What a cover band does is very simple; they play other musicians’ material. How they do it, though, that’s really the trick. A cover band can include everything from the cheesy bar band that whips through hits of the ’80s to the repro groups that dedicate themselves to sounding, and even looking, exactly like their idols, whose work they seek to carefully reconstitute with every performance. In jazz, covers are an integral part of the music’s heritage, an opportunity to give a classic arrangement one’s personal stamp, and in rock there are groups like Yo La Tengo who put as much craft and creativity into their choice and execution of cover songs as they do into their original material.
Then there’s Santa Cruz’s Coffee Zombie Collective, who are indeed a cover band, but with a very different approach. They look and sound like a ramshackle bluegrass band (with some odd instrument choices, like a trumpet and a ukulele) and they play quite literally anything. Their set list includes Britney Spears, Neutral Milk Hotel, Motorhead, LMFAO, Sir Mix-A-Lot, NOFX, Foster the People and many more.
CZC aren’t just a bluegrass cover band—they mangle and twist songs into fun and sometimes barely recognizable shapes. Take their cover of Weezer’s “Undone – The Sweater Song” which clocks in at roughly 10 minutes. After they play about three-fourths of the original song in a downtempo bluegrass arrangement (even including a live rendition of the spoken dialogue introductions), the band jumps into a medley that includes “Hunger Strike” by Temple of the Dog, then “Jeremy” by Pearl Jam, then “Barbie Girl” by Aqua, then a bizarre banjo breakdown where the band chants “Chewbaccca! Solo!” and makes wookie sounds while lead singer Nate Lieby rattles off a bunch of Star Wars facts, all before they hop back into “Undone” to finish the song out.
This particular medley, as is the case with a lot of their songs, evolved over time. The last piece of the puzzle so far was the inclusion of “Jeremy” which happened spontaneously when they played a friend’s wedding in Manresa State Beach. Before the performance, someone asked them if they played any Pearl Jam songs. The answer was no.
“That stuck in my head as we rolled into the interlude for ‘Sweater,’” says lead singer Nate Lieby. “‘Jeremy’ just fit, and the crowd lit up. It was great. We do it every time, and have added a special group move for the ‘arms raised in a V’ line that cracks people up. Someday, that song will be 45 minutes long,” Lieby says.
But even the “Sweater” medley (or as they call it, the “Swedley”) doesn’t compare to the absurdity of the “George Michael Wind Sprint” which Lieby does at the end of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” just after they start the music for George Michael’s “Faith.” Lieby will hop into the crowd and run a lap around the venue, which—depending on where their show is—could be a really long lap. He then returns to the stage. The band plays “Faith” instrumentally the whole time. Once on back on stage he busts out the first line of “Faith,” and away they go. The first time they did it, it was totally unexpected, even to the rest of the band.
“I just booked it, leaving the band to fend for themselves. I did a quick loop out around, and behind the perimeter of the audience, playing the intro riff. People were dying, the band was cracking up,” Lieby says.
The “George Michael Wind Sprint” is now a regular part of the show, which has led Lieby into some precarious situations. He’s run through a working kitchen at a wedding, he did a knee slide across a tasting room at Pichetti Winery, and one time even hopped on some unsuspecting guy’s motorcycle (which wasn’t appreciated).
“We all have our ska/punk/rock backgrounds, so a lot of that comes out in the energy. We’re whipped into a frenzy, and drawing everyone there into helping create our unified shout choruses, falsetto barrages and general lunacy. We’re doing crazy people covers,” Lieby says.
Busking Zombies
The band started as a fun outlet for Lieby, who had previously been in local ska band Sneaky Creekans and, later, indie-rock band 300 Pounds, and Dustin Di Mauro who was in local reggae-rock band Stone Groove. Besides singing, Lieby also plays the ukulele in Zombie Coffee Collective, and plays a homemade percussion instrument he calls the BoomSlap, while Dustin Di Mauro plays the acoustic guitar. Other friends later joined the band, starting with Nate’s wife, Kristi (banjo), then Dustin’s brother, Joel (mandolin), John Davis (upright bass), Brian Forsse (trumpet) and most recently Sean Ring (violin).
