The jam band scene’s mellow master

By Brendan Buhler

Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Greg Serensits has been in Las Vegas since April Fool’s Day of 1995, but the real bad joke wasn’t played on him until 2000, when his favorite bar closed.

Serensits, a Web server technician and salesman, went to Legends Lounge for the music. Luckily, he wasn’t the only one who did. And thus was the Las Vegas Jam Band Society formed, with its mission to book bands for one or two miniature, Grateful Dead-esque shows a month at whatever bar will have them.

He got into jam bands after what he dismisses as a youthful fascination with hard metal in the early 1990s, a scene he describes as “meanness, hatred and hard liquor being drunk,” where it was punch first and ask questions later, if at all. He found jam bands through a Grateful Dead concert, where he liked the vibe of “do your own thing and be cool.” Plus, the music.

“You can see the same band three nights in a row and they’ll play the same song three times and you’ll never hear it the same,” Serensits says. “It’s like opening a musical present.”

The Jam Band Society even follows Robert’s Rules of Order when it meets to discuss shows, complete with officers (Serensits is the president), committees and minutes, from which we present a brief excerpt from a meeting in December 2003: “Major- (newly elect) Keith, sets the stage with the jamband security level at ‘Valencia orange,’ not only a color but a flavor as well, nice first call Keith.”

They still meet in bars. “We’re not like the United Way or something,” Serensits says. “We’re the Jam Band Society.”

The society’s membership has oscillated between 40 and 70, Serensits says, with guys leaving as they get married and have children and new guys joining when they move to Las Vegas and try to find “the music.”

Serensits, 38, has never been married nor had children. “As my mom says, ‘You’re the smartest one.’ ”

For a while Serensits and the Jam Band Society did what any jam band society would aspire to do and produced its own festival, called Area 51 Soundtest. It was in the fall. Then the Vegoose music festival started, also in the fall, and that was even better, Serensits says.

“We figured instead of doing our own festival, let’s just go to another festival that we like and party and have a good time and not have to set up or take down anything.”

Or take minutes.