The Ladies Said “Please”: BERTHA’s Bay Area Pride Month Appearance

Bertha: Grateful Drag | Menlo Park, California | photos by Gabriel David Barkin

BERTHA, the world’s first Grateful Drag band, made a timely Pride Month appearance in the Bay Area Thursday night at Menlo Park’s Guild Theatre. Special guests included Mark Karan (The Other Ones, RatDog), burlesque dancer Emperess Astara, and Jerry Garcia’s legendary Stratocaster Alligator.

BERTHA: Grateful Drag

For two long sets, BERTHA proved once again that they are an A-team Grateful Dead tribute band, musically speaking. Thomas Bryan Eaton’s guitar chops are equal to any other post-Garcia practitioner of the Dead’s catalog, and Jacob Groopman is among the few bass players who fits approximately into Phil Lesh’s distinctive bottom-end shoes. Props as well to Michael Wheeler (guitar, vocals), Alex Jordan (keys), and Justin Vorp (dums) for their instrumental skill, and to “Daddy” Melody Walker and “Mommy” Caitlin Doyle on lead and harmony vocals.

The fun is exponentially impressive due to the drag show element. But beyond being fun and often described as “irreverent,” BERTHA is decisively on a mission to spread a message of acceptance for people with LGBTQ+ identities. One element of this is meaningful goal is contributing to relevant local nonprofits at each gig. Thursday’s beneficiary was Billy Defrank LGBTQ+ Community Center (https://www.defrankcenter.org).

The Guild show was also notable for the presence of several historic instruments loaned to BERTHA courtesy of Andy Logan and Grateful Guitars Foundation. (Grateful Guitars is a 501-c3 nonprofit that obtains world-class musical instruments for talented players who seek to carry on the tradition of jam band music. The foundation also supports numerous music education initiatives and related causes. Visit (https://gratefulguitars.org) for more information.

Among the “guest instruments” at the Guild Theatre were:

• Jerry Garcia’s Stratocaster Alligator. (Played by Eaton)
• Brent Mydland's Kurzweil MIDIboard, used on stage with the Grateful Dead from 1987-1990. (Played by Jordan.)
• An 8West Guitars Crescent, built by luthier Bob Fishman and modeled after Tiger and Wolf, two of the guitars Doug Irwin built for Garcia. (Played by Eaton.)
• “Little Brown,” a cousin of Phil Lesh's “Alembicized” Guild Starfire bass "Big Brown." (Played by Groopman.) The headstock has a “Grateful Guitars logo, and here’s a note on this instrument from Andy Logan: “[This] was an original late 60s ‘Alembicized’ Guild Starfire made by Rick Turner when he was at Alembic. It fell into disrepair and was waterlogged and in two pieces. I brought it to Rick, and he and his team [after Turner died in 2022] brought it back to life, including reengineering one of the trapezoid pickups that needed replacing.”
• A Hoeg Guitars replica of Bob Weirs Pinky Blackknife. Weir played this model from 1988 through all of his post-Grateful Dead bands. (Played by Wheeler.)

Let’s unpack this now: we’ve got a collection of men and women in drag playing cover songs like Johnny Cash’s “Big River” a la the way they were covered by the Grateful Dead,  and using instruments that are themselves, in some instances, the selfsame (or variants of) instruments used by the Dead themselves. Have fun parsing that one!

Maybe this is a stretch, but something about this mishmash suggests that it’s more than just “okay” to embrace the many different ways of being human. It’s imperative to accept, embrace, and celebrate differences as well as similarities, variations as well as resemblances. Bertha is all about that.

One of the intriguing things about BERTHA is how they call one’s attention to lyrics that are somehow entirely applicable to LGBTQ+ self-realization and acceptance – and also, occasionally, to bigotry and ignorance. To wit (and I acknowledge that this is purely interpretive for the present context only), I’ll let the words sung by Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia take us to the outro. These are all from songs BERTHA played on Thursday, starting with the ugly and working our way toward the beautiful.

• “The heat came ‘round and busted me for smiling in a cloud day.”
• “Wherever he goes, the people all complain.”
• “When they come to call on you and drag your poor body down.”
• “Gone are the days been the ladies said please.”
• “Sure as you're born…”
• “Please forget you knew my name.” (My “dead name” that is.)
• “Might as well, might as well.”
• “At least I’m enjoying the ride.”
• “If I had my way…”
• “She raised a few eyebrows, and she went on down alone.”
• “There’s nothing wrong with the look that’s in her eye.”
• “Mama, Mama, many worlds I've come since I first left home.”

And perhaps most instructive of all:

• “Let your life proceed by its own design.”

BERTHA. Let them proceed by their own design. And that goes for all of us, too.

SET LIST

Set 1:

Might as Well
Hell in a Bucket
Brown-Eyed Women
Cassidy
Friend of the Devil
Me and My Uncle
Big River
Sugaree
Promised Land

Set 2:

Samson and Delilah
Scarlet Begonias
Cryptical Envelopment
The Other One
Cryptical Envelopment
St. Stephen
Drums
Space
Stella Blue
Sugar Magnolia
Going Down the Road Feeling Bad

Encore:

Brokedown Palace