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WEHM All Access - Great South Bay Music Festival - The Ripple Allstars · WEHM All Access

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well coming up Saturday, July 25th, the Javelai Stage, 5 30 p.m.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's the Ripple All-Stars making their second appearance here at the Great South Bay Music Festival and joined on the Zoom uh with uh Colin.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for coming on, and also Scott, how are you guys?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Doing well, thanks.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: How are you?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Very good.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for doing this.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: And a good chance to kind of sit down and learn about you guys.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: And uh also uh we were just chatting off off the air as far as this is your second year doing the festival.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: What uh how did you guys get hooked up with uh Jim and the festival?
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I guess was it last year?
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it came through our bassist uh Ray Karras, who has been uh member of the Electrics for many years, and uh they've played the festival a few times, and for various reasons they couldn't do it last year, so we kind of got slotted in uh as uh another choice, which was really exciting.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: This is cool.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking forward to uh this weekend of all the bands that are performing this year.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh tell me a little bit about uh the Ripple All-Stars.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: I guess I came together uh right in I guess 2023.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: What was the uh kind of the spark that brought you guys together to decide to do this project?
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think I can answer that one.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so Rennie and I were part of a another band for a number of years, uh and about three almost four years ago, uh things uh went south, and uh we had a commitment to the bitter end, and I had about two weeks to put together a band.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: And uh in about two hours, uh literally, I uh put together Colin, Ray, Jordan, and Rennie.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we thought it was gonna be a one-off, and uh four years later we're we're still doing it, and it's been bigger and better than ever.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: There's uh four vocalists in the band.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: How do you decide who takes the lead on the given song?
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Do you guys have uh certain ones you want to do or different how do you decide that in the band?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: So many voices?
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we've we've had a few uh different, you know, we've taken a few different approaches.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think the actually one of the principles we kind of go by is that no one necessarily owns a certain song because we all like to get a turn singing different songs uh in the repertoire, right?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: And that's kept it fresh for folks um and and really ha ha helped everybody kind of enjoy themselves.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, there's not really a a Jerry vocalist or a Bobby vocalist.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we all four of us take turns singing songs.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that people that don't know, you guys play obviously the The Dead, but you also do some Dylan and Van Morrison too, and the almonds clout it.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: What um how did you kind of decide which direction to go in as a band?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: I would say I mean we would we definitely started out with Grateful Dead as the core repertoire, but we're doing this monthly uh residency plus other gigs, and you know, eventually we just kind of wanted to surprise people a little bit.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's it's kind of in the in the realm of what you see a lot of bands like maybe TTB doing or other other bands, you know, picking out stuff that's sort of adjacent or sympathetic in its vibe to the dead and and the their scene and our scene, uh things that our people will enjoy hearing.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we we will pick them out and and we love to surprise everybody.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: Where does the uh the name Ripple All-Stars come from?
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously the owner than the dead, but is there kind of a reasoning behind that?
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: How do you guys decide on that to be the name?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think I just came up with it because I needed to really fast.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, when we started doing this, two hours, yes.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, no, it was uh pretty much I I would believe it was in conjunction with our good friend Jen Bowden.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we started uh a potlock, you know, uh Paul uh at the bitter end, Paul Rizzo, uh allowed us to allowed us to bring outside food in uh at the beginning, which was really unheard of.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we started setting up uh food.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: People were able to bring food in from outdoors, and we set up uh an area in the back and from Ripple All-Stars, we came up with the Ripple Potluck, and it's uh it's just taken off tremendously.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, people bring everything from pizza to dumplings to any type of finger food.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And we uh it's just been great, yeah.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: You were mentioning the the monthly residency at the bitter end, kind of a signature part of your identity as as a band, got to get involved from that.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: How is playing the same room uh shaped the band's evolution over time?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it sure is nice to kind of have the same room over and over again.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: You really get used to it.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: We we do notice when we're not in there, it's a little bit of a more of an adjustment, you know, to whatever sound situation we're in.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and and you know, at the bitter end, they've got an amazing Meyer sound system.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: They're an official Meyer room now, and Meyer has great connections to the Grateful Dead, so that part of it's awesome.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and we just have a great relationship with those guys and and with that room.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: So is it kind of obviously it's kind of home base for you guys?
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: Is it a chance to kind of try things out there and then bring them out to other other gigs, I'd imagine?
