Remembering IDB

Several years ago, my girlfriend and I were checking out rock bands in the area. However, it was slim pickings when it came to decent live entertainment in New Jersey suburbia. Bars and other venues hosting home-grown rock bands were few and far between in central New Jersey. They relied mostly on digital jukeboxes or, in some cases, a DJ who played only dance music to entertain customers. Of course, there were bands playing elsewhere but it was a chore to figure out where they could be found or anything else about them. And the bands we did run across mostly covered Top 40 shlock that had been beaten to death by radio stations. There were some edgy bands but were largely located in the northern or southern parts of the state or New York City. Going to those places meant at least an hour of travel time there and back, which wasn’t an ideal situation if you had downed a few drinks during the evening.

And since my girlfriend was and still is a huge fan of The Grateful Dead, we decided to see if there were any GD tribute bands close to home. Not really. The only one at that time was This Old Engine, which had a regular gig at a hotel bar/restaurant in Stirling, NJ. But the other bands that covered GD music, for the most part, played in venues too far away if alcohol was coursing through your veins.

Then one day a Deadhead friend told me about a terrific Dead tribute band that played at the Branchburg County Fair, a mostly boring event in a sedate Jersey suburb. The name of the band was IDB (note: IDB didn’t want to be known as a GD tribute band but a group of musicians influenced by the band). Somehow we heard that IDB would be performing at a dive bar in Pattenburg, NJ, located in the far corners of Hunterdon County. So, we hopped in the car and sped down I-78 to reach our destination. Once inside, we saw the band members which included guitarists Michael Jaskewicz and Chris Repetto, bass player John Nemeth, drummer Jim Russo, and the keyboard player, whose name escapes me but who once honored our request to play “Unbroken Chain” at a later gig. At the Pattenburg bar, the band played many of the Dead’s popular songs like “Scarlet Begonias”, “Playing in the Band”, “Shakedown Street” and several others. They also played some deep cuts to satisfy hardcore fans who wanted the band to dig further into the Dead’s extensive catalog of music.

We were hooked. After that fateful evening, we followed the band to other area bars which began to realize that live entertainment, especially Dead music, could bring in more paying customers. There were other Dead-inspired bands like the aforementioned This Old Engine as well as Touch of Gray, Lazy Lightning and others playing the local circuit. Slowly, more bars turned off their Touch Tunes machines in favor of live entertainment like the Dead bands.

At the height of its popularity, some IDBers and a couple of other musicians formed a band called Cosmic Jerry, which (you guessed it) played a lot of Jerry Garcia’s solo stuff or his time with his side project, Jerry Garcia Band, in addition to Dead tunes. Cosmic Jerry featured Nemeth, Jaskewicz, drummer Dan Donovan and (sorry) another keyboard player whose name I can’t remember. The current band member on keys is Billy Seigel. With IDB and Cosmic Jerry, hardly a weekend went by that one of the bands wasn’t playing within a fairly short distance from us.

But as it’s typically the case in the music business, bands break up and go their separate ways for various reasons. IDB was one of those bands. Whatever the reason, the split produced two great bands: Cosmic Jerry and Diamond Eye Jack. DEJ featured Repetto, Russo, bass player Michael Malinowski (an ardent fan of Muligo who now can be seen wearing a replica of a Phil Lesh ’80s-style wristband that we give to bass players of Dead tribute bands), keyboard player Chris Shelley and lead guitarist Luke Youngman.

After the breakup, Cosmic Jerry pretty much said goodbye to the rural and suburban venues and headed south to shore bars. This included a regular stint at Sea Girt Lanes, which recently announced its closure and will soon face the wrecking ball. Around that time, the band shortened its name to Cosmic and its setlist included covers of other bands and some originals. Then, recently, Cosmic announced that Jaskewicz was leaving the band-no explanation given. With the departure of Jaskewicz, the band’s name reverted to Cosmic Jerry. There was also no explanation given for the band going back to its old name, but it was speculated that the name Cosmic Jerry tended to draw more Dead fans.

Filling in for Jaskewicz has been veteran jam band guitarist Mark Diomede, who used to play with Juggling Suns and Solar Circus, and Billy Thoden, a/k/a Billy the Kid, a New Jersey guitar phenom, who killed it during a recent cannabis-clouded Cosmic gig at Weedman’s in Trenton. Meanwhile, Diamond Eye Jack also has grown artistically and fanwise and, fortunately, hasn’t yet abandoned its stomping grounds in central New Jersey.

Nowadays, Dead tribute bands or those whose music is heavily influenced by the Dead are plentiful in the Garden State and in other states, along with other bands covering major artists. I assume the proliferation of these bands has something to do with fans craving for live entertainment during the pandemic, and the bars needing something new and exciting to draw in patrons, not just DJs spinning insipid hip-hop dance tunes or hosting trivia contests. Lately, though, it seems more and more bars, restaurants, Elks lodges, VFW halls, and cornfields in every corner of the state have jumped on the bandwagon of offering live entertainment, drooling over the prospects of making their cash registers ring. But where were they years ago, when music fans desperately searched high and low for jam bands outside of hip urban centers? I guess the canceled culture was the right incentive. But they shouldn’t be too surprised if their dreams of packed rooms or fields don’t come to pass, as too many live entertainment venues could very well dilute music-hungry weekend crowds. Unless, of course, it’s an established classic rock tribute band like those who play the Dead.

But my girlfriend, who is the co-founder of Muligo, and I will always fondly recall those nights at the Pattenburg bar, one of the spots where IDB began its much too short-lived musical journey.