Jane Morgan
The band pays homage to Beatles albums.
Plenty of bands form via Craigslist. But Get Back Wisconsin — a five-man group from Madison that re-creates nothing but Beatles songs onstage — can trace its origins back to a 2012 documentary film about the online classified advertising website.
After watching Craigslist Joe — about a man who spent a month depending on Craigslist for food, shelter and companionship — guitarist, keyboard player and longtime Beatles aficionado Aviv Kammay took to the site in search of fellow Fab Four fans. “I wanted to talk about the Beatles, but instead I started a band,” he says.
Faster than you can say Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the like-minded musicians he met on Craigslist starting playing Beatles songs together, and things escalated from there.
Get Back Wisconsin’s ultimate goal? Celebrating the 50th anniversary of every Beatles album by performing it live as it was originally released in the U.K., beginning with 1963’s Please Please Me. No costumes or fake accents allowed.
While previous album-anniversary shows were held at the Harmony Bar & Grill, the band’s tribute to Revolver — released in August 1966 and recently hailed by Classic Rock magazine as “the album that changed everything” — will happen at the High Noon Saloon on Sept. 2. The show will feature 10 extra musicians, including brass and strings players, to vividly bring to life the songs producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick perfected in the studio.
“Revolver is when the Beatles turned the corner from being really good songwriters to becoming an unfair comparison to everybody else in the world,” says guitarist and vocalist Sean Michael Dargan, who took over on vocals and guitar for Get Back Wisconsin after the 2014 death of Charlie Johnson.
Paul McCartney’s high vocal range on “Got to Get You Into My Life,” the tricky guitars and tempo of “And Your Bird Can Sing” and the complex vocal harmonies of “Dr. Robert” are some of the challenges involved in re-creating the album, according to Dargan and Kammay.
In addition to performing Revolver’s 14 songs, Get Back Wisconsin will play dozens of other Beatles songs spanning the band’s career — even cover songs they played. The show could last as long as four hours, says Kammay, who claims to not have a favorite Beatles album or Beatles song: “I see the beauty in each one, and I think that’s an advantage for me.”
Playing other artists’ songs is nothing new for Dargan, who in addition to his own solo act has performed one-off cover shows with musicians since the late 1980s, featuring tributes to such bands as the Cure, the Smiths, the Who and, on Oct. 7 at the High Noon, the Smithereens.
Get Back Wisconsin isn’t a one-off, but it’s a finite project. The Beatles’ final album, Let It Be, was released in May 1970. Revolver’s follow-up, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, came out in June 1967, and Kammay and Dargan hope the concert celebrating that album will be held at an even larger venue.
“I want to play great songs, no matter who writes them,” Dargan says. “For me, the writing is always going to be the greatest thing about the Beatles.”
