Deadicated: BERTHA’s Grateful Drag

photo: @chriscapturesitall

***

On April 29, 2023, a cover band made its debut at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge in Nashville. The group pulled together a number of ace local players to interpret the music of the good ol’ Grateful Dead. The show was a dazzling success by musical standards and also as a fundraiser, generating over $4,000 for a few area organizations.

However, the premiere performance by BERTHA also was a sensation due to the band members’ intent and ethos. As the group explained during the days leading up to the show: “BERTHA is the world’s first Grateful Drag band. An all-star collective of queer and allied East Nashville talent, coming together in wigs and full face for a good cause. Fronted by a harmony trio of Berthas and backed by a rocking all-Bertha band.” The evening was hosted by Nashville drag icon Marlene Twitty-Fargo and proceeds were distributed to Inclusion Tennessee, Trans Aid Nashville and Williamson County Trans Aid.

This performance took place just a month after Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed into law the Tennessee Adult Entertainment Act, which outlawed drag performances on public property and at events attended by minors.

As BERTHA co-founder Caitlin Doyle recalls, “We booked our first show at this tiny, kind of dive-y bar. You couldn’t really buy tickets for it. We had no idea of the supportive and warm reception that we would get because everyone in Tennessee was starting to awaken to this reality that our governor wants to tell us what we can and can’t wear and that we can’t express ourselves the way we want.”

Doyle and Melody Walker had initially contemplated forming a Dead tribute group comprised exclusively of women. That idea then morphed into BERTHA: Grateful Drag, prompted by the fervid interest of some male cohorts, as well as the actions of the state government.

However, the group wasn’t envisioned solely as a political expression. The band members bring a musical fluency and enthusiasm to the material. There is an element of humor that often informs the presentation, but while the Berthas are playful, they certainly can play. They also contribute a vocal prowess that allows the songs to soar.

As she describes the emergence of the group, Walker notes, “I feel like the other closet, as we like to call it, is the Grateful Dead fan closet. Especially in the music community down here, it can be polarizing. Certain musicians don’t want to say that they’re Grateful Dead fans because it has this connotation of non-execution, of train wrecks, of the worst things that happen. But they’re not taking into account the pure magic that can happen when you do have that freedom. So it’s counterculture, even in the music. People who play music have these big feelings about the Grateful Dead and they will judge you for being into the Dead. I feel like it’s queer in its own way, in that way.”

The band has connected with exuberant audiences outside of Nashville at the Newport Folk Festival, Sea.Hear.Now, the original Brooklyn Bowl and many other locales, with an upcoming Colorado tour and a 2025 Jam Cruise appearance on the docket as well.

“We’ve encountered a lot of fans who aren’t Deadheads who come out to these shows,” Mike Wheeler adds. “Maybe they have a queer partner or they want to check out the drag element, or maybe they just think it sounds like a fun alternative to your standard Dead cover show. I’ve definitely encountered a few people who say, ‘I didn’t think I liked the Grateful Dead, but I think I’m a Grateful Dead fan now.’ Or there’s people who claim to not be fans, but they still have a favorite Grateful Dead song and they’ll be like, “I’m not really into the Dead, but I really do like ‘Box of Rain.’ So there’s a good amount of that, which is always fun and just a testament to the songwriting.”

What role did the Tennessee law restricting public drag shows play in the origins of BERTHA?

MELODY WALKER: We had this idea before the drag ban came down—before there was even an inkling about it. The culture war has been raging since Trump got into office, and it’s just been mounting since then. But the drag ban had not happened. We just had this idea and we were talking shit about it all over town. We were telling friends and we were trying to get our crew together of who would be in the band.

But it wasn’t until early 2023, when the drag ban came down in Tennessee, that we realized maybe we should do it and maybe we’d needed a reason why we should do it.

We also had mixed feelings about not being drag performers before this—whether we would be encroaching on someone’s space or art form. We weren’t sure how it’d be received, but we decided that if we did it as a benefit, then that would be alright.

I talked to a few drag performers about it and some friends who are activists, and they were like, “As long as it’s a benefit, then that sounds freaking groovy. You should do it.” So we have maintained that ethos in what we do. Every single one of our club shows has a benefit element. We try to get a local org to come and table and speak to local causes, and we kick them something for it too. Also, a portion of our merch goes to that org.

Did you initially anticipate that this was going to be a one-off, or did you think it was going to be an ongoing project?

MELODY: A one-off. We didn’t know how well the first show would go, and then it went so well. We were able to do so much good with it. After that, we released some of the videos from it and people were engaging with them online. It just kept going. That’s when we realized that this idea was more than just a stupid idea that we had. It actually could be so stupid that it’s brilliant.

