Easy Jim

Rock / Americana

Easy Jim is a Grateful Dead tribute band from Gunnison and Crested Butte, Colorado, formed in the fall of 2018 and named for a line in Robert Hunter's lyric to Althea. The band came together after drummer Ben Wright and bassist Kevin Reinert, who had played together in a Beatles tribute group, decided to build a project around the Dead's catalog. The six-piece mirrors the Dead's classic instrumentation, with two drummers, two guitars, bass, keyboards and four-part vocal harmony: Reinert on bass and vocals, Tyler Lucas and Dwayne Dodson on guitars and vocals, Wright and Chris Chalmers on drums, and Julian Young on keyboards and vocals, with other keyboard players rotating through the chair. The members do not perform in character as individual Dead musicians; their stated approach is to listen closely to one another while landing the parts audiences recognize. Reinert assembles a fresh setlist for every show from a repertoire of more than a hundred songs, so no two performances repeat, and the band leans on the segues and open improvisation that defined the Dead's own shows, drawing particularly on the group's 1989 concerts. Because the members hold day jobs, Easy Jim works mostly as a regional act, playing Colorado mountain towns and the Southwest rather than touring nationally. It has become a fixture at Belly Up Aspen, where it has played roughly ten times and strung together consecutive sold-out shows, and it also appears at I Bar Ranch in Gunnison, Sunset Plaza in Mountain Village near Telluride, and Glenwood Springs' Summer of Music series.

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