It’s not every day that you’ll find a Grammy Award-winning producer and a former writer on The Daily Show performing side by side in a Grateful Dead cover band. And yet, on a Sunday afternoon on a backyard deck somewhere on Nantucket, that’s exactly what they’re doing. In less than a year, the Grateful Dead cover band that Doug Cote formed out of his basement has become Nantucket’s go-to house band. In that time, the band has found its groove, sifting through a 60-year discography like it’s a textbook to study.

Sure, the Grateful Dead has a reputation for living the subdued, marijuana-induced jam band lifestyle, but each member of this cover band will quickly tell you they were the greatest American rock band of all time. The cover band even schedules rehearsals at the Nantucket Community Music Center just to work on their harmonies. “I have a totally new appreciation for the depth of what the Grateful Dead is doing,” said Cote, the front man for the  band, which calls itself Doug & Co. “I’m consistently blown away by the depth and integrity of the music. It’s really complex what each individual player is doing at any given time. With other bands I’ve played in, I can learn the song and perform it. But with this stuff, I’m constantly on my toes.”

Each member of Doug & Co. came to the Grateful Dead at different points in their lives. Lead guitarist Ben Champoux grew up listening to Jerry Garcia’s noodling guitar solos as a kid on Nantucket, heading off-island to Foxboro Stadium for his first show in 1986 before creating his own Dead cover band as a college student, called Uncle Ben’s Rubber Band. Bass player Brad Smith didn’t get into the band until later in life, only when he became overwhelmed by a fear of missing out when his friends caught a Dead show in his hometown of Chicago.

Keyboard player Jamie Howarth—a 25-year veteran pianist at The Summer House who won a Grammy reproducing a 1949 Woody Guthrie live recording—didn’t always appreciate the Dead, even though he saw them multiple times as a college student in the ’70s. Though to be fair, Dead shows for college students in the ’70s were more a rite of passage than formal concerts. It was only years later when Howarth’s production company, Plangent Processes, started working directly with the Grateful Dead that he changed his tune on the band.

“Did I go about looking for a Grateful Dead act? No. But what the hell, why not?” Howarth said. “Any good opportunity to delve into the music with this much detail as the Grateful Dead has is a joy and a luxury. I put [late Grateful Dead lyricist] Robert Hunter up there with the great American writers, but because he’s a rock lyricist he’s underrated. To me, he’s right below Bob Dylan."

For Cote, a former television writer, it was seeing the Grateful Dead at Washington, D.C.’s RFK Memorial Stadium in 1994 that did him in. It was just one year before Grateful Dead front man Jerry Garcia’s death. Cote, a self-described punk-rock skater kid at heart, started thinking more and more about putting together a cover band. But life got in the way, and in 2015, he formed Buckle and Shake, the Nantucket country-twang band that’s become a regular fixture at Cisco Brewers and The Gaslight. After nearly 10 years of performing Waylon Jennings, Alabama Shakes and Tyler Childers covers with Buckle and Shake, Cote decided it was time for something new. He reached out to Champoux, Smith and drummer Tyler Somes.

After a year of rehearsing, he contacted Howarth. “I started the band out of fear that if I didn’t do it, someone else would do it,” Cote said. “The universe the Grateful Dead created is so vast, and the fact that people come to it at different points in their lives is really a profound thing. Someone may get into it in their 60s because a song really speaks to them. There’s a frequency about the Dead. It’s almost something you can’t describe. It’s like magic."

Playing in a cover band often presents a fundamental question for the band members involved. Do you perfectly emulate the sound of the band you’re covering, or do you introduce your own spin on the music? For Doug & Co., it’s a bit of both. Champoux spent hours upon hours trying to capture the nuances of Jerry Garcia’s guitar style. Four of the band members sing choruses together, recreating some of the iconic harmonies the Grateful Dead were known for.

“I think you want to touch on it, but hopefully there’s a thread of authenticity with it, even though it’s a cover band,” Cote said. “We play half court,” Howarth added. “We’re constantly working off each other. Ben will play one thing, then Doug will play a solo at me, and we bounce stuff all around. This is a really great bunch of guys and I’ve known some terrific musicians over the years. The opportunity to be on stage with these other dudes kicking it out—that’s great stuff. It is different from sitting alone at the piano. It certainly is more of a rock and roll thing than I had been able to access for years.”

As for the music they play, all five members of Doug & Co. agree that the Grateful Dead is one of the greatest—if not the greatest—American rock band of all time. There’s a perception that the Grateful Dead were always on drugs and goofing around, Smith said. And while there may be some truth to that, there’s no doubting the music they created is some of the most complicated music of its era. Their music has also stood the test of time. “The Grateful Dead is like an organism that keeps morphing,” Cote said. “I feel like we’re still exploring it, and I hope the local community gets behind it and follows us as we explore it, because we’re learning.”