CAITLIN DOYLE: The booker at the club started getting calls that people were coming from out of town and traveling far and wide to go to this Grateful Drag show at this tiny little club. Then things blew up and we ended up raising $3-4,000 to fight hate in Tennessee just from that one show. That’s when we started to realize that what we were doing is actually important People are putting their time, energy and money behind going to this funny little show. So here we are.

How would you characterize the Grateful Dead fandom of the band members?

MELODY: Well, Mommy and I, that’s Caitlin and I, we grew up around the Grateful Dead. We’re both California girls who grew up listening to the Dead. I’m from the Bay Area, so I like to say I got it by osmosis.

I had learned a lot of the songs over the years and I had dove in a little bit. I play folk music and I come from bluegrass and there’s a lot of crossover with Old & In The Way. So I have learned a lot of it over the years, but I would say that neither Mommy nor I had dove in this far until this point in our lives.

I’m a songwriter, so I was interested in seeing how those songs tick from a songwriting standpoint. We have a good mix of people in this band. Some are casual fans of the Dead who are into the culture of it and know more of the hits. Then, we’ve got some folks who are big-time nerds, who go for the deep cuts. [Laughs.]

MIKE WHEELER: Myself, Thomas [Bryan Eaton], the lead guitarist, and Jacob [Groopman], our bassist, we all got our start playing in jam groups, from what I understand. My first band in high school, the very first songs we performed were “Shakedown Street,” “Eyes of the World” and even “Ripple” acoustic.

My uncle turned me onto the Dead when I was about 15. Then my first buddy who I started collaborating with in high school, his dad is Rob Eaton in Dark Star Orchestra. So we kind of immediately had mentors in the Dead world and I’ve seen Dark Star more times than I can count over the last 20 years. It’s music that I care a lot about.

I had never really taken the deep dive into learning the Bobby stuff, though, until crossing paths with the Berthas. I joined after the first official BERTHA show but it’s been a blast getting to dive into this music.

Seeing these songs in a slightly different context really underscores their artistry and impact.

MELODY: They’re the quintessential Americana band and I don’t think that they get enough credit for that. It’s them and The Band, but The Band didn’t play as much traditional music. The Dead played bluegrass songs, they played traditional blues songs, they played old-time ballads.

It’s like the DNA of roots and folk music is there in the Grateful Dead repertoire. I think that is so amazing. One of the songs we do that people always comment on is “Peggy-O,” which is just a moldy old ballad from the Anglo tradition. I think that that’s really cool.

How did you initially define the repertoire?

MELODY: At the very first show we realized, “OK, this is a Grateful Dead cover band. We could argue for hours, for days, for months, for years, on what a setlist should be for the first show.” It was just too much pressure and people have a lot of opinions. So what we did was narrow it down and have a theme to the setlist, which was all songs with women’s names or women in the title. Of course, we had to open with “Bertha.”

MIKE: I joined after that first show and then we all started coming up with a wish list of maybe 5-10 songs and we saw which songs had the most votes. Thomas has really taken the reins. Right now, we’re up to over 50 songs and we’re trying to add somewhere in the realm of three to five songs a month. We’re tackling “Terrapin” and “Wharf Rat” right now. But all eras are fair game and we’re learning the bulk of the songs that fans would probably want to hear, along with some deep cuts. We’re just chipping away at it.

MELODY: What we do at our hard ticket shows is a full two-set Dead show, and these guys are nerds, so the setlists are what they should be. There are first set songs and second set songs. It’s structured like a Dead show. It’s a lot of work. We also try to cram in a short “Drums” and “Space” because it’s funny to do a tiny “Drums” and “Space.”

CAITLIN: There are many things that set us apart from other Grateful Dead cover bands but another one is that we do a lot of singing with harmonies. We do three-part harmonies and then four-part harmonies, and having two female lead vocals really changes the feeling of the songs.

Someone came up to me after a show and they said, “When you sang ‘Black Muddy River,’ hearing that song from a female perspective really made me look at it in a different way. It made me cry.” I was like, “Oh, God, thank you. That song makes me cry too.”

MIKE: We change the keys on some of the songs, especially for the female leads, which gives them a little makeover.

MELODY: We play too fast some times, which is fun.

CAITLIN: Sometimes BERTHA likes it fast.

MELODY: And hard.

Is there a particular BERTHA ethos that makes certain songs especially well-suited for this band?

MELODY: I would say that BERTHA is all ethos. First of all, there’s the Grateful Dead ethos of always exploring, never playing something the same way twice, pushing the envelope so that it’s more about process, not product.

We really do try to take that on, and that’s a big part of the healing work we wanted to do with this band, so that it wasn’t about execution and being a perfect capitalist product because that will really freaking wear you down. I had the sense that there was some magic in the Grateful Dead’s music, and in that process was going to heal something for me as a musician.

So that’s part of the ethos, but we also have a benefit ethos, tied into the fact that the band is majority queer folks. We’re really trying to represent that.

