With traditional Christmas concerts on hold because of the pandemic, one Jersey City band has come up with a way for local musicians to share their holiday favorites and help a worthwhile charity in the process.
The group Supermutt, spearheaded by bassist Michael Keating, will be presenting “12 Days of Covers” on several online platforms Dec. 14 through Christmas Day. Each day, a video of a local band performing a seasonal cover will be accompanied by a link asking for donations to Grace Community Services in Jersey City, which provides meals and social services for senior citizens, disadvantaged youth, and those in need.
“The idea was one I shot to Jackie (Smith) from JCMusicScene. She’s been a great resource, and she made the flyer for us,” Keating said. “Then I told Diane (DiMemmo) at Asbury Park Vibes about it and she loved the idea and even got a corporate sponsor to match our donations. We’ve already raised about $1,800 and the event hasn’t even started yet, just from Venmo and Facebook.”
Supermutt has teamed with Jersey websites like “Dancing Tony” Susco’s Rock-it Docket.com, JCMusicScene.com, and AsburyParkVibes.com to promote and host the fundraiser, and has put out the call for local musicians to provide videos of their favorite holiday-themed songs.
“We’ll be taking in videos up to Dec. 6, I believe, and we’ll be sure that each video gets played on some online platform, whether it’s Supermutt’s site or one of the partners we’re working with,” Keating said. “If we get 120 videos, then we’ll be showing 10 a day, and if we get 12 videos, we’ll show one a day.”
"12 Days of Covers'' is the brainchild of he Jersey City band Supermutt, from left, Billy Dwyer (Vocals), Michael Keating (bass guitar), Justin Kral (sound engineer), Matt Kocubinski (drums) and Tommy Keating (lead guitar). (Photo by Tyler Law)
Supermutt had been working on an album when things started to shut down and realized it wouldn’t be a good idea to go into a studio with a large group of people anytime in the foreseeable future.
“We just wanted to play music, so we started doing covers on Instagram, and it started getting a really good response,” Keating said. “We found it was really helping to get the band out there, and, of course, it was something we’d been doing for years, so we knew how to choose and play covers. It’s an easy way to entertain people as opposed to playing originals and hoping you find an audience.”
Keating mulled doing some kind of Christmas show online with his bandmates but, again, decided it wasn’t the best idea given the situation.
“So, we thought it would be good to reach out to other people,” Keating said. “We’d done things with other bands online before. And every musician loves to have a platform where they can reach people. So it was kind of a blend of let’s try this, let’s try that, and we finally came up to do the ’12 Days of Covers.’”
Once Supermutt reached out to a few friends, word of mouth quickly spread the idea.
“It’s really not much work for us as far as putting a little Venmo stamp on it that says ‘Donate Here,’” Keating explained. “That’s all the work we have to do. It’s good for artists who want to play for an audience, it’s good for people who want to hear Christmas music, and most of all, it’s great for Grace Community Services, who hopefully will be benefitting from this tremendously.”
Supermutt may technically be a new band, one that barely had a chance to start playing out before COVID shut everything down, but its members have been around for a while.
“We used to play as a cover band in Hoboken called Old Croak,” Keating said. “We use to play McSwiggin’s and Willie McBride’s. And we grew up in Bayonne, so we used to play all the Board of Education parties and things like that there. So we’ve been in the mix for a while now, but we just started doing originals last December. It’s been a long year for everybody, but starting a band during a pandemic has definitely been interesting.”
Community service has been an ongoing concern for Supermutt.
“Back in March or so, when everyone started quarantining, I was actually a volunteer at Grace Community helping with the breakfast program,” Keating said. “But once that wasn’t possible, we were just starting to get the band going on social media, so we decided to use our platform to raise money. So we started doing live streams in March and April, and we raised about $3,800, which was a whole lot more than we expected. What better time to ramp that back up than the holidays?”
Any band or musician who would still like to submit a video can reach out to supermuttmusic@gmail.com.
For information about Grace Community Services or to donate, go to gracecommunityjc.org/ or call 201-659-0309.
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