Dead cover band the Schwag truckin' to Pitter's Cafe this weekend

If you already know who The Schwag are, you also probably already know they're playing at 9 p.m. Saturday at Pitter's Cafe and Lounge.

If you've never heard of them, their full title, "Grateful Dead Experience: The Schwag" should give you a pretty good idea: They're a Dead cover band. But rather than the meticulous pursuit of perfection, the Schwag take a mellower tack.

"We gave up sounding like the Dead a while back," frontman and bassist Jimmy Tebeau said. "It's cool and respectable; it's just not what we do."

It's an ethos that runs all the way back to the band's founding in St. Louis two decades ago, when they settled on their lovably self-deprecating name.

"We were playing for friends at first and at bars in the west end or Soulard," he said. "We were never like, 'Oh, we're the best.' It was always, 'We're not the greatest. We're the schwag, you know?'"

As a four-person outfit, they're necessarily guided more by the feeling of the Dead than by the Dead's musicality. There's just something in a 25-minute, spaced-out "Help On the Way/Slipknot/Franklin's Tower" jam that note-for-note execution can fail to convey.

When Tebeau met Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh at a book signing, he mentioned he was in a more-or-less Dead tribute band.

"I told him we just rock the tunes out, you know?" Tebeau said.

"Well, that's all we do," Lesh replied. "That's all you're supposed to do."

So that's what they do.

"It's not about what you see and hear," Tebeau said. "It's about what you feel. We do our best to create those positive vibrations."

Even now, as a national touring act, they still put a good deal of stock into finding venues that have the right atmosphere. Their goal is to evoke the kind of intimacy through music that made the Dead legends.

Which is why they make sure to play Pitter's at least twice a year, Tebeau said.

"It isn't the biggest room we play, but it's got such a great vibe and the family who runs it, the Seabaughs, they're great," he said. "We're all coming together to make something bigger happen."

The show is open to people 18 and older, and tickets are $10, available at Pitter's.

"Our plan is to take everyone on a musical adventure with us," Tebeau said. "Just buckle up and enjoy the ride."

tgraef@semissourian.com

388-3627