Dave Novak carpooled with nine of his band mates from central New York to catch a Beatles concert at Shea Stadium more than 50 years ago. Although they barely caught a glimpse of the Fab Four, they got to sit in front of the speakers.

“It’s an experience you don’t forget,” Novak said. “There were 55,000 people there and I happened to be one of them. It was incredible.”

Novak, a Syracuse Area Music Hall of Famer, has come full circle with his love for The Beatles — he’s one of the musicians performing at BeatleCUSE, a Beatles tribute concert featuring more than 60 musicians from central New York. The show takes place at 7 p.m. on Saturday at the Palace Theatre.

This year marks the 4th edition of BeatleCUSE, which first started as a celebration of The Beatles’ 50th anniversary since the band’s iconic debut on the Ed Sullivan show. The event premiered at the Landmark Theater and attracted more than 1,200 people.

“I thought it was going to be a one-time thing, but the musicians wanted to do it again, the crowd wanted me to put it together again,” said Paul Davie, executive director of BeatleCUSE. “And so I came up with the term BeatleCUSE to signify the great CNY musicians taking part.”

With the success of BeatleCUSE and the help of his friends, Davie founded a nonprofit organization last year, BeatleCUSE Productions, Inc. The organization preserves the history of popular music of the 1960s and 1970s, including The Beatles, the British Invasion and Rock & Roll Hame of Fame acts.

Davie then secured donations and corporate sponsorships, reorganized and moved the show to The Palace Theatre. The show donates its proceeds to four local causes, including the Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund of CNY, Inc., which has raised more than $5,000 in the past two years.

With a different set of songs every year, this weekend’s BeatleCUSE will perform every song from “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in honor of the album’s 50th anniversary. The “Summer of Love” orchestra, the show’s first 30-piece orchestra, will be featured, along with “the Inner Light Ensemble,” a four-person ensemble playing Indian instruments such as the sitar, according to the press release. Guitarist and songwriter Joey Molland of Badfinger will be headlining the show.

Novak, who’s been involved with the show since its first run, will be paying a special tribute to the 12-string guitar with his British Invasion band, The Fabcats. His favorite part of the show is “the camaraderie within the Syracuse music community.”

“It’s wonderful to get all these like kind of minded people together ‘cause we often don’t get to hear each other ‘cause we’re working musicians,” Novak said. “This is an environment where you’re all together for a common, fun thing that’s based on music that we all love.”

Davie, who knows many of the musicians, is excited to watch them all perform The Beatles’ “ground-breaking” album, though many have never worked together before.

“They leave their egos at the door,” Davie said. “They bring their A-game, they’re prepared, they listen to the song that I’ve assigned to them, and they knock it out of the park.”

Through an “organic process,” Davie selects the performers and their songs based on their skill sets and the type of sound they possess. Around two-thirds of the songs are based on the records, and the other third contains different versions of the Beatles’ songs the artists will present.

Last year, Davie recalls, Ronnie Lee, a Syracuse Area Music Hall of Famer, played a jazz-style rendition of “Yesterday” with one guitar and one violin. Once his performance was over, more than a thousand people in the room stood up and started crying.

“He hit that big note, and people got out of the seat and started screaming because they loved what he did with that song,” he said.

Davie hopes to recreate that effect this year with BeatleCUSE’s performance of the album’s final song, “A Day in the Life.”

Gary Frenay, another Syracuse Area Music Hall of Famer, serves as one of the co-directors of BeatleCUSE. He’s known for his extensive Beatles knowledge, and started taking guitar lessons as a child after watching The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. Frenay, another member of The Fabcats, is especially looking forward to performing “A Day in the Life.”

“To hear ‘Sgt. Pepper’ brought to life with all these musicians is really a once in a lifetime thing,” Frenay said. “There’s no band that really does this, so it’s one of those standalone events that you just have to see and believe — it’s really going to be something.”

From baby boomers to millennials, Davie attributes The Beatles’ universal appeal to their influential songs. They wrote songs about “love, relationships, peace — there was no anger,” Davie said. He hopes that BeatleCUSE brings together all generations of Beatle fans and celebrate their music.

“People can come out to the show, can escape from everything that’s been going on in the world right now, whether it’s the media or politics,” Davie said. “I tell everybody to leave that at home, come and escape, enjoy, get your spirit uplifted with some great live renditions of those songs.”

Published on April 5, 2017 at 10:32 pm