There are cover bands. And then there's Dark Star Orchestra (DSO).

A Grateful Dead cover band, DSO goes beyond merely playing covers. It recreates entire Grateful Dead setlists using the correct instrumentation, arrangements and effects.

DSO will play tonight at Crowbar, 420 E. College Ave.

Singer-guitarist John Kadlecik, who plays the Jerry Garcia parts for DSO, formed the band in 1997 after playing in other Grateful Dead cover bands.

"I had a certain attraction to [the Grateful Dead]. A certain thing would happen when I played Dead songs and when I played Garcia parts. I tried to repress that, but I finally gave in," Kadlecik said.

When it comes to portraying Garcia, Kadlecik said that he feels no specific pressure.

"The quest for improvisation has been a focus for me. Going for that has become progressively easier with time," he said. "We're all providing each other the perfect background to release all of our memories of tapes and shows we've experienced, and we can provide a sort of record, not of how a show was exactly, but how it might have been in a parallel alternate universe."

Although Kadlecik has heard that he sounds remarkably like Garcia, he has trouble hearing it.

"It's kind of hard for me not to when we're playing his songs," Kadlecik said. "I don't think vocally I sound that similar to Jerry; what I'm going for is timing and the melody."

Due to the ever-changing line-ups of the Grateful Dead, some members of DSO play different musicians' parts depending on which era a setlist is from. Sometimes the band will have two drummers and other times only one will play, depending on how many drummers the Dead had at the time the show being replicated was performed.

Tonight's show will "probably be a one drummer show" due to stage constraints at the Crowbar, Kadlecik said.

Kadlecik said band members pick their setlists depending on "a combination of what eras we've played in that town and what show we played last night."

Recently, aside from just doing straight Dead setlists, DSO has been mixing in setlists of its own creation about one out of every four shows. Last year, DSO also played Jerry Garcia Band setlists for an entire tour. Now the band throws in occasional Jerry Garcia Band numbers at the end of shows as extra songs.

Although the band tries to avoid playing the same show more than once, Kadlecik said that it has "happened by accident a few times."

"It's more important to have a tour with minimum repeats from night to night than to not play a show we'd played previously," Kadlecik said.

When picking which era a show comes from, Kadlecik said that the eras "all have unique qualities that make it hard to pick one over another." He did point to the late '80s as a strong era because the Dead has its "largest repertoire plus their largest quality of sound."

Although the songs DSO plays are constrained by the songs that the Grateful Dead played, Kadlecik said that he never grows tired of playing those songs, because "recovering arrangements from different eras means some songs are radically different."

Earlier this year, DSO got a chance to play with former Grateful Dead and current Other Ones singer/guitarist Bob Weir, which Kadlecik points to as a career highlight.

"It was like getting a really good little league baseball team together and then having a hitter from the major leagues join the team for a few innings," he said.

Through playing Dead shows, Kadlecik said that DSO's goal is to "just give a live presentation of how the music use to be played. Ultimately, we're hoping to make people feel something or create a feeling in people for something."

Meghan Roarty (sophomore-nursing) has seen DSO twice.

"They were really amazing," Roarty said of a show she saw in December 2000 in Pittsburgh. "I had this smile on my face the entire time. After the show was over, my face hurt."

Tonight's all-ages show begins at 9. Doors open at 8, and tickets are $15.