thePULSEBand with local connections adding up fans across the Northeast!
By Michael Grandone
I don’t think we’re a ‘college’ band, and I don’t think we’re really a Worcester band either,” says Ted Gallagher, guitarist from The Nine.
That’s probably true since the four members of The Nine are out of college, and the group is making a name for itself far beyond Worcester at gigs all over the Northeast. Still, this group has strong Worcester connections.
September 2003 – In March of 2002, four guys — three from the city’s College of the Holy Cross and one from Tufts University — came together to form a band that still manages to draw crowds constantly to Worcester’s Tammany Club.
The Nine are Mike Fiore on vocals and guitar, Ted Gallagher on guitar, Mark Chernausek on bass, and Peter Schaefer playing the drumkit. Peter is the only one who didn’t attend Holy Cross.
Gallagher reminisces, “Fiore was playing solo shows already at Holy Cross with his own material. When I came a year later, I was searching for a band. A mutual friend, Nick Cioe, introduced Mike and me and we began to rehearse together everyday. At the time, we were performing acoustic and Mike sang. Eventually, we decided we’d like to work with a whole band, and I automatically thought of Pete [a high school friend of Gallagher’s]…we asked him and then Mark Chernausek, a bass player I met in a jazz improv class at HC, to start rehearsing with us.”
“Ted did a really good job of explaining that,” Mike Fiore says at the conclusion of Gallagher’s account. It is not entirely surprising that Fiore is happy with what one of his band mates has to say. At the group’s live shows, you are clearly hearing four members of a cohesive unit on stage, not a band with maybe one or two talented musicians who expect the rest of the group to just play their instruments and fall in line.
“We arrange songs quite democratically. If I bring a piece of new material to the table, we all sink our teeth into it as a band,” says Fiore.
“I think there’s something in The Nine that follows a tradition of musicians that revere the spontaneity of improvisation, and the excitement that we get in communicating in the moment,” adds Gallagher.
The Nine at a recent Tammany Hall gig.Photo by Michael Belsito
Every member of the four-piece band has unique musical roots. Gallagher says, “I began studying guitar, learning by ear, when I was about fourteen,” which is an amazing admission, as anybody who has heard him play goes away convinced he was born with a guitar in his hand. He is never complacent playing The Nine’s songs, adding fills everywhere, and knowing just when to offer maybe two notes of resonance, or to unravel his guitar strings with quick playing.
Chernausek is noticeably versatile on stage. He plays a five-string bass regularly and occasionally takes out a full-size, stand-up bass, generally seen in symphony halls, not local bars or clubs.
“Pete has been playing since fifth grade and had experience playing in a band,” Gallagher says of The Nine’s drummer. “He studied for a while, but by the time we began playing together, we were learning from each other.”
Fiore never took a formal guitar lesson in his life — another amazing feat, considering he does not just play rhythmic chords to sing over. “I began mostly by playing along with the records that I liked at the time,” he says.
One of Fiore’s earliest memorable performances at Holy Cross was a solo shot of Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay” which extended far beyond the classic vision of a college boy with his acoustic guitar strumming four chords and trying to sing.
“Playing a wide range of music is certainly not a novelty for us,” says Fiore of musical influences. “I think it’s a function of all of us coming from different places, both musically and demographically.”
Ted agrees, “We have so many influences it is almost hard to begin. Pete and I were heavy into Greyboy Allstars, MMW, Bob Marley, Charlie Hunter (and on and on and on) in high school. Mike was way into Radiohead and the Beatles. Mark has a very open-minded approach to absorbing music…We don’t discriminate on a ‘genre’ of music, it just depends on our mood, I guess.”
At any given show, The Nine may throw in a cover with their own songs. In the past, they’ve played the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Peter Gabriel on stage, keeping with their commitment to eclectic music. This all makes it a little difficult to describe their music, or put it into a certain category.
The immediate, and by now somewhat annoying comparison of The Nine’s music would probably be to the Dave Matthews Band — but that is only skin deep. Of all the bands that Fiore and Gallagher mentioned as part of their influences, the DMB was noticeably absent.
Still Fiore’s acoustic guitar (which he has abandoned lately for a semi-acoustic), together with the band’s sometimes melodic and loose sound, and the ability of the band members to improvise off of each other, does immediately draw a Dave Matthews comparison from most listeners.
It is the depth of The Nine that makes them so much more than the usual band. Sure they have a “jammy” element. And there is a pop element that makes their songs memorable. But this group is so much more than just everybody playing in the right key and keeping time. The Nine have the skills of professional musicians, not garage band flunkies.
The crowds that they bring out seem to know this, able to dance to The Nine or simply enjoy the music. Both college students and big crowds of locals go back to see the group over and over again.
Fiore claims not to notice, though. “I’ve never given much thought to the blurring of the line between locals and students,” he says. “Tammany Hall is a great place to see music, and it’s hard to gauge how many people are there for the music itself. We might be appealing to both groups, or neither. Or one. Or the other.”
Gallagher takes more of the musician’s way out, saying, “In the end, I’d like to think we’re all there for the love of music, the love of friends, or both.”
The Nine will be appearing Thursday nights at Worcester’s Tammany Hall during the school year.
