Jake Joyce Band

Jake Joyce wasn't quite 9 months old when Jerry Garcia died in August 1995, yet it somehow seemed inevitable that when the Jake Joyce Band's self-titled debut EP dropped 23 years and two months later, the Grateful Dead guitarist's influence would come through loud and clear.

“It's like putting three different ingredients in a blender,” Joyce said on the eve of an Oct. 13 EP release show at Tellus 360 in Lancaster. “You can't get one out afterwards.”

Nor would you want to.



In the case of Joyce and the backing track to his life, the Grateful Dead has been ingrained since he was in the womb, thanks to his father, Tim, who, as Jake put it, “was a major nerd of the band.”

When Jake was a kid growing up near Alvernia University, his dad would download a different Dead concert every morning from the Speeding Arrow website, which posted soundboard archives of all the band's shows, and they'd listen to them in the car on the way to school. It was “early, primal Dead,” he said, and it made quite an impression.

Whether it was the result of a son looking up to his father or some sort of cosmic force radiating from the music — or both — Garcia's guitar-playing gripped his emotions.

“It seriously hit me in a major way,” Joyce said.

And while he's not trying to imitate Garcia's sound now that he has a band of his own, that ingredient is baked into the mix, and there's no getting it out.

“I am very inspired by what Jerry Garcia did, and by what other people do today that reflect his approach, and it is undeniably present in what I do,” Joyce said. “If somebody got reminded of Jerry while I was playing, I think that would be pretty freakin' cool. I'd be OK with that.”

Like Garcia, Joyce grasps subtlety. He knows when to let the notes breathe and reverberate in deference to the songs, as in the bouncy opener “Try and Let Go.” Track two, “You Could Be My Medicine,” features Joyce's haunting lap steel effect created using a brass slide on his electric guitar. Bradley Herring's funky bass line shines on track three, “The World Is at Your Fingertips.” And the finale, “The Roses,” ends with a 90-second jam that gives a taste of what's in store when the band stretches out at shows.

When it's all said and done, you're left wanting more, and so more there shall be.

Joyce said he's constantly writing, and his year-old band already has a repertoire of about 15 originals.

They were motivated to get these four tunes out quickly after being booked by local promoter Rob Hunt of Flagship Music Productions to open for Melvin Seals & JGB last Saturday at the Harrisburg Midtown Arts Center. Seals was a longtime member of Garcia's side project, the Jerry Garcia Band, which he has kept going as JGB since Garcia died, so JJB — the Jake Joyce Band — knew they'd be playing to a big, like-minded crowd, and were determined to have a recording and other merch in hand for the gig.

To produce their EP, and quickly at that, they turned to Lucas Gienow at the Sugar Tank in Lancaster, where they recorded it in two days, with everyone in one room playing the songs live. Joyce couldn't be happier with how it turned out.

“The band really kills it, and it's really fun to play with these guys,” Joyce said. “They bring it to life, for sure.”

In addition to bassist Herring, Joyce is backed by his childhood friend Anthony Pietrowski (songwriter for Talk Louder!) on guitar, Brendan Quinn (songwriter for THE) on keyboards (Joyce plays bass in THE) and Ryan Kipp on drums.

Their fall has been jam-packed with shows throughout the region. This weekend, they're back in Reading for a Halloween party at the Northeast Taproom on Saturday at 9 p.m., then Joyce will play solo acoustic at the West Reading Farmers Market on Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

He's working on booking a year-end run of shows that will include a gig at Dawson Street Pub in Manayunk on Jan. 5, then the band plans to head back to the studio in 2019 and just keeping the ball rolling from there.

Undoubtedly, Saturday's hour-long set in front of a room full of Deadheads served as an early milestone along Joyce's path to fulfilling a lifelong dream.

“We got to stretch out a little bit,” he said. “We had a lot of family and friends from the area come out. ... Just getting to open for Melvin Seals, with a lot of people there who are into the same kind of music I'm into, who dig it, that was really cool.”

Contact Don Botch: 610-371-5055 or dbotch@readingeagle.com. - Reading-Eagle