THE NERDS

In his 44 years, Jim Garcia, lead singer and bass player for The Nerds, one of the most established Jersey Shore bar bands, has never had a day job. Well, that’s not entirely true.
“Sometimes we play weddings during the day,“ said Mr. Garcia, seated on a recent Thursday night in the food court at Jenkinson’s the open-air club with eight bars and lots of dance floor wedged between the beach and the boardwalk in this quintessential Shore town.
It was nearly midnight, and Mr. Garcia and the other Nerds had already sweated through their first plaid shirts of the night. But they were happy. “Jenkinson’s,” said Peter Oltmanns, the bands lead guitarist, is a “great place to be.”
“There might not be a better place,” he continued. “Being at the Shore doing this, yes, it beats actually growing up.”
It might take a special breed of musicians to gather it up and play the Shore four or five nights a week every summer, but Mr. Oltmanns and the other three Nerds think that they have what it takes.
“If you can maintain your childishness in adult life, why get rid of it?” asked Mr. Oltmanns, 45. “I forced my kids to listen to classical music, but they like the goofy rock we do. Can’t say I blame them.”
The Nerds formed in 1985, and, except for a change in keyboardists nine years ago when the original player died, have been together in rock ever since. Their gimmick is, yes, dressing as nerds—plaid shirts, unmatched plaid shorts, white socks, worn sneakers, heavy, black rimmed glasses. They play oldies of a sort, mocking the songs more than just covering them.
“We try to force a square peg into a round hole as much as we can,” said Jack Yocum, the 46-year-old drummer and senior member of the group, who supplements his black glasses with white tape over the nose of the bridge for extra nerdiness. Their sets often include, say, a “Mrs. Robinson” played at high speed or a “Summer Wind” with over-the-top Sinatraness or even an Eminem slowed down to bossa nova tempo.
Basically, when we started, we wanted to be defiant to club owners, who had certain ways they wanted the music to be,” Mr. Garcia said. “We started out getting together from other bands we were in and had a female singer, doing it straight. It didn’t work. We thought of the nerd gimmick, so we could get away with changing the music a bit.”
It would be six months, they figured, before people would get tired of their act. But it has been 18 years, and the young Nerds have become middle-aged, popular and happy. They play 200 dates a year, in the summer, mostly along the Atlantic from Connecticut to Maryland; and in the winter, inland bars and ski resorts and for weddings and corporate events.
At one point, the band did their own material, and made a CD of their original work, “Poultry in Motion,” which is for sale at their gigs. There is the ballad, “If B’s were V’s,” with the lyrics “then I’d ve in lobe with you / We could ve habing so much fun together / I’d neber leabe you vlue.” And “We’d go out dribing in Fevuary / We’d habe a lobe so true.” And the inimitable “Great Big Chest.” “She had a great big chest of memories. / Locked up at the foot of her bed” and “she just kept on talkin’ / about her life of misery / that’s when I noticed she was talkin’ to me.”
“But we stopped at that,” said Mike Spiro, 44, the white-haired keyboardist. “We decided that we were entertainers and what the audience wanted was the songs they knew. We just do it differently.”
Differently is apparently how the crowd at Jenkinson’s wants it. On that recent Thursday, with the half-moon lighting up a deck that overlooks the ocean, and the electronic lights spinning n the dance floor, several hundred people from their 20’s to their 60’s seemed to know every nuance of the performance. A highlight was the mocking version of the Neil Diamond song “Sweet Caroline,” seemingly and anathema to serious Shore rockers.
As the line, “touching me, touching you” emanated from Mr. Garcia, in Diamondesque warblings, the hundreds before him grabbed their chests (“me”) and then pointed to the band (“you”). When the “ba-ba-ba” interlude came up, the band went silent and the crowd shouted the line out, punching the ceiling in unison.
“I was getting a hot dog one day and the vendor had it on the radio,” Mr. Garcia said. “I thought, ‘Who hasn’t’ heard the ba-ba-ba?’ So we turned it into a ridiculous anthem.” Such is the Shore band business, he said, familiar and fun. “But we don’t get tired of it,” he added. “We try to change it around when we can.”
The material the group sends to potential wedding and corporate clients has a roster of about 400 titles, “the Nerds list of songs they like to play, and play well.” The band has a website, www.starsproductions.com, and management, S.T.A.R.S. Productions in Newton, NJ. It’s unofficial leader is Mr. Garcia. “Pretty much,” he said, “because he runs around the most on stage and sweats a whole lot.”
While none of The Nerds envisions doing this at 65, neither do they deny that they might still be in the game. “We’ve already outlasted the Beatles,” Mr. Oltmanns pointed out. “Why fight it?”
They each have families, and some have children in their late teens, thinking about playing music for a living, too. Mr. Garcia lives in Freehold; Mr. Oltmanns, in Ridgewood; Mr. Yocum in Carlstadt; and Mr. Spiro in Hopatcong.
“Yes, we don’t get tired, just tired of driving,” Mr. Spiro said. “I figure I put 45,000 miles a year. But it beats working.”
Their latest CD is “Wedding,” a semi-mocking set of songs that goes through a wedding ceremony—father and daughter dancing to Guns n Roses, for instance, and “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe” for the salad course.
“Yeah, weddings,” Mr. Garcia said. “We love them. Almost as good as the Shore.
He reminisced: “We did a wedding one year in Paterson, and the next year we happened to be in the same place doing a wedding, and that couple was, coincidentally, celebrating their first anniversary right then. Somebody from one party tried to pick up someone at the other and this big brawl started.
Chairs went flying. Blood. I can remember the bride in her dress on her knees, pounding the floor and crying, ‘But this was my night! My night!’”
“We’re an inspiration, aren’t we?”
- The New York Times

