From “Space Oddity” to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars to Aladdin Sane all the way to this year’s Blackstar, David Bowie was transcendent at every step of his career. His life was too big to capture in a simple eulogy after his death from cancer. He left a void, and that void hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Milwaukee community.
At Shank Hall on Saturday, March 5, local performers will pay the ultimate tribute to Bowie for “Milwaukee To Mars” starting at 8 p.m. For a suggested $10 donation with all proceeds going to the American Cancer Society, those in attendance will hear bands cover everything from well-known hits to the lesser-known songs spun in accordance to their own creative sensibilities.
The idea for the tribute sprang from Peter Jest, who owns the venue. On the day of Bowie’s passing, he posted on Facebook that he was offering Shank Hall as a venue for a tribute if anyone in the area wanted to organize a tribute. The two to raise their hands were Steve Drymalski, who plays in the band Men Among Thieves, and Kirk McFarlin, a veteran of the bands Ecoteur and Carnival Strippers.
“When Peter opened the doors to this opportunity at Shank Hall, I jumped on it because I felt that it would be something good to do and it’s for a great cause,” Drymalski said. “After Peter put me in touch with Kirk, who I had done a bunch of gigs with in the ’80s and ’90s, he and I just started talking about it and we reached out to the American Cancer Society and they were behind it. It just seemed like the right thing to do.”
For Drymalski and McFarlin, organizing the tribute seemed like the best way they could honor the musician who has influenced them in different ways. “It always seemed like there was Bowie in my life,” McFarlin recalls. “I was actually a little older when I first discovered him and started to listen to and appreciate him. But sometimes you don’t know what you got until it’s gone.”
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Plenty of other artists felt that connection to Bowie, too. “We didn’t have to twist arms for people to do the show,” Drymalski said. “We’ve gotten so many requests from people to do the show that we couldn’t fit everyone into the schedule in the timeframe that we could do it.”
The lineup they came up with includes Drymalski’s Men Among Thieves and McFarlin will perform along with Dan Kubinski of Die Kreuzen, Eagle Trace, Roni Allwaise & Sordid Details, and others. Once the lineup was set, it was then simply a matter of figuring out who wanted to play what song. Luckily for the organizers, there were no duplicates.
“We didn’t have to sort it out,” Drymalski said. “Everybody kind of magically picked four songs and we didn’t have to get into any wrestling matches because everybody had different songs to play. That goes to credit Bowie a lot in how his music had reached out to people in so many ways.”
Asked what songs the bands will cover, Drymalski refused to elaborate in order to keep everything as a surprise until the night. One thing is for certain: Bowie will be celebrated rather than forgotten quite frankly because he had made himself unforgettable.
“I think each phase of his music kind of speaks to a certain element,” Drymalski said. “I wouldn’t be able to sit here because that’s kind of the magic of it. When Bowie started his stuff, especially in the early ’70s, teenagers really grasped onto it because he made it OK to be different. He made it okay to be you. He made it OK to do the things that you wanted to do.”
Shank Hall’s “Milwaukee to Mars” benefit begins at 8 p.m. on Saturday, March 5.
