by Alan K. StoutMusic Columnist
Flashback to Market Street Square, one of NEPA’s most popular nightclubs, circa 1994. On any given Friday or Saturday night, 800 people may have been there partying, and the band on stage more than likely would have been Tribes.
Tribes was, without question, one of the region’s biggest bands. And wherever it played, huge crowds followed. Known best for its hard-edged alterative covers, the group blitzed the clubs with a passion from 1993-1997 before disbanding.
Now, 13 years later, Tribes is back.
The group is once again being fronted by vocalist and guitarist Eric Rudy, who has spent the past 10 years with the band Crush. Crush, as many know, was also a very successful band, but Rudy says it was time to move on.
“After 10 years of Crush, we just felt it was time to do something familiarly different,” says Rudy. “We wanted to do some stuff that we really wanted to do, in a little bit of a harder fashion. It’s really hard to put it into words, but when I mentioned it to the other guys, they were like, ‘Yeah, that’s just what I’ve been thinking for the last year and a half.’ Sometimes things just run their course, but even if you just take the same people and put them on a different path, they’re happy again.”
Joining Rudy in the new Tribes is Joe Dennis on drums, Ed Cole on bass and Krysten Montgomery on vocals and congas. All three played in Crush, and Cole and Rudy also played together in Tribes. Rudy says he has fond memories of Crush, which was perhaps known best for its Dave Matthews covers. He says he particularly enjoyed the first few years of the band when it featured violinist Rachel Galassi.
“It sounded so good with Rachel, when we were doing the violin thing and doing some country,” he says. “It sounded so good. But we weren’t as into the country as she was, and it really wasn’t fair to her for us to try and do the county half-assed and not put our hearts into it. But it sounded great with her. Between the singing and the violin — oh my God. It was crazy.”
Rudy says that after Galassi left the band, Crush entered into a new era with co-vocalist Montgomery. She, too, impressed from the beginning.
“It was Krysten’s 21st birthday, and her brothers brought her up to Tink’s, and they kept saying, ‘Get my sister up on stage! She can sing!’ And we were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah …’ But she got on stage, and she started singing “Piece of My Heart,’ and three seconds into it, we were like ‘Whoa.’”
Now, with the resurrection of Tribes, Rudy is digging into the past to help shape the future. And though those that remember the band might remember it as a hard-edged unit, Rudy says there was a lot more to it.
“We did a little bit of harder stuff in Tribes, and that’s what people remember because that’s what was the craziest, but we also used to do The Cure and stuff that wasn’t so hard,” he says. “We’ll still keep some of the older stuff around, like Nine Inch Nails, and obviously The Cure, and Depeche Mode, Everclear, Foo Fighters and Rage Against The Machine. But that’s just some of it. There’s no way around having a girl singer in the band and not also doing some of the crossover hip-hop stuff.”
Rudy says that will include Alicia Keys’ version of “Empire State of Mind,” which he says reminds him of the days when the original Tribes would sometimes put its own spin on a contemporary hit.
“It feels the same as it did back then,” he says “We’re going to do it with a hard-rock band, so instead of having electronica as the basis for the sound, we’re going to have kick-ass, hold-on-to-your-drink drums.”
Many people in their early 20s that now frequent the clubs might not remember Tribes. If you’re 22 now, you were only 11 years old when the band broke up. This fact hasn’t been lost on Rudy, who says he finds it exciting. He’s also been surprised how many people in that age group do know about the band.
“Either their parents, or their older brothers or sisters came out to see us and talked about us,” he says. “That’s one of the things that prompted me to do this. Kids were saying, ‘Hey, my uncle used to come out and see you guys. You’re the same guys that were in Tribes.’ We’d hear stuff like that much more often that I could possibly count, so I started thinking maybe it’s not such a bad idea. And besides, I always thought it was a cool name.”
Other tunes on the Tribes setlist include songs by Michael Franti, Heart, Led Zeppelin, Dispatch and Michael Jackson.
“We’re just going to do every good song that we can remember,” he says. “Back in the Tribes days, when we first started, we tried everything. We did Neil Diamond. We did Rage. We did Paul Simon. Nobody did Paul Simon back then.”
Tribes will play Brew’s Brothers in Pittston on Friday, Jan. 22 and Fernwood Resort in Bushkill on Saturday, Jan. 23. There will be plenty of more dates throughout the spring, including an appearance on April 22 at “Concert For A Cause 8,” where it will take the spot held for the past 10 years by Crush.
“It feels really new,” says Rudy. “Every couple of years, if I can reinvent myself and do it all over again like it’s new … that’s the greatest gift of all. Because that’s how it feels. It feels new again.”
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