Yes, they’re dressed that way on purpose. You’ll have fun anyway, we promise.


The Nerds look like the kind of guys you hope won’t be meeting you for the blind date you have planned for Friday night. But don’t be deceived by those huge plastic glasses and hiked-up pants – these are four nerds who know how to have a good time.

The Nerds is a cover band from the Jersey Shore area that got its start in 1985 with a crazy gimmick (“let’s all dress up like dorks and take this show on the road!”), an idea the band didn’t expect to last even six months. That hasn’t been the case – frontman/bassist Spaz, keyboardist Mongo, guitarist Stretch and drummer Biff have done it all, from playing Stern sidekick Stuttering John’s wedding to opening for Bruce Springsteen.

Perhaps the reason The Nerds have been around for 20 years now – and have gigs booked through 2007 – is because these guys know just what the audience wants to hear, whether it’s Poison, Barry Manilow or Rage Against The Machine. “We tried being an original band, but too many people didn’t care,” Spaz said. “When you’re playing originals, unless you have something somewhere on some radio, you’re playing to your friends again and again and again ... and that gets old, real quick.” Now, with a catalog of about 350 cover tunes, each Nerds show is different from the last. With a look that’s straight out of Meatballs, The Nerds isn’t a group of guys you’d expect to curse, rap or get many ladies (as it turns out, each member met his wife at a Nerds performance). Here’s more from Spaz about what it’s like to be dorky on the outside, but still get to play Carnegie Hall. Lucky!

PULSE WEEKLY: What made you guys decide on dressing as nerds? Why not astronauts, or maybe firemen?

SPAZ: Actually, we had a concept before we had a band. Our manager said, ‘Why don’t you put a band together and call yourself The Nerds? You can dress up and play a lot of funk music.’ It sounded like enough of a stretch that we were like, ‘Yeah, that would be kind of novel.’
PW: This may sound silly, but are you guys nerds in real life?

S: Yeah, we really, really are. All you have to do is sit in the dressing room with us for half an hour and you’ll realize that. But anyone in a band is a nerd – they didn’t do sports, they probably didn’t do a whole lot of anything, and the only reason they even play a guitar is because that was the only hope that they had of getting a girl to notice them. Certainly that’s why we all did it. And we got wives that way.

PW: Are there any covers that you’re absolutely sick of playing?

S: Yeah – Hey Ya. That was a terrible song right out of the box. There’s some stuff that quickly becomes so overplayed that it’s like, the sooner we ditch this puppy, the better. And that was one nasty-looking puppy.

PW: What’s been the highlight of your nerdy career?

S: Carnegie Hall. It was an amazing experience because it’s Carnegie Hall, first of all, and we were able to play to a packed house. I jumped offstage into the aisle and dragged a bunch of people into a conga line, which is against the rules. The security of the place was totally opposed to anyone getting out of their seats for any reason. I didn’t know that until later. The ushers were freaking out, but I was in such a state that I didn’t care. It was fun.

PW: You also play a lot of weddings. Do you perform in nerd gear?

S: We do exactly the same thing that we would do at a club. It becomes sort of a cabaret show rather than a wedding band playing in the background while everyone’s eating their salads.

PW: You played Stuttering John’s wedding, right? Was Howard Stern there?

S: We met everyone else on the show, but Howard was not there. He’s a high-maintenance, high-security guy. We’ve known John for a long time ... that was a funny wedding. Here’s a little inside info – just as he was taking his vows, he took off all his clothes, down to his underwear, and jumped into the ocean. When he got back, he was soaking wet ... and his wedding band was gone.

PW: No way! What’s the best way for a nerd to impress a chick?

S: A six-figure salary. No – to accept his nerdiness, and to be a good listener. - From THE BEAT: By Monica Ortwein, Associate Editor