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we build our repertoire there.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: I was kind of looking back to get some numbers.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: We played something like 250 different songs in the residency, and of those 80 uh or so are not Grateful Dead covers, like not a not a cover that you know of a song that Bobby or Jerry did.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: Those I would count those in the in the core repertoire, all the JGB stuff, etc.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it's just songs completely out of the dead's normal repertoire, right?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: So we've had a lot of fun with it, and uh yeah, it really is a chance for us to do a kind of a we do a fresh show every every month.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: We kind of have this insistence on not repeating a song within a four to six month period.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: So wow, that's a challenge, yeah.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: We are we are really uh trying to cover Scott and I joke that we have a goal of covering every song that that ever did.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: I think we're still a ways from that because there's a great big number of them that they only did once or twice.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: But uh we're having fun with it, that's for sure.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: Keep pushing.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: When you uh approach uh a song, uh what's kind of the balance between honoring the original feel and and kind of letting your own instincts take over on it?
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: So how does how does that work?
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: Is that easy?
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: I'd imagine you want to make sure you represent the song well, but you want to do your own thing.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'll probably just take a stab at this because Colin and I always uh recently we've been talking about this.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: We all have different uh visions, different versions, different uh years and uh eras of the Grateful Dead in in mind.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Colin may be thinking about uh the wheel from you know the early 70s, and you know, Rennie may be thinking 1990.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Who knows?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there's definitely a difference in the in the feel, the tempo, uh sometimes the vocals, and uh we sort of have to tune it in and and agree that we're going to kind of focus on that.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, my take on it is we we try to bring something of ourselves to us to it.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um we're not really trying to reenact a certain show or a certain any you know, any particular version.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: At the same time, of course, we are listening to them and we're influenced by them.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I I find the sort of research part of it fascinating, you know, to check out how the band did songs differently, like Here Comes Sunshine, for example, like when they they did it a lot in the early 70s and it was done a certain way.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: Then when they brought it back in the 90s, it was quite different.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yet still the same song.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: There's so much to choose from.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a song that you've tried that you've it's taken a while to kind of grow into doing it the way you want to do it that it just hasn't kind of necessarily clicked yet?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um I mean a few things come to mind.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh just some of the pieces are quite complicated.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: So so something like Sailor Sync.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, I think recently we've taken the the tactic of breaking it up so we only have to do one of them.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's just uh learning all the ins and outs of it uh has is been really fun.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: And that one is really kind of coming into its own, I think, with us.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um we'll be doing one of those in one of our shows coming up.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so that's an example.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: How do you um uh you're improvising a lot on the stage?
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: How do you keep it fresh, but also make sure that you kind of rein it in at times?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: You don't want to go necessarily too far.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh my bandmates might disagree.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes I I I go pretty far, uh you know, but uh I think it's important to let the music breathe.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's really an essential part of this music, is that you kind of get on stage and you don't necessarily know everything that's about to happen.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's I think Phil felt very strongly about that, and and the other rest of the band members, obviously.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and we really enjoy that part of it.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: But at the same time, yeah, you kind of got to be thinking about how long is the show?
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: How long can you extend this jam?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: Can this go from you know being what we thought might be a seven-minute song to being a 12-minute song?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: Well, if we do that, something else is gonna get cut.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, you have to think about that, but also just have fun with it.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: And and it depends also what the crowd energy is, right?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: What are we getting from people?
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: How does it sound?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: Does this feel really good in this moment?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: Let's keep this going, you know.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned too uh the improvisation, and with a festival like Great South Bay, there is there's a time limit.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do you guys prepare uh the set lists and and leave still some room for improvisation?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think we owe thanks to Colin for that.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Colin uh is the master at creating uh not just the set list, but the we're all combined pushing songs that we'd like to play.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but Colin takes the time and creates uh PDF song uh song sheets for everybody, and obviously they're being shared on a uh Google Drive and everybody has access to it.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and it's constantly being updated and uh improved, and uh so we all try to focus on just that.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: And and to get the set list just right, I mean there you gotta have some contingencies, right?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: You might end up cutting a song and and kind of know that, you know, if something goes long, also you know, need to have maybe a song in reserve, a short one if you end up five minutes short.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh this kind of festival, it uh it does present its own challenges with a timeline.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: The timeline needs to be quite tight.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: And and it's you know, it's only fair to everybody that you stick within your time frame.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: You've uh played Great South Bay before, I believe, last year.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: What stands out about that performance uh compared to some others on Long Island?
