Playing ‘Wonderous’ Music at Malibu

Wonderous Stories once played the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the Who’s “Tommy” and Yes’s “Close to the Edge” — all in their entirety. While that’s an unusual set for the five-piece band, performing whole albums is a trademark of Wonderous Stories, whose members further pride themselves on never practicing together or following a set list.

Last week, at a show at Malibu Beach Club in Lido Beach (1500 Lido Blvd.) — where Wonderous Stories plays outdoors every Wednesday from 7 to 10 p.m. — the band played no LPs, yet hinted that they might by belting out The Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour,” the first song on the album of the same name, during their opening set. With Dan Hickey, who has played with the likes of Joe Jackson, The B-52’s and Joe Cocker, sitting in for regular drummer Ricky Martinez, they played Jackson’s “Is She Really Going Out With Him,” as well as a trio of tunes by The Monkees, The Doors and Supertramp, including “Take The Long Way Home,” in which lead guitarist Tommy Williams broke out his harmonica.   

“When people see us they never know what they're gonna get,” said front man Kenny Forgione about the band’s unpredictable sets. “Most of the time we don’t know either.”

Forgione and Kevin McCann are the band’s multi-instrumentalists, who both sing and play guitar and bass, and are backed by Mark Bonder on keyboards.

While Wonderous Stories (named and spelled after a Yes song) is faithful to recorded versions of songs, sometimes uncannily so, they still take enough liberties with the covers to express their individual styles. The one constant, though, is their spot-on, tight precision, a quality all the more outstanding considering their disdain for rehearsals.

“We’re able to do this because these are all songs we grew up listening to,” said Forgione, who spent his pre-Wonderous Stories’ days performing with McCann.

The duo’s acoustic gigs ranged from well-known Beatles’ tunes to Tears for Fears-like pop songs of the day. But they also injected some personal favorites, such as Peter Gabriel-era Genesis numbers. “And we’d always have some people who would tell us, ‘I can’t believe you’re playing that stuff,’” Forgione recalled.

In 1993, he and McCann formed a trio with Chris Clark, the band’s original keyboardist, who introduced much of the intricate progressive rock, including Yes. After adding a drummer, the quartet played increasingly more sets of this intense, relatively obscure music. The following year, Martinez, the drummer on PBS’s “Sesame Street,” replaced the band’s percussionist, and two years later Williams, the musical director for 1980s pop star Debbie Gibson, completed Wonderous Stories.

In more recent years, Bonder has filled in as Clark performed in “Wicked” on Broadway. But when Bonder, Martinez and Williams joined the band, each brought more songs to cover, from Pink Floyd to Steely Dan.

The idea to play whole albums grew out of Forgione’s love of one in particular. “‘Tommy’ affected me from the time I was a kid,” Forgione said. “When I heard it, it freaked me out. So if it did that for me, it must have done it for other people, too.”

“All of us said, ‘Wow, this is really fascinating and challenging, let’s try to pull this off,’” Martinez remembered.

The band first tested the waters with “Sgt. Pepper,” as Clark learned to play the difficult parts, like the strings on “She’s Leaving Home.” “People loved it,” Forgione recalled, “because not only are you playing the hits everyone knows, but also the songs that people forget about.”

The band then played “Tommy,” a double-LP, and several other, mostly “concept” albums, including the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour” and “Abbey Road” and Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” which they once performed at Heckscher Park before some 4,000 fans.

Wonderous Stories draws many fans in their 40s and 50s, but has attracted a sizable younger crowd, including college-age kids, at its gigs at venues like B.B. King Blues Club in Manhattan and the Jones Beach boardwalk band shell, where authorities pulled a gig last summer in anticipation of overcrowding.   

Williams, who grew up in Merrick listening to the Beatles, Cream, Yes and Genesis when disco and punk were the rage, is surprised and heartened when younger fans sing back to them every lyric of every song, even the obscure ones, from any random album they play. He sees this as their yearning for the album era.

“With the advent of downloading, very few people download a whole album — they mostly take a song or two from many different albums,” he said. “So the idea of an album as an entity that you listen to, it’s become like an aging bottle of wine. It’s much cooler to get one of those now.”

To learn more about Wonderous Stories, visit the band’s Web site at www.wonderous-stories.com.

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