Photograph by Katherine Mengardon

Post-“Revolution 9,” people can ask, “The Beatles or the Stones N’ Roses?”

I caught a Stones N’ Roses set at Soda Bar on November 1. Their Guns N’ Roses costumes would have been more fitting on the previous evening, but their mash-up of GNR, The Stone Roses, and pretty much anything else they decide to throw into the mix is a year-round trick with many treats. The concept of the band was born out of an idea to perform as a Stone Roses tribute in conjunction with a Brit-Pop club night at The Whistle Stop.

“I didn’t want to dress up like the Stone Roses, because it would be too weird, because I love them so much,” band mastermind Adam Gimbel explained. “I thought Guns N’ Roses would be sillier. It was more just a little bit of a Stones song or a GNR song, and then a whole Stone Roses song and then maybe something at the end. It wasn’t so crazy. Now you get everything: The Beastie Boys, The Stooges, The Damned, TLC. Anything that’s funny, we put it in there.”

There are currently 15 medleys in the Stones N’ Roses arsenal, and Gimbel estimates that 48 different songs are at play within those medleys. The band is low-key complex and often laugh-out-loud funny. (A brief appearance of the chorus from Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” rammed onto the ending of one of the medleys during the Soda Bar gig illustrated the latter.) The downside is that the free-for-all approach that Gimbel seems to bask in — he also helms the similarly ADD Weezer tribute Geezer — isn’t as readily embraced by venue bookers as the one taken by the band’s straight-tribute counterparts.

“For 20 years, I have been told, ‘You know, if you were just doing a tribute band, you would get booked a lot more,’ and they’re kind of right.” That being said, he added, “Once people are in front of us, they get it, and they love it. The hurdle is always getting a club or a festival to get it. I’ve been trying for 20 years or so to get on a festival, because I know that any of those bands that I have done, if you ever put us in front of 5000 people, they would love it.”

So it’s no surprise to learn that, when Stones N’ Roses were invited to play in front of 2000 people at England’s Shiiine On festival, Gimbel jumped at the opportunity. The band booked a few weeks’ worth of UK club gigs to coincide with the November Shiiine On appearance, but the festival date was the focus of the trip. “It was amazing. Six years of thinking about it, and suddenly 2000 people who really got it, losing their minds, laughing at every joke. There was a Facebook group for the festival, and it was flooded with hundreds of people saying that we were the best thing there, and that we better be back next year, and we were also getting offers from other festivals before the day was over. It was unbelievable. They’ll ask us back for sure, but we’re hoping that we can play a bigger one, too. People still don’t get it until they see it, but at least there’s 2000 people raving about us, and they’re telling their friends who run festivals.”

The band wrapped their UK excursion with a trip to record a cover of The Beatles’ “Revolution 9” on the Fab Four’s old home turf: Abbey Road Studios. True to form, Gimbel explained that they “basically made ‘Revolution 9’ into ‘Twist and Shout.’ We did two more shows after the festival, and then drove down. We had to be there at noon, and we were way up in Manchester, so we had to hightail it back and record it. And it came out great. I can’t believe how great it came out. We’d been playing it for two weeks, so it should be good. We got to use old microphones that The Beatles and Hendrix had used.”