In April last year, Tank and the Bangas headlined at College Street Music Hall, supported by local favorites Phat A$tronaut, Jelani Sei, and Nikita. The next week, Ian Sweet anchored a show at Cafe Nine, with Jay Som, Audio Jane, and Daniprobably opening. The next month, Farewood, Violent Mae, Passing Strange, and Sarah Golley shared a bill at Best Video.
We know that none of these shows happened. But since September, local musician Dan Deutsch has constructed a kind of alternate reality in which they did.
Deutsch calls it CT Covid Gigs, and the idea is simple: He first makes playlists of the songs of bands — both national touring acts and local stalwarts — and then packages them together by making a simple graphic that could be a poster for a show they’re playing together. Tying it to New Haven, most of the venues he picks are based here, from College Street, the State House, and Cafe Nine, to DIY spaces like the Church and the recently closed Never Get to Be Cool, or NG#BC.
The simple idea has struck a nerve; the Instagram account has over 150 followers who share the content. Looking at the poster for one fictitious show, a commenter said, “this hurts.”
Deutsch — who, in addition to being the drummer in the band Lil Sluggers, is currently working from home as the marketing and communications manager at the Greater Hartford Arts Council — said he got the idea “back in the fall, around September. I’ve always enjoyed making playlists, for myself and other people. It’s the new way of making mixtapes.” The all-digital format, meanwhile, makes it “easy to get carried away.” He once made an 11-hour playlist for a New Year’s Eve party, he said.
Deutsch.
But “as a musician in the local scene, and as a drummer who doesn’t have his own studio, I’ve been really missing just playing gigs, attending shows, and supporting the scene,” he said. The playlists were “an act of nostalgia, if there’s a word for recent nostalgia,” he said with a laugh.“I started making them for myself.”
The organizing idea came from Deutsch’s experience at having booked and promoted a handful of shows around the state. “What are my dream gigs?” he started thinking. “I started making a playlist and I was talking to a fellow musician” about what he was doing. The friend asked him to share the playlist, which then got them thinking, “how do you think the scene would react if it was dropped publicly?”
That got Deutsch thinking about the graphics that might be associated with the playlists, and naturally thought of show flyers. “I had almost a dozen playlists I’d already made before I started making the graphics for them.” That made it easy for him to start making the virtual flyers, which he did using the design app Canva. He decided to make them once a week “to give myself some sort of commitment. And it became a really nice creative outlet,” he said.
Akin to the often playful nature of posters for actual gigs, “not all of them really go well with the music. I wanted it to be lighthearted and whimsical, and bring people back to the time of gigs.” Also as with actual gigs, sometimes there’s a common thread, or similarities in sound, that unite the bands, and sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes the only commonality is that they’re all bands Deutsch likes and wants other people to hear.
“That’s what I was thinking about,” he said. “It’s all about the music.” Deutsch was inspired by CT Verses, the nearly one-person operation covering an astonishing amount of the music in the Nutmeg State. “You can really tell it’s out of love for the scene,” Deutsch said. It’s “very earnest and very honest,” and “it’s really about directing people to music.” It’s also about encouraging listeners to support their local artists financially. Embedded with each post is enough information to buy the music listeners are taking in.
As Deutsch continues to roll out his playlists and posters — he has at least five more in the works — he has been gratified by the response in the scene as he has reached out for playlist suggestions. “It’s been really nice,” he said. “People want to be included. It’s this tiny community.” On his own Instagram page, and as others have shared his content, he has noted people’s responses: “this would have been a great show”; “I wish I’d played at this”; “if only”; “this would have been so goddamn sick”; “imagine.”
And, of course, the aforementioned “this hurts.”
“It does!” Deutsch said. ?But it’s this heartwarming kind of hurt.”
As he looks at the first signs of the arts scene reawakening, he sees that “it’s going to be gradual. The big shows are going to happen” — like the new stadium shows being scheduled at the Westville Music Bowl — but “the DIY scene might not come back until 2022. What would outdoor house shows even look like? Are they possible?”
But he’s hopeful that New Haven will produce smaller outdoor shows like the rooftop shows Cafe Nine held last year. “How can that happen more?” he said. “I feel like New Haven has much more of the music infrastructure. They’re ready for it and there are spaces for it.”
For himself, he has been making music in isolation with guitar and GarageBand, and has gotten together with Lil Sluggers to rehearse a few times. He has noticed how some artists have produced a lot while others have laid low. Some have embraced live streaming and others haven’t. Lately, it has become “more structured” as artists have gotten the hang of the available technology. He’s seen “venues allowing instrumental music. It has been trickling back in a way. I feel personally, if you want to create, do whatever brings you the most joy, If that means creating, fine. If that means not creating, fine.’”
Early on, he settled into calling the conditions of living under the pandemic as a “temporary forever,” he said. “Now with the vaccines, it’s a little less forever. But we’re still in limbo.”
Visit CT Covid Gigs on Instagram.