We have a feminist ethos as well. Mommy and I are both women, and women have not been included in the jam scene very much, so that’s a huge part of our ethos too.

But as far as the lyrics and things revealing themselves, it’s usually less deep and more just dirty jokes that you hear because when you hear some of the song lyrics in a gay context, they become very campy. I mean, one man gathers what another man spills? That writes itself.

As you look out from the stage, I would imagine you see a range of reactions. When you think back on that, what comes to mind?

CAITLIN: I think most reactions that we’re getting are people being like, “What is this all about?” There’s a lot of curiosity. You kind of watch their faces a few songs in, and then Thomas rips a guitar solo and it keeps going and it keeps going and it keeps going, and then they’re like, “This is the spirit of the Dead.” So we win people over, and it’s such a visual show, so it becomes super entertaining for people.

Then they’re looking at us and they’re like, “So who’s actually a man? Are those real boobs? Are those fake boobs?” There’s a lot of curiosity, which again, is part of our mission of inclusion and exposing people to people that look different, but sound beautiful.

Or you might not be a fan of the Dead, but maybe you’re a fan of drag, and so you and your friend both go together and one of you comes back a fan of drag, and the other person comes back a fan of the Dead.

MIKE: We definitely had some colorful folks out in Nashville, and a lot of people traveled, too. That seems to be a recurring thing wherever we go. A good handful of people are traveling because it means a lot to certain folks—like queer Deadheads or Deadhead parents with queer kids who want to connect. There’s been a good bit of those stories coming our way, which is always great to hear.

Sea.Hear.Now: photo by Bryan Lasky

Has the Nashville drag law impacted your local shows in any way?

MELODY: We have been playing shows that are not typically all ages because venues in town are a little bit scared. It has a chilling effect. I am not sure about our Basement East show. That may have been all ages or 18-plus.

But we definitely have been denied from at least one venue in town that was too scared to do the show at all. It’s not the cops and the legislature that they’re worried about. They’re actually worried that local hate groups have become emboldened. And they have good reason to worry because they actually did have local Nazi groups threaten them when they had a show with drag and trans folks in it. It was a drag and trans comedy night or something. So because of that, they decided that they couldn’t book us.

That’s really scary and I’m sad for them, but I would also hope that people have guts, and some of the venues in town do have the guts to book us.

I think a lot of people in some of the places that we’re playing outside of Tennessee don’t necessarily understand just how repressive it is here. They really don’t understand where we’re coming from and why this exists. We don’t want to give Tennessee a bad name, but we try to explain why we’re doing this and why it really does matter.

Can you talk a bit more about the musical arrangements you’ve brought to the material?

MELODY: A lot of times, especially when we decide to split lead vocals, which is something that most Dead groups don’t do, we’ll kind of go around the horn and Melody, Caitlin and I will each sing lead on a verse. Melody does a lot of the vocal harmony arranging. So even if I’m singing lead on a verse, I’ll often jump down and sing below the chorus harmony. We have some stuff that’s set in stone, but it also fluctuates, and that’s been fun. It seems to work energy and flow-wise to split leads even within one song. It’s just another way to breathe some fresh life into these songs that people have heard a million times and want to hear a million more. But it’s nice to mix it up.

We definitely weave in some of the studio vocal arrangements that the Dead wouldn’t typically do live, like this bit from “Sugar Magnolia,” for instance. Sometimes we change keys of songs if we feel, “Oh, this could go up another whole step.” So there’s a lot of fine-tuning and taking the music seriously.

MELODY: If there’s a cool harmony or vocal thing that happens in either a live version or the studio version, we’ll try to do that. Often the studio versions had this million-vocal-tracks, CSNY vibe. We’ll try to take as much harmony as we can get that is part of the canon, like doing an outro on “He’s Gone,” where it’s just a big doo-wop vocal jam.

MIKE: The initial lineup had f iddle and some light guitar. By the second full BERTHA show when I joined, we moved towards a lineup with the traditional instrumentation of the Dead. That’s when I came in and started doing the Bobby stuff. We didn’t really sit down and strictly decide, “This is how we’re going to jam.” We have all done our best to hold down our individual roles and do it in a way that’s true to the Dead, sonically and musically.

Everyone kind of just buckled down and did their homework. Of course, we’ll take time with the arrangements and tempos and that kind of thing. Also, as with any band, you’re learning certain cues for when to jump out of a solo and back into the song form. We’re still fine tuning our jam segues, though. Everyone’s been working really hard to make it work.

CAITLIN: Thomas is the musical director, and he was trying to cue us and tell us when to stop, when to come in and all that. He thought that he was being clear with his facial movements but I looked at him and I was like, “Honey, you have 12 pounds of makeup, a huge bouffant wig and these glasses. No one can see your face. With all this drag makeup and your wig, you need to make your cues as big as your drag, and then we’ll be able to follow you.”