It’s a good way to make money

Comfortably numb: The Machine

If you ask Joe Pascarell, there’s a reason Pink Floyd music is still around today.

“I might sound old saying this,” he laughs into his phone from his home in New York. “But, so much of music today is fad and fashion, rather than quality. I think if you go back in time, the quality music just keeps going, but the fad and fashion fades.”

He’s had plenty of time and reason to think about it, too. For the past 17 years, Pascarell has been the singer and guitarist for The Machine, a Pink Floyd tribute act, or “experience,” as they prefer to be called. Beyond replicating the sound of the band, they aim to give the audience the whole Pink Floyd package. Lights. Video displays. Floating pigs. You name it.

With so many tribute acts out there these days — and there are plenty, ranging from the Grateful Dead-loving Dark Star Orchestra to the rather literal-minded Dave Matthews Cover Band — it’s hard to see what’s so special about a group like The Machine. The whole thing seems so commercial, so riddled with issues of artistic morality, that it’s hard to see any of these groups as anything other than musical mercenaries.

Even Pascarell admits that their main motivation for keeping the band going was money, rather than their specific musical abilities. “Maybe it’s a little delusional to think that our talent had a lot to do with it,” he says about their success. “The agent thought that this would just be a good way to make some money.”

And yet, there is something special about The Machine. Perhaps it’s not so much what they do, but rather why they’ve kept doing it.

“I’ll tell you, even to this day, we’re all extremely passionate about this music,” declares Pascarell. “We’ve played it for so long that it feels like our music, you know? We try to be very honest with it.”

One thing stoking The Machine’s flames of passion is the band’s willingness not to copy every Pink Floyd song to the note. They improvise (although, as Pascarell points out, the group does try to “maintain the authenticity so that people aren’t disappointed”). They play songs from Syd Barrett’s and Roger Waters’ solo albums. They rearrange epic songs to be played in unplugged acoustic settings. In other words, they try to keep it fresh.

In some ways, this puts The Machine more in the territory of groups like the Easy Star All-Stars and Luther Wright and the Wrongs, bands that have released genre-switching reinterpretations of Pink Floyd classics in reggae and bluegrass, respectively. And how does Pascarell view these tweaked covers?

“I love it,” he says. “It’s great to hear good music interpreted in a different way. That’s the flexibility of a quality piece of music. It’ll lend itself to any interpretation. It’s like a vehicle for people to express themselves. If it’s a good song, it’s a good song no matter how it’s done.”

But while the Easy Star Allstars and Luther Wright’s band have been widely praised for their work, The Machine is still — if not openly artistically dismissed — largely ignored. Or so it was until the release of its recent live album, The Machine Unplugged, recorded almost on a whim at the group’s acoustic tribute concert to Syd Barrett at B.B. King’s Blues last year. Pascarell says the group was forced to pare down its instrumentation and, in some cases, rearrange songs completely. “It’s a really different thing than we’d done before,” he remarks. “It’s really our own take on these songs.”

Surprisingly, the album appears to have also given the group a hint of artistic credibility they’ve never had. Pascarell says that, these days, they’ve even got devoted fans following their tour.

“There’s plenty of people who have seen The Machine over a hundred times,” he notes. “They feel like every night it’s a different experience. That makes me happy. Nothing is better than that.”

And yet, for all their modest success, being in a tribute act isn’t exactly what most of the band’s members saw themselves doing. All have various original music side projects, and Pascarell is fairly honest in his assessment of what his band is really about.

“What The Machine affords us to do is that none of us has to go to work every day,” he says, his voice free of irony or sarcasm. “As a result, we have a lot of free time and freedom to pursue other musical things.”

So as a serious musician caught dead center in one of the 21st-century’s first major musical movements — the tribute act — Pascarell must have some interesting insights regarding the genre.

“To be honest, it’s hard for me to see us as being a part of that,” he offers. “I guess that it’s easy for other people to see it, but for me this is just my band that me and my friends started a long time ago. When we started it in 1990, tribute bands weren’t a popular thing. There were a handful. Now, it seems like there’s a tribute to everything. It’s too big of a thing for me to comment on, because I don’t really feel like I’m part of that movement. I’m a little far removed from it, as funny as that may sound.”

The Machine plays The Orange Peel (101 Biltmore Ave.) on Saturday, Jan. 20. 9 p.m. Ages 16 and over. $15. 225-5851.