Covering Their Bases: Shakey

Cover bands. Say what you will about them, but unlike their more successful and famous counterparts, they’ll always play the hits and won’t be snobby assholes about it. In Covering Their Bases, Decider asks a cover band to weigh in on issues regarding the reason for their existence. In this edition, we catch up with Madison music veteran Peter Kaesberg, who manages to sing in an eerily accurate Neil Young voice in the tribute band Shakey, which plays a Friday, July 10, happy-hour show at the High Noon Saloon.

Decider: How did Shakey come about?

Peter Kaesberg: It started out as just a two-piece with me and Matt Joyce (of The Midwest Beat and The Honey Slides), and we never, ever played a gig. Then we did it as a five-piece for my 40th birthday party four years ago with Dan Hobson on drums, Tim Sullivan on guitar, and Matt Appleby on bass. Appleby is the one person that I didn’t know when the band started, and he’s proven to be the most important member. Both of the Matts in our band have an encyclopedic knowledge of Neil Young that is pretty flabbergasting to me. We’re all up there with our notes and I don’t think he uses them at all. But I’m like, fuck, man, that’s what music stands are for.

D: You’ve been in plenty of Madison’s original acts over the years. Is this your first tribute band?

PK: Someone just reminded me of this the other day. I had forgotten that when I was in college and was in sort of a hippy band called Harvest. We did mostly Neil Young and some Grateful Dead. When I was playing in that band, I was kind of a little punker—I was in Poopshovel at the time—but it was really fun playing with these guys. The one thing I kind of realized even back then was that Neil Young was the common denominator of the musical tastes between me and the hippy contingent of that band.

D: You’ve covered entire albums for your last couple of shows, and this time you're doing Harvest. Does that present any special challenges?

PK: Harvest has been a little more of a challenge for us because the album has so much piano and strings. One thing I like to mention to people is that it’s definitely a Neil Young tribute band, but the whole sort of three-guitar thing we do is definitely patterned after Drive-By Truckers. Obviously, Neil never has three guitars in his band at once. When you have Neil, you don’t really need that many people.

We have Maggie Weiser singing “A Man Needs A Maid.” Maggie is an integral member of the band now as well. We have her sing sort of the "Neil sexist songs" just to turn it around. It makes it more like someone’s reading a story as opposed to espousing the views of the actual song.

D: Do you think Neil Young is being sexist or just speaking from a character’s point of view?

PK: I don’t know. Harvest, to me, seems like a break-up record. Either being lonely as a man, or just getting over a relationship, or just trying to say, "Screw relationships. I’m going to just go on by myself."

He’s been accused of being sexist, but women love Neil Young. If anything, they might be able to take that stuff with a grain of salt or just realize that it’s a frustrated man getting some of his shit out and not necessarily to be taken as a whole. He’s been married to the same great woman for 30 years, so apparently he must know what he’s doing.

D: Obviously, Neil Young has a huge back catalog. How do you decide what to play?

PK: That’s the beauty of it. If we wanted to, we could keep doing sets and never repeat songs. We do like to repeat songs, though. "Powderfinger" is one song that we do every show. At least one person in the band besides me has decided that’s the quintessential Neil Young song. That chord pattern—there’s something about it. What would all these alt-country bands do without Neil? Sure, Dylan helps them, but I think Neil is the prototype for so many of these bands now that people like.