Aspen adopts Easy Jim as its own | Arts & Entertainment

In July 1995, 14-year-old Tyler Lucas had scored tickets to see the Grateful Dead play at Riverport Amphitheater, 20 miles outside of his hometown of St. Louis. At the last moment, his parents pulled the plug on the adventure. 

“You can see the Grateful Dead when you’re older,” Lucas remembers his mother saying. 

That show turned out to be one of the last few shows the Grateful Dead would ever play. Garcia died a little over a month later of heart failure at a rehab facility in California. 

“I was so close to seeing Jerry play but it never happened,” Lucas said. “But it created this intrigue for me. It was this mysterious thing that I never really got to capture and it only heightened my interest in it.”

Three decades later, Lucas is helping to keep the Garcia mystery alive as guitarist and vocalist for Easy Jim, the Crested Butte-Gunnison band that has quietly become something of a house band for mountain towns across Colorado, including Belly Up Aspen, where the band will play on Tuesday. 

Learning the old-school way

Lucas began taking piano lessons at age 6 and picked up his first guitar around 9. He studied scales, modes and classical techniques with teachers, but his real musical education came in the basement, listening to tapes of live music by the Grateful Dead.

“I would send off two blank tapes in the mail and they would come back weeks later with Grateful Dead concerts on them,” he recalls. “I’d play them on my stereo and play along.” Lucas collected shows from the Dead as well as from bands like Phish, The String Cheese Incident and Moe.

Lucas attended the University of Colorado at Boulder where he played in various kinds of rock-oriented bands, including a West African ensemble. The group focused on Ghanaian music but also explored Afro-pop, Afro-reggae and Afrobeat.

After graduating, Lucas traveled to Ghana to study music more deeply. The trip led to performances across the country, including one memorable event hosted by Rita Marley. “We played her 60th birthday party,” Lucas said. “That was a pretty amazing experience.”

Lucas moved to the Gunnison Valley in 2005 and began playing in local bands, but the realities of the music business eventually wore him down. 

“It can be kind of defeating,” he said. “There’s not enough money in it to eat.”

By 2008, he had largely stepped away from performing regularly, focusing instead on occasional solo gigs while advocating for fair pay for musicians in the Crested Butte and Gunnison scene.

Birth of Easy Jim

Easy Jim was born as a one-off gig at a 2016 anniversary party for KBUT Community Radio in Crested Butte (where Lucas is currently the development director). Because the station had no real budget for entertainment, several DJs formed a house band called Faces Made for Radio.

Lucas, bassist Kevin Reinert and drummer and KBUT founder Jim Michael played a few Grateful Dead songs during the event. After a great reception, they contemplated forming a Dead cover band, with dual percussion. 

“We wanted to keep the two-drummer approach,” Lucas said, referring to the classic Dead lineup of Billy Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart behind the drum kits.

Easy Jim’s first official show was in August 2019 at the I Bar Ranch in Gunnison. Lucas, Reinert and Michael were joined by drummer Ben Wright, guitarist and vocalist Dwayne Dodson and keyboardist Zach Gorsuch. The band had rehearsed for months and wasn’t sure if the project would continue beyond that one night. But again, the reaction to the band was incredibly enthusiastic. 

From there, momentum built quickly. They were invited to open for Leftover Salmon and before long, the band began selling out shows in the valley.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived.

For many bands the pandemic was a momentum killer. But for some outfits it had the opposite effect. Easy Jim saw their popularity skyrocket during COVID.

During the summer of 2020, no bands were touring. But the outdoor setting at I Bar Ranch allowed concerts to continue with social distancing. Easy Jim ended up playing 11 shows in the summer of 2020. Their concerts became something of a cathartic release — a place where audiences could rediscover the shared experience of live music.

“Our shows touched a nerve with people,” Lucas said. “COVID really had people thirsty for live music and connection and rediscovering the magic of going to shows. And we got super tight along the way. COVID was our biggest launching pad. We knew coming out of it we had the foundation for a band.”

Making a novel experience

Today, Easy Jim approaches the music differently than many tribute acts. Instead of assigning one member to play the role of Garcia or Bob Weir, Lucas shares guitar leads and vocal duties along with Dodson. Lucas and Dodson both approach the music as lead players, often trading solos within the same song.

“I’ve always been a lead guitar player and so is Dwayne and neither one of us wanted to give up the appeal of playing Jerry’s parts and soloing and that kind of led to, ‘Well, we’ll just split up the songs, and we’ll even split up the parts within the songs.’ And we’ve done the same with the vocals,” Lucas said.

Even longtime fans often don’t know which band member will take the lead vocal or solo on a given night. That’s what makes Easy Jim so unpredictable and exciting. Add to that the ferocity with which the band plays the music and every Easy Jim show is a throw-down dance party.  

Since the first show at I Bar Ranch in 2019, Lucas, Reinert, Dodson and Wright have remained the stalwarts of Easy Jim. There has been somewhat of a revolving door in the second drummer spot and keyboards. Chris Chalmers is currently doing his second stint with Easy Jim on drums and the band is now rotating four keyboardists until they find a more permanent replacement. 

“The keyboard situation has been super fun because we have four different guys that are all monster musicians,” Lucas said. “And each one brings their own flavor to it and it makes it really interesting and fresh.”

Although Easy Jim is based in Crested Butte and Gunnison, Aspen audiences have embraced the band as one of their own. Lucas believes that connection comes from a shared mountain-town mindset.

“There’s an adventurous attitude in these mountain communities,” he said. “People prioritize the outdoors, quality of life and physical and mental health above the corporate template. And we keep the prices down. There’s only two affordable things in Aspen — The Public House and Easy Jim. Our shows are hopefully something that people can afford to go to, it’s inclusive for the people that live and work in Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley.”

Lucas admits the band’s rise has exceeded anything the members imagined when they first rehearsed together. 

“At the very beginning, we made a list of venues we hoped to play someday in Colorado,” he said. “And we’ve checked off all the boxes.” At the top of that list was Belly Up Aspen.

Now, after multiple sold-out appearances at Belly Up, Lucas savors every minute of every show. 

“If this thing ended today,” he said, “it would still be a high-water mark in my life.”

Lucas said the band’s goal is to keep the music evolving — just as the Grateful Dead did.

“The question for us now is how do we not only make it nostalgic, but make it novel every time,” he said. “How do we keep it a living experience? We just want people to feel good and to remember what music and community can do.”

Visit bellyupaspen.com for information and tickets.