Melvin Seals, whose musical roots seep deep
into gospel soil, has always been seeking
that point where music merges with spirit,
what he calls “church vibe.” He
found it with Jerry Garcia over two decades
ago, and he is finding it again in the new
JGB.
Melvin Seals has had a powerful presence
in the music industry for over 30 years,
playing with the likes of Chuck Berry, Charlie
Daniels and Elvin Bishop. The powerful keyboardist
was playing with Bishop one memorable night
back in 1980:
“This
big guy, he was just playing a Fender Rhodes.
But he was playing it so tasty…He was
just playing the tastiest little stuff,
I thought, This guy is just too much! I
asked him what his names was. He said Melvin
Seals.”
Jerry Garcia, on meeting Melvin Seals
It
was early 1980 and the Jerry Garcia Band
was looking for a new keyboardist. “Melvin
started playing with us, and he was just
a monster. He turned out to be the guy that
we were looking for all along.” Jerry
Garcia
“I
had no idea what was going on,” Melvin
recalls of his early days with the Jerry
Garcia Band. “I was fresh out of the
church and suddenly I was in a strange place
where all the locals had skeletons with
flowers in their hair. I didn’t talk
much, I was shy, playing the organ and getting
out of there as soon as I could.”
Melvin’s
fears that he had stumbled into some kind
of satanic cult were laid to rest when he
talked with Jerry about the skeletons. “I
realized that it was just what it was. It
made me feel a whole lot better. Jerry knew
the Bible inside out. He respected my values.
I saw that these were peaceful people.”
Jerry’s
music spoke to Melvin in a language all
its own. “There was church vibe all
over the music, a sacredness vibe, it was
like what’s known in church as a spiritual
experience. Musically, I felt compatible.
The way I played the organ was exactly what
Jerry wanted.”
Fifteen
years later Jerry was gone and it was another
seven years before Melvin heard the Jerry
sound again. It was last summer at a concert
in the Rockies when Melvin played for the
first time with a New Jersey-based Grateful
Dead tribute band called Ripple and felt
compelled to start a new JGB band.
“There
are a lot of cover bands but these guys
are different,” Melvin observes. Ron
Penque has a voice just like Jerry –
you close your eyes and it’s Jerry.
Jimmy Saluzzi plays guitar identical to
Jerry, right down to the mistakes, right
chords, right timing, it’s the church
vibe.”
“It
only took 24 years to do this,” says
Jimmy Saluzzi the new JGB’s lead guitar
and vocals. “I understand how Jerry
thinks. Every Jerry band, they play the
same rock scale, they don’t play that
intricate walkdown, updown, triplets. You
don’t stay in one scale, you got to
work it, start off low at the bottom of
the scale, bring it up the middle of the
neck, then at the last fret, you can’t
overplay your notes, you’ve got to
tease it. If you jumped into a high note,
where are you going to go? You have to know
how to stretch a screen in between frets,
out of tune, bring it in tune. I love it!”
Relentlessly
reaching for the totality of the Jerry sound,
Jimmy
is now working at a feverish level of intensity
to get the finger picking down to perfection
on his handcrafted T.W. Doyle guitar. When
Jimmy Saluzzi speaks of getting Jerry Garcia
absolutely right, from sweeping concept
to tiniest nuance, a throb in his voice
echoes the “sacredness vibe” that
first connected Melvin Seals to Jerry Garcia.
“We
first saw the Jerry Garcia Band in ’78
at the Capital Theater,” recalls Ron
Penque bassist/vocalist whose voice brings
Jerry back for Melvin. Ron and Jimmy grew
up together in Northern New Jersey with
Jerry Garcia’s music the defining motif
of their adolescence. “We’ve been
doing it for twenty- five years and at some
point it became more of a style that we
were taught by the masters – it became
a part of us.”
Another
Bergen County kid whose musical life shaped
itself to the Jerry sound was the versatile
Johnny Markowski, a songwriter like his
father Thomas Jefferson Kaye.
“I
had my first band in the fourth grade; it
was called Four Wheel Drive. I was the drummer,”
recalls Johnny, a dynamo who’s been
putting bands together ever since.
Johnny
became known with Stir Fried, a jam band
he co- formed, for which he wrote all the
songs, and sang lead. He joined Ripple several
months ago and with characteristic verve
worked on getting the guys a chance to play
with Melvin Seals and the cycle came full
circle. Just as Jerry found in Melvin the
keyboardist he had been seeking, Melvin
has found in Ripple the Jerry he had lost.
Johnny expresses what they’re all feeling:
“Jerry
Garcia Band was my absolute favorite band
in the world and I’m honored to be
able to carry on the torch and play homage
to the heart and feel and tones. I’m
honored to be playing with Melvin Seals
who blew me away at every concert I went
to. We’re all honored to be KEEPERS
OF THE FLAME.”
April 2005 - Volume 4, Issue 3
