Canan came to prominence as a guitarist in the group Bockman and spent several years as a touring musician with the Grateful Dead Experience, better known as the Schwag. He still plays with that group on occasion, but he's moved into the second-chair guitar role after he and his wife had a pair of children.
Even when he was with the Schwag, he tended to a growing weekly stint at McGurk's, where Falling Fences plays every Sunday night, blending Irish and American songs. Adding a Wednesday night staple to his calendar allowed him a chance to scale back from what had been an ambitious road schedule, while getting him much deeper into a wide selection of music.
The Voodoo Players will rehearse a couple times before a show; Canan's recent Prince shows required his eleven-piece band to work for marathon, five-to-six hour stretches. Even with experienced hands joining him, he's had to develop tricks to make it work.
"The other kicker about our gig," he says, "is that we do two-set shows; each is 75 to 90 minutes and it's often longer than the artist would play. Tom Petty just did a couple-hour set and we're doing three hours of his music. Essentially, part of my approach is to be able to extend the arrangements to fill the time. It's the same amount of songs as his two hours, but you add a funky trumpet solo here, a longer guitar solo there, you let the horn section go off." That means instead of doing 45 songs, he says, they can get away with just fifteen or twenty longer versions.
When it comes to the accuracy versus feeling, Canan falls comfortably in the middle.
"I like the balance of the two," he says. "We recreate the material and we also reinterpret the material. It becomes a half-and-half. It makes it a little more thrilling for the audience: You know these songs, but they'll be played in a way you've never heard before. So many tribute bands in the area can play it absolutely note-for-note and there are good bands that do that. Celebration Day can nail Led Zeppelin exactly.
"When the Voodoo Players do Zeppelin, there's a little more interpretation of the material, our coming up with our thing. People grasp what we're all about. First of all, it's about joyously celebrating the material, but putting our own, creative spin on it."
Dwight Carter got into music through fashion. Through his Brainchild Events umbrella, he put together a series at the Gramophone paying tribute to fashion icons and the musicians who created certain trends. "All three shows did so well, I decided to do more shows," he says. He's now created tributes to Queen, Prince, the Beastie Boys, the Native Tongues and Joan Jett, among others. Currently, he's working on putting together an MTV series, including Headbanger's Ball, 120 Minutes and Yo! MTV Raps.
Carter has largely hung up his bass, making him less a musician himself than one who's around lots of musicians on a regular basis. His role in creating tributes is an interesting one: As the demand has grown, he's been able to match musicians with clubs, forming venue-specific shows that may happen only once, or a handful of times. While a Superjam may play out dozens of sets a year, a band like the 120 Minutes tribute crew will pull together a set of R.E.M., Pixies and the Cure, with enough material for one night's entertainment. As the ringleader, Carter's doing everything from song curation to marketing.
Jason Nelson's chameleon abilities mean that he is often Carter's first call. Of his friend, Carter says, "Jason can transform himself into any genre of music and any vocalist. His vocals range from soulful to punk in a matter of minutes. It's amazing how he recreated the songs of Queen perfectly and hits the vocal range of Angelo Moore in Ghetto Soundwave. I don't know how he learns so many songs in a short period."
The answer? At the gym. Nelson says he has a regimen he follows, learning the lyrics on the treadmill in chronological set order.
"It's just brain training," he says. "And I'm not gonna lie. Sometimes I do have a cheat sheet next to the drums, but for the most part, I try to show up to rehearsals and the performance with lyrics fully ingrained. It really is just muscle memory so that at the show it's go-go-go."
One thing Nelson has learned in his many years fronting tribute acts? St. Louis might be shy about dancing, but it still really wants to. It's up to Nelson to find the band, the tribute and the song that will, he says, "compel people to the dance floor."
That differs by location, even inside the city. "At the Chase Club, you'll be able to play 'Uptown Funk' for the next 50 years and it'll always pull people in. Out in St. Charles, you can play 'Don't Stop Believin' and that will get people's attention. ... Over in Illinois, they're big into hair metal and the '80s. It's their American lexicon.
"We played Decatur last weekend," Nelson says, "and we played 'Africa' by Toto. That was their jam. We went on break and the crowd played it on the jukebox twice more. Then we came out and played 'Roseanna.' Those were huge Toto fans."
For a split second, the gregarious Nelson pauses. The idea comes that quickly: "Maybe my next tribute will be Toto."
