A Musical Time Machine

OK, I time-traveled a bit on Friday night. Well, my attitude did at least. My longtime friend Mr. Chip and his wife Anna coaxed me out of my normal Friday routines to go to Pisgah Brewing and check out a Dead/Phish cover band that I had never heard of—but then again, I don’t hear about many touring bands nowadays. It’s just not part of my radar, and my attentions are happily focused elsewhere … like scanning doggie DNA reports. You know important stuff.

I’m not a huge Dead cover band kind of follower or listener either. I preferred the real deal, and I admit from the late 1970s until Jerry’s passing in 1995, it was a minor obsession. Well maybe a major obsession, I saw 40-plus shows all over the U.S. and nearly a dozen Jerry Garcia Band shows through those years.

So I'm kind of jaded when it comes to bands attempting to mimick the Grateful Dead, and my expectations were nil when I chauffeured my friends over to Pisgah. Now, if you’ve never been to Pisgah Brewing, it can be a tough place to find. The brewery is housed in an old furniture factory on the western edge of Black Mountain. It takes a few turns and unexpected twists to get there, and you can easily miss the turn just past a small Free Will Baptist church and into a parking lot that can be described in one word … industrial.

The old guard shack still sits at the edge of the property, decrepit and shiny with crystals of broken glass. I’ve known the guys who run Pisgah for a few years now, and they have upgraded the place considerably. They expanded their brew house by knocking down walls and replacing the aging dairy equipment they used for brewing vats to much larger stainless steel tanks and kettles. I was there when they first started construction on the tasting room—where the bands now play. The large bay doors in the tasting room now open to a graveled courtyard, fire pit and Quonset hut game room. Simply put, it is a very funky place.

The guys who run Pisgah are all Deadhead types, so it surprises me none that they knew about this band Hyryder from Indianapolis. These guys were good, and their music is what set me to time traveling a bit. Often nostalgia can be a double-edged sword, and reminiscing can leave you at loss pining for things that once were.

I didn’t experience that though, this was much different. The band played the music that I was so familiar with, but it sounded and felt different. It was alive and in the present, and I think that’s no easy task when you cover an iconic band like the Grateful Dead. I think the music woke me up a bit and to start thinking about how to embrace the past and make it work for us in the present and the future.