They started by busking downtown and playing Famer’s Markets, but have since played shows locally at Kuumbwa, the Poet and the Patriot, the Redwood Mountain Faire, Earth Day and Wharf to Wharf. There have also been lots of parties and weddings, along with some pretty unusual gigs, like the opening of DeWitt Physical Therapy office on Portola, and the Santa Cruz Public Library book sale.
In most cases, they’ve made no effort to seek out these gigs. For instance, they were approached while playing a farmers market by someone asking them to play Earth Day. Then at Earth Day, someone asked them to play on KPIG. A KPIG DJ then invited them, while on air, to open for Austin Lounge Lizards at Kuumbwa.
“I’m not on the horn sending out promo packs to venues or anything like that, none of the drudgery I used to have to do for my ‘real’ bands, or all that schmoozing with bookers. It’s been really awesome,” Lieby says.
Earlier this year, they even released a full length album called Streetlight People, which has some of their favorite covers, like “Fight Test” by Flaming Lips, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses, “Kiss” by Prince and even “Carry On” by the Sneaky Creekans.
“I’m constantly amazed at how well things are going for this band and the fact that we’ve been getting these really amazing shows,” Lieby says.
There’s even some talk of the band doing some originals, particularly after one show at the Poet and the Patriot, when an audience member shouted out a request for them to play an original.
“I have never once in my musical career heard someone scream, ‘play an original.’ It’s always, ‘play something I know,’” Lieby says.
Not everyone in the band is convinced that doing originals is a good idea. Di Mauro, for instance, is having fun with the overwhelming reception Coffee Zombie Collective is getting with covers.
“People love what we’re doing. I don’t want to waste time writing music, because I’ve been there and done that. Let’s just keep this train going,” Dustin says.
Under the Covers
As entertaining as Coffee Zombie Collective are, Lieby is weary of being labeled just a “fun” band, because it downplays the hard work the band puts into their songs, and the creativity behind them.
“When you hear a band being described as fun, it’s like a girl you’re going on a blind date with being described as having a nice personality,” Lieby says. “Without sounding pompous, it’s a very honest band. Half the stuff that gets people laughing, I’m pulling on Dustin every practice anyway. We’re putting on a show, but it’s all of us out there. A black metal band, I’m pretty sure those guys don’t walk around in their black metal gear all day long. People get that we’re enjoying what we’re doing.”
When looking over Coffee Zombie Collective’s vast range of material, it’s hard to find a common thread to their cover choices. The idea has always been to play songs that excite people—that they’ll want to sing along to, even if they don’t know they want to sing along to them. Some artists, like Britney Spears, are the type of performers that a lot of the audience would say they hate, yet out of context of the pop ridiculousness that surrounds them, her songs can actually be pretty good. For whatever reason, when Coffee Zombie Collective plays “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” it suddenly seems okay for even hardened hipsters to enjoy the song, and sing it at the top of their lungs.
“Everyone knows these songs for a reason. It’s not ’cause it’s a terrible song. Everyone knows it ’cause it was a great song. Maybe the reason you hated it was because it got popular, and you heard it every 30 seconds,” Lieby says.
Their cover that is both the best example of that guilty pleasure, and one that has the biggest shock value, is LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know it,” which all started one day when Ring came over to Lieby’s house and showed him and Kristi their music videos.
“LMFAO was completely off my old-guy/dad radar,” says Lieby. “I’ve always been a huge fan of B-Boys, popping, locking, you name it, and their videos were filled to the brim with guys and gals just crushing it. So their videos instantly had me interested, not to mention staggered by their hit counts on YouTube. How did I miss this one?”
