The digital compilation is “Stuff Your Fridge!” – a play on the iconic “Steal Your Face” lyric from the Dead anthem “He’s Gone.”
“Everything that we collect from this project is going right to the Free Food Fridge of Albany, which is a project, service that provides food for people who are experiencing food insecurity in the city of Albany," said Dan Paoletti of Bee Side Cassettes — that’s “bee” as in “buzz buzz.”
“The project here is sort of the latest iteration of benefit compilation that we routinely or semi routinely do," he continued. "This latest benefit compilation’s theme, I decided it was going to just be Grateful Dead covers. We had quite an overwhelming response and ended up with 30 tracks that come in at over two and a half hours.”
Paoletti decided to tap into the recent renaissance of Dead appreciation that launched with the “Fare Thee Well” 50th anniversary shows of 2015, the subsequent formation of Dead and Company, currently on a nationwide farewell tour, and his own personal trip with the band.
“I personally have been swept up in it as sort of a longer personal architecture of myself trying to reconnect with certain family members who have passed," he told WAMC. "So, coming out of that, and the vogue for the band in general these days, it became kind of my pandemic project. And I got really into listening to live sets from all different eras. And that just became a fascination of mine during that time. It was like I finally had some alone time to really spend devoted to diving into this artist that I had sort of been dancing around for a while. And I'm obviously not alone because we did get such a generous turnout of people from around the Capital Region and the Northeast generally.”
“Steal Your Fridge!” opens with Albany’s own Pony in the Pancake covering “Bertha,” a timeless Dead ode to the cyclical nature of love and loss first performed in 1971.
Paoletti arranged the track list to reflect the set one, set two, encore ritual of the Dead concert experience.
“We opened with a very strong ‘Bertha,’ of course, followed by ‘Touch of Grey.’ So, you could be in any ’83 [show] or onward by now- don't quote me on that," he laughed. "There's a diverse representation of everything from non-live standards such as ‘From the Heart of Me’ or ‘I've Been All Around This World’ to staples of the live repertoire, like ‘Eyes of the World,’ ‘Jack Straw,’ ‘Peggy-O.’ Somebody even did ‘Me and My Uncle.’ I think my favorite replication of a real or quasi-real thing is that we have a 10-minute version of ‘Cold Rain and Snow’ that goes into a feedback. I thought that was a really interesting choice by that artist.”
Here's a taste of Delay 77’s heady take on “Cold Rain and Snow,” which resolves in a squall of feedback in the style of the Dead’s primal era of the late 60s.
At least one in 10 households in Albany faces food insecurity, and Feeding America notes that African American, Latino, and Native American communities in the United States often face disproportionate rates of hunger due to systemic racial injustice.
Paoletti says the outpouring of submissions to the compilation shows both the interest in addressing food insecurity in the Capital District as well as the Dead’s legacy in the region.
“You've got that great 'Dozin' at the Knick' live CD," Paoletti noted. "I actually like going back and listening all those Knickerbocker Arena shows from the 90s. And I also think that it shows that there's a real warm and giving willingness among artists here to just reach out and do whatever they can to be helpful and supportive to their community members and the members outside of their community who are less fortunate. There's an underlying generosity just to folks around here in general. It's consistent, but it always catches me off guard, to some extent, how giving and caring folks can be."
