When Charlie and Hurley found a Geronimo Jackson album in a hatch (during Season Two of Lost), they were both astounded that neither of them (music aficionados that they are) had ever heard of the band. Fans immediately began scouring the web and used record shops trying to hunt down any releases they could find from this obscure Grateful Dead-ish group. References to the band continued to pepper the subsequent seasons via subtly planted posters, not-so-subtly planted t-shirts, and samplings of their sound. Not too long ago, a single track from Geronimo Jackson popped up on iTunes. This just added fuel to the speculative fire that this was, in fact, a real band.
Listen to Dharma Lady by Geronimo Jackson HERE.
Finally, this excerpt from an article in the most recent issue of Wired Magazine reveals the truth behind the mystery:
If there’s any group of devotees more loyal and obsessed than Lost fans, it’s Deadheads. And long before Eddy Kitsis was hired as a writer for Lost, he dreamed of being the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia. So when he became a Hollywood scribe instead of a guitar-plucking warbler, he decided to create a fictional Grateful Dead-style band for his own amusement — and then became fixated on making the world believe it was real.
The result was Geronimo Jackson — named after Barry Hannah’s award-winning novel Geronimo Rex — a 1970s band that occasionally pops up on Lost, whether on a hitchhiker’s T-shirt in a Locke flashback (above) or blasting from a Dharma Initiative van on the island. Kitsis crafted the band’s initial “image” by borrowing heavily from the Dead’s Steal Your Face album art and vintage typefaces from Creem magazine. But having fictional followers on Lost wasn’t enough for Kitsis, and the writer soon finagled $20,000 from ABC execs to bring the bogus band to life. Childhood friend Craig Finn, lead singer for the Hold Steady, suggested he check out a San Diego-based indie quartet called the Donkeys. Kitsis liked what he heard and hired the group to rerecord its tune “Excelsior Lady” as a show-referencing track called “Dharma Lady.” The song, which aired for 11 seconds in a February 2009 episode, was then discreetly planted on iTunes.
“Dharma Lady” immediately gave the Donkeys — er, Geronimo Jackson — a loyal following among Lost viewers and gave Kitsis a taste of rock stardom by proxy. But true success came when Kitsis met one of his musical heroes, Dead bassist Phil Lesh, and learned he was a fan of the show. “How do you tell him, ‘You inspired me so much, I created a fake band after you!’” Kitsis says. If Lesh does tune in every week, there’s no need to tell him.
— Erik Malinowski
The real lads behind the fake band
Not a real band, but they do have a real song. Not really my taste, though. I’m more of a Driveshaft kind of guy.