Ring, Lieby and Kristi started holding unofficial “CZC Dance Crew” practices after their actual band practice for weeks, learning the dance moves in LMFAO’s videos. Of course, talk quickly turned to Coffee Zombie Collective covering one of their songs. They settled on “Sexy and I Know It” because it was more vocal-focused—and more ridiculous—though they now flip over to “Party Rock Anthem” at the end. Of course, they sing “Coffee Zombie is in the house tonight.”
“Some people recognize it, and we get some cocked eyebrows and turned heads. By the time we hit the first chorus, people are jamming and smiling. It’s instantly fun. When we hit the outro, it just elevates the mood. People who know LMFAO get that we’re giving a nod by hopping over to ‘Party Rock Anthem,’ people who don’t just love the huge ‘Coffee Zombie’s in the house tonight’ anthem. Then we finish off with our falsetto-beeps-as-synths ending, and people just fall over. It’s great,” Lieby says.
Soul of the Song
The process of transcribing songs into their set obviously isn’t about the authenticity. The band will often not even listen to the song they’re thinking about covering, but start trying to figure it out based on their hazy recollection of the song. They liken it karaoke, where you’ll hop on stage convinced you know the song, but you forget all the little details, instead adding your own new ones.
“We play it how we remember it first, then we listen to the song and we’re like, ‘Oh, that’s way different.’ We’re defining the soul of the song first,” Lieby says.
Though it’s hard to pinpoint when a song is ready to put in a show, they will sometimes work on a song for months before it feels right. One of the toughest songs for them to work out was Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks.”
“‘Pumped Up Kicks’ is pretty down-tempo, whispery tune, so when we first started trying to fit it into our configuration, we started there. We kept on playing it all slow and kind of mopey and it was just falling flat. It sort of plodded along, waddled into the chorus, slid into and out of verses, and then trailed off,” Lieby says.
They kept at it, because they really liked the song and wanted to make it work. One day, they got the idea to play it as a high-speed rockabilly hoedown.
“We just blasted through it on the first try. We hit the ending and just said ‘done!’ We knew it was going to be that way or nothing. We added in the shout-choruses and some fine-tuning to the arrangement and called it a Coffee Zombie song. We were stoked,” Lieby says.
This process is true even for some of the cheesier, guilty-pleasure type songs. Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” was a surprising challenge for the band.
“‘Living on a Prayer’ is a complex song—which I feel like I’m going to regret saying—but I wanted to play it cause I knew we’d play it at parties and people would vibe with it. Of course everyone’s going to jump out of their chairs and scream ‘woah’ with you,” Lieby says.
While there is a certain goofy element to most of their songs, they have a handful of serious songs in their set, like “In the Aeroplane over the Sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel, for instance.
“That is pretty much a love song to my wife. That song is really special to me,” Lieby says. “When we play it at a wedding, everyone gets really into the emotion of it, and everyone’s slow-dancing and there’s the bride and the groom and everything. That’s a very deep down emotionally satisfying song to play, whereas there are other songs that people freak out to. Those are very satisfying as well.”
Three years into this band, Coffee Zombie Collective continues to be an unexpected source of fun and joy for the members of the band, particularly because they’d worked so hard when they were younger in their other bands, and in some cases beating their heads on the wall trying to catch a break. Ninety-five percent of their gigs with Coffee Zombie Collective are just thoroughly fun for the members. And even that 5 percent of “bad gigs” means something totally different than what it once did with their previous bands.
“I’ve played way more punishing gigs with my real bands, driving up to Roseville on a Tuesday, playing to nobody, and you have to drive back and go to work at 7am the next day. Getting paid zero dollars and having no one care,” Lieby says. “Whereas with this band it’s like, ‘It was a bummer, but it was two blocks away and we got tacos and we got a few hundred bucks.’ It’s like, ‘That gig sucked, no one danced til the last 40 minutes.’ That’s a pretty good gig, guys! We get spoiled on how fun gigs can be.”