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I would say it is, frankly, the biggest stage we've been on physically.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: That was really fun.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_02: And and you know, just having professional sound there to to help you set up the team was flawless.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: They were amazing.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um we really loved it.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it was fun also seeing all the other bands.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um we had a great time.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_02: We had a fair, fairly good turnout from our our usual crew from from the bitter end.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh luckily that crew kind of comes from all over the place in the tri-state.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_02: We get people from Long Island and New Jersey and Westchester, and uh it's all a bunch of people that just really love live music, and many of them probably would be going to the Great South Bay anyway, but they came down to see our set, and and we had a great vibe.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: We're looking forward to that again.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's a Saturday, July 25th, uh Jambelaya Stage at the Great South Bay Music Festival, and uh you guys have been together for a few years now.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm curious, uh obviously doing a lot of covers, uh ever thought about evolving kind of into original material?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'd imagine there's some that you guys are looking at.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: The band hasn't taken that step yet.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: It it's been uh focused on kind of the legacy of the dead and really honoring that.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um that could happen.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh definitely would be an interesting uh thing.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, some of us do write original tunes, uh, but we haven't gone that direction yet, to be frank.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, it's uh something to consider.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: I was curious where you guys, because you're all uh obviously you guys have been in a lot of different bands and projects over the years.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh as far as with the uh the residency um at the bitter end, which you do every month, how long do you guys play for?
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you um decide to kind of I'd imagine you mentioned the Google Drive and different conversations.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: How do you build the you you said you want to make them different.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: There you said it's like four to six months, you don't play the same song.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean uh for the bitter end, we're developing the set kind of from the moment the last show ended.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we do tend to bring things back at this point, now that we've been there, you know, three plus years.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's we're in our fourth year at this point.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: And uh so we have actually taken the step of saying, okay, here's the repertoire, right?
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: Here's the tunes that we've done that are relatively easy that we feel we can pull off uh without a lot of notice, right?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_02: So that makes it a lot easier to put to pull together a show.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: Then we then we have you know the folder of quote harder stuff, unquote, which you know includes includes uh like the Sailor Saint that I mentioned, includes things like Terrapin or the whole weather report suite, which we performed recently at uh Garcia's, was great fun, um, and other things like that.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: What's it like performing at Garcia's and and places that are so dead-centric and you're you're honoring such an amazing legacy of music?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh does that uh it has to cross your mind, I'd imagine, when you're performing these songs.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Feels like home when we get to uh Porchester, whether it's the cap or Garcias, uh, we we feel very comfortable playing in there.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and it's definitely a very big Jerry vibe, and uh we like that.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: Were you guys familiar?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: You must have been familiar because it came together pretty quickly, the project, but um, who was the most familiar with the dead songs or in playing them and who was the the least familiar?
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: And how long did it take to everyone kind of catch up?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: This is one of the only uh instances where almost everybody had a pretty I mean I think everybody had a great grounding in the material, right?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody in the band knew the stuff, you know, if not inside out every tune, having played them all, probably not, but having heard them all, yeah, yeah.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_02: I mean it was really fun, and that's been part of the the joy of it is really getting to explore all the different tunes that we want to.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we're now down the list where you know things like Cosmic Charlie are being contemplated, you know, which is something the dead themselves hardly ever played, mostly because it's got a sort of uh semi-impossible bridge.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: But uh it's very fun to to to sort of check these tunes out and to learn them together.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, everybody does quite a bit of work every month, as you can imagine.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: Sounds like it is given given that we have such a varied set list.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Coming from uh from my end, I've been uh a Deadhead for many, many years.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a big 80s deadhead, so I've been to uh quite a few uh dead shows and offshoot bands uh as well.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I've seen my share.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I uh I feel that I can bring a lot of the uh the memories that I that I experienced going to various shows, different stories, parking lot stories, and just uh share the vibe with with my band members uh and just try to uh continue continue that that that trail.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh it's been a lot of fun.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, very good.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: You guys are doing a terrific job with the legacy of the music, and thank you for doing that.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: And coming Saturday, July 25th to the Great South Bay Music Festival at the Jambalaya Stage.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Ripple All Stars, thank you so much for joining us.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate uh a chance to get to know you.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, we look forward to seeing you at the festival this year.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for coming on.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Five thirty to six thirty, jambalaya stage.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Very bad.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: See you there.