By Dave Cantor
Early in Garcia Peoples’ run, there was a four-year break between albums. It’s an almost unthinkable span of time in the digital age, but it was spent devising material for a clutch of future albums that includes five studio efforts and several live recordings.
It’s an avalanche of music, one that revels in song-focused pieces, as well as extended improvisational flourishes, positioning the New York band at a surprising crossroad, one where a punky DIY ethos runs into a jammy musical premise.
The group’s latest album, Dodging Dues (No Quarter Records), was recorded and released just ahead of the pandemic’s descent, disallowing the ensemble from plying its trade on concert stages. And after all that time away from performance, Garcia Peoples had to refamiliarize itself with the music and establish new meaning for it within the context of the world we’re now inhabiting.
“You think you know something,” guitarist Tom Malach says over the phone from his home in Queens after a gig in Philadelphia. “Even just playing today, new ideas happen with the songs after not playing them for a bit. We’re the kind of band to still be reworking songs from our first album when we’re playing live.”
Those live settings have provided a chance for a batch of hobbyists, armed with recording gear, to capture the troupe in the wild. On archive.org, more than 30 live sets by the group sit alongside thousands of Grateful Dead recordings and audio rescued from decaying 78 RPM slabs and cylinder recordings.
“The fact that someone would want to come out to the show and document it for others, that’s an awesome thing for us,” Malach says. “We put in a good amount of work to make sure different things are happening every night and each performance is unique.”
The ensemble’s undergone some personnel shifts, with members moving to Chicago and back to New York a few times, and then spreading out across the region. They’ve performed as everything from a trio to a sextet; on Friday at The Southern, they’ll appear as a quintet.
Dodging Dues reflects a copacetic contingent of players, and perhaps includes a summation of the band, sonically and philosophically. On “Tough Freaks,” where “maggots turn to flies” and gardens are properly tended, the band’s looking for “an escape from everyday drudgery, dodging the dues that life wants you to pay at any given moment,” Malach writes via email. The tune comes at an ambling gait, weaving guitar lines with colorful keys and a momentous chorus, where common folly is critiqued and a desire to embrace dreams emerges in full blossom.
A few tracks in, spacey, electrified folk underscores the breezy progression of “Cassandra,” where it seems as if the figure from Greek mythology is being asked for help. And album-closer “Fill Your Cup” has a spiritual connection to Antipodean punks The Saints—both in its riffy guitar and growling vocals.
Despite forays into aggressive sounds, an earlier tour saw Garcia Peoples opening for Grateful Shred, a Dead cover band. “That tour was awesome,” says the guitarist. “They’re really good dudes and they’re fantastic musicians, and they interpret the music really well. …I was having a blast. Number one, you get to go out and do your thing, and then you get to relax after being the opener and listen to some good jams.”
It was a turn that belied the group’s earliest days, which found them playing basement shows in and around New Jersey, where Malach grew up.
“We’re closer to that than the jam world,” he says, while acknowledging the impact of the Dead’s blueprint—how they went about the business of being a band, and how members approached and thought about music.
That Malach’s father Bob, who appears on Garcia Peoples’ expansive 2019 One Step Behind, was a professional musician likely informed his conception of music and writing for an ensemble.
Beginning in the mid-’70s, reedist Bob performed with folks like Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes, The Stylistics, The O’Jays, and Stanley Clarke. The younger Malach says his childhood home wasn’t a place where musicians came to hang out, but his father forged close relationships with a wide swath of the folks he played with. Malach called late jazz drummer Alphonse Mouzon, “Uncle Alphonse.”
“I think I found a healthy medium,” Malach says about watching the travails of a professional musician, then turning toward performance himself. “My dad was always like, ‘Don’t do the music thing. Play music and learn music, because it’s good and fun, and good for the world. But it’s tough to be a musician.’”
That heady lesson imparted by Malach’s father might not actually have set in, though: After getting off the phone, the guitarist and his cohort were set to woodshed new ideas in preparation for more time on the road and in the studio.