Beatlejuice drummer John Muzzy says for the Beatles tribute band, playing a gig is like “hosting a party for people who appreciate the music as much as we do.”
“We have so much happiness in being able to do this and have this music,” Muzzy said. “We really think of it as a real privilege and it has never gotten old for us.”
Beatlejuice is hitting the Peterborough Town House stage on Saturday, Nov. 9.
“We are thrilled for this, as we are for every show, and the fact that it’s someplace new is really, really exciting,” Muzzy said.
Beatlejuice came together as a lark in 1994 when friends Brad Delp, renowned vocalist for the band Boston, and Muzzy, the drummer from the band Farrenheit, went to see a friend’s Beatles tribute band – Bob Squires’s Beatles cover band Merseyside.
Having grown up listening to the Beatles, the musicians were blown away at how much fun they had. Muzzy said he also became fascinated with the simplicity of the five-piece Ringo drum kit.
“I was always using these very huge drum sets,” Muzzy said, looking back to the early 1990s. “The grass is always greener in the other yard. I thought that would be really fun to do that. … The original intention was I wanted to play a little kit.”
Of course, Delp and Muzzy also had a deep love of the music created by John, Paul, George and Ringo.
“I grew up with The Beatles. I saw them on The Ed Sullivan Show like everybody else,” Muzzy said.
Back then and even today, Muzzy said, The Beatles stand alone in terms of their songs. “Even as a kid I remember thinking, ‘Oh The Beatles are coming out with another song,’ and it would sound so different. It sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. I remember hearing ‘Sgt. Pepper’ or ‘Hello, Goodbye’, which I just love playing.”
Delp and Muzzy thought they would do a few Sunday brunches and a summer garden party playing Beatles music. But once they started they were having too much fun to stop and audiences loved it as well.
“First of all, I never thought I was starting a tribute band. I just wanted to play a Beatles kit,” Muzzy said. “It’s such a rich collection of songs. … Of course – because of our affection for the music and attention to detail – we started getting more and more into it.”
“I started calling around and booking it and it was very successful and it was always very good,” Muzzy said, giving credit to the material. “The blueprint is there. … When people say, ‘Oh you guys were so good,’ it’s really like The Beatles were so good.”
“Some of the music is very, very complex, the harmonies. [The Beatles] really have earned their place,” Muzzy said, and it isn’t just the incredible songwriting, but the song arrangements, the instruments used and how they were used. The Beatles would go into the recording studio and work away at a song till it took shape, Muzzy said. “They always got to the essence of a song … and that’s what makes the music so unique.”
When Delp passed away in 2007, Muzzy said he and the other band members couldn’t imagine continuing to perform under the name Beatlejuice beyond a memorial concert for Delp, which Muzzy, Steve Baker, Joe Holaday, Dave Mitchell, Evan Gianoulis and Rich Bartlett played at the Regent Theatre in Arlington, Massachusetts.
Delp had always done all of the vocals so a group of friends, including Mike Girard of The Fools, Jimmy Rogers of Velvet Elvis, Buddy Bernard of Aces & Eights, and Bob Jennings, stepped in to sing.
But out of their love of the music and knowing what a Beatles fanatic Delp was the band played on. A quarter of a century later, Beatlejuice is still going strong. They have played thousands of concerts over the years to multi-generational audiences of Beatles fans.
“Always, we feel we’re in the audience as well, playing this music and appreciating it as we go,” Muzzy said.
Now, Beatlejuice is not about recreating the moptop Fab Four, Muzzy says. “We were never concerned about looking like them. We were never concerned with ‘Oh there’s five of us.’”
Nor is it about making the music their own. “We love the music so much and do it as much justice as we can”
“We’ve certainly come through tragedy, but the music remains the core of what keeps us together,” Muzzy said. “Every single night, we are just pleased to do anything from ‘Golden Slumbers’ to ‘I am the Walrus’. It never gets tired doing this music.”
Beatlejuice is playing the Peterborough Town House Saturday, Nov. 9, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $35 and can be purchased online at peterboroughconcert.eventbrite.com or at the Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough.