DeadPhish Orchestra is a quartet of Colorado musicians who, above all, are close friends who have played together for many years. They had played Grateful Dead songs together, and they had played Phish songs together. But they got to wondering what would happen if they tried to merge the music of these two bands, the Granddaddies and Daddies of the jamband scene.
While these two bands have their surface similarities, most fans realize that their actual musical styles are quite different. The Grateful Dead are an earthy, folky, bluesy band where Phish is sharper around the edges, funky and more aggressive. But both bands have an improvisational approach to their live shows, and it is in that spontaneity where the magic really happens.
The guys in DPO have posed themselves a unique challenge in merging the two styles. Setlists end up with segues that look like Divided Sky>Morning Dew>Divided Sky, or Help>Slip>Frankenstein. Or even stranger, like My Friend, My Friend of the Devil or It Must Have Been The Roses Are Free. You can see that between the vast repertoires of the two bands, the possibilities are endless.
It's just about as much fun as humans are allowed to have.
Private Gripweed: A Beatle's Tribute
Private Gripweed was inspired by current events and the rapid transformation of his country into a fascist police state. Influenced by the musical styles of late 20th century hard rock, the music is best described as politically charged lyrics set to melodic, guitar-driven original songs. The result of one lone madman's tireless work, Private Gripweed is an ambitious project whose goal is to simultaneously entertain, enlighten and prod the sleeping masses to question their reality.
As a youth, Gripweed found the strict regimen of the state-controlled conformity factories known as public schools to be intolerable. To make matters worse, Gripweed's parents, despite their good intentions, forced him to attend church several times a week where dominator-style religion was force-fed to him like spoonfuls of foul tasting medicine. With authority figures everywhere attempting to control his mind, body, and spirit, Gripweed found escape from the monotony by retreating into imaginary worlds found in comic books. He often wished he had superpowers of his own in order to help him and others break free from tyranny and oppression.
As a teenager, Gripweed found himself totally unsatisfied with his current reality. To keep himself sane, he wallowed in the rebellious refrains of rock-n-roll, explored the depths of his mind with the aid of psychedelic drugs, and over-indulged in promiscuous activities with fatherless young women having low self-esteem. As a young adult, Gripweed tried in vain to play by the Rules of the Man. He wasted years toiling away as a miserably unhappy bureaucrat in the private sector. During these dark days, he always considered himself as just another cog in the gears of the mighty corporate machine that was America Inc.
Then, a catalyzing event took place that forever-altered the world - the attacks on mostly civilian targets in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. It did not take a genius to realize these attacks were an inside job. Gripweed's perception of his government had always been one of mistrust, but this time they had gone too far. Gripweed knew in his heart that those in power had either set the sinister plans into motion or allowed it to happen. To add salt to our collective wounds, these sick, twisted, treasonous fucks were now benefiting economically by the events of 9/11 and the subsequent infinite "war on terror." Gripweed came to learn that these staged events were all part of a coordinated effort to seize geopolitically strategic targets while simultaneously accelerating world corporatization. To his horror, Gripweed also learned that this was not the first time in recent history that the US government had put forth the idea to offer up its citizenry like sacrificial lambs. As it turns out, his country had a long, sordid history of exporting misery and Killing Hope around the world. It became painfully obvious to Gripweed that in a world of close to 7 billion people and counting, life is now a cheap commodity to be spent at will by the world's so-called elites.
At this point, Gripweed decided on a course of action. He recalled a time not so long ago when popular music had been used as a form of protest against the establishment. In the late 1960's, iconic guitarist Jimi Hendrix had used his guitar as a counter-cultural weapon. A sonic machine-gun if you will, to mow down authority. While Gripweed is certainly no Hendrix in the talent department, he planned his own version of sonic assault to help expose the corrupt establishment. To this end, Gripweed is currently hard at work on his debut album Security Index, named after the U.S. Government's secret list of citizens deemed troublemakers that are to be rounded up and placed in gulag-style internment camps in the event of a "national emergency." In addition to the sonic assault, Gripweed has established this website to help provide ammunition in the information war.
DEADPHISH ORCHESTRA & PRIVATE GRIPWEED
Boulder Theater
April 20th, 2013
Doors: 8:30pm | Show Time: 9:00 pm
