This combination of soulful ambition and day-job commitment keeps each show at the Cantab fresh and meaningful for both the band and the audience of regulars. There’s an embracing tolerance in Valadez’s gleeful, rapid-tongued emcee monologue: “This is another damn Thursday.” Somehow, he uses the same voice even when he asks the crowd to be careful not to break Fontes’s foot.

THE SOUL SURVIVORS

“Maybe the drunk college kid crowd tweaks the show a little bit, but even that’s genuine,” Berthiaume says. “That timelessness that’s in the music is in that scene.”

Though the music may be timeless, many acts devoted to the same genres resort to gimmicks to make it feel authentic, a paradoxical strategy. The Chicken Slacks have some of the typical aspects of a traditional cover band—the nicknames, the hype man—but their sheer skill and overwhelming commitment to the Cantab make genuine the crowd’s experience of their act. Their shows are fueled by tenacious showmanship verging on willful ignorance of their ever-varied surroundings, and a throbbing energy that feeds on the rowdiness of the crowd the band tries both to tame and entertain. All of the members treat their work in The Chicken Slacks like a job but maintain a belief in the music that transcends their routine.

Soul music, even in its original form, has mostly been played by cover bands. Many soul and Motown greats would cover each others’ songs, which in turn were often written by songwriting teams. With the exception of singer-songwriters like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, soul and Motown music has always been sung by thrown voices; snatches of melody and refrain that come out of the dancehalls, into the mind of a songwriter, and back into the dancehalls and bars through the voice of a singer. So when Valadez talks about “putting a little Chicken Slacks into it,” he and his band are essentially doing the same thing with their arrangements that the ‘original’ artists did. Only they are working decades later and most frequently in a bar where high-definition is something that comes with a channel in the 800s rather than off a vinyl cut from more wax.

Each member of the band thinks of soul music as an ideal genre for different reasons. Berthiaume sees soul as spiritually consistent with its gospel roots: “Originally this music was singing and dancing for God, and then Ray Charles just kind of switched that a little bit and instead of ‘This Little Light of Mine’ it became ‘This Little Girl of Mine,’” Berthiaume says.

For Rosco, The Chicken Slacks are a means of preserving the music of his youth. “It’s music that I grew up with, I listened to it as far back as I can remember,” Rosco says. “More recently with The Chicken Slacks I’ve been able to go back and revisit the material that I grew up playing and I hear new things in it, and I hear more authentic bass lines, so I’m enjoying it a second time around as well.”

Valadez talks about his work with The Chicken Slacks through the lens of his training as an expressive arts therapist. “I knew the power of healing in music. It does have that power to heal the individual or at least set them in the right direction when used properly,” Valadez says. For him, the music loses some of that power on record, and only in a live setting can it really move a person physically and spiritually.

Fontes sees the same value in the music. “I think when you sing soul, you’re talking about things people have in common. I think it can be therapeutic for a lot of people,” Fontes says just before the show. “The songs I like singing the most are the ones that talk to people where they live their feelings.” Even when he has to keep the crowd back, he can remember why he plays the weekly concert: “That anticipation and excitement builds in me every week.”

“That gig can become a slog,” remembers Berthiaume. “You gotta love it to do it…but I love that place—it’s the best place in the world. There’s no bar I would rather be at.”

But eventually, the shows did wear on Berthiaume. “Once it stopped being fun I didn’t want to do it anymore. I wanted to leave before I got sick of it, before I got jaded. At the same time I was sweet on a girl,” he remembers. “I wanted to spend time with her. We wanted to go on an adventure.” Still, he occasionally comes back to see the group he began 11 years ago. “Sometimes I’m excited and feeling good and I’ll play a whole set, and sometimes I won’t even play because I love to sit back and watch the whole scene—I never got to do that for so long.”

I ask Berthiaume about what he thinks of what he sees from the back during the rowdy sets and the quieter nights. “I see joy,” he replies. “It’s joyful.”

—Staff writer Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey can be reached at bhafrey@college.harvard.edu.