This article appeared in the August 16, 2013 Jewish Advocate.

Gary Waleik of Big Dipper touching all the bases

Boston rock star is also a sports radio producer and Torah scholar

By Susie Davidson

Special to the Advocate

Boston’s Big Dipper (including Natick’s Gary Waleik, left), seen here in the fall of 1986, released their first record the following year.Sports fans of a certain intellect tune into WBUR’s “Only a Game” with regularity. And rock fans of a certain age continue to spin the discs of the beloved Boston band Big Dipper.

But the man behind both, Gary Waleik of Natick, spends many of his own nonworking hours on the online Jewish Learning Institute.

“I study with Rabbi Yosef Resnick, through his Institute’s Mercaz Machshavah Tova site (www.machshavatova.net),” said Waleik, who also participates in the institute’s Room 613 discussion forum and private messaging network.

The Rabbi himself described the purpose of the forum.

“Room 613 is dedicated to helping Jewish children and families create a deep, personal and lasting connection with our amazing, infinite Torah,” said Resnick. “Jewish parents have been teaching their own children Torah for thousands of years. And why not? After all, it is one of the 248 positive mitzvot (commandments).”

Big Dipper are shown in a photo for their Boo-Boo EP. Natick resident Gary Waleik can be seen at the bottom.“All Jewish home schoolers are invited to connect here to make friends around the world, share ideas, help each other and learn together.”

It wasn’t always this way for Waleik, who grew up in a non- Jewish family in Brookline. When he was 5, his mother remarried, and his new stepfather was Jewish. “All of a sudden, I was wondering what those slippery black nylon ‘hats’ in the coffee table drawers were,” he recalled. “And wondering why most of the front doorways in our apartment building have these funny little things nailed to the posts.” His stepfather was not religious, and would answer his questions about Chanukah, Rosh Hashanah and the Hebrew language with what Waleik called “patronizing chuckles.”

Gary Waleik’s son Daniel is wrapped in tefillin for the first time. Waleik (right) is a Torah scholar.Waleik began getting some answers when his stepfather would bring him and his sister to visit his grandfather at a local rehabilitation hospital. “He was ‘frum’ (devout), so I guess it’s pretty amazing that he treated us like a part of his family,” he recalled. “I loved visiting him in part because he’d answer my questions. I learned a lot, but didn’t realize, consciously, that these experiences were actually small revelations that would later have a huge bearing on my life.”

He went on graduate from Emerson College in 1985, majoring in radio, journalism and creative writing. At Emerson, he met his wife, Natalie Werlin, who was from Malden. She was 17, and he was 18. “We had similar musical tastes, and hit it off pretty quickly,” he said. “Her first gift to me was The Fugs’ Tenderness Junction,and my first gift to her was a short-scale nylon string guitar, which she never learned to play. We still have it.” Werlin Waleik, with whom he has a son and a daughter, was a rock DJ at the seminal “Late Riser’s Club” that still airs on WMBR, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology radio station. Waleik converted in 1992 though the Conservative stream, and a group then called the Gerim Institute. The family is active at Temple Israel of Natick. Since 1992, Waleik has been the Senior Producer at WBUR and NPR’s sports show, “Only a Game,” hosted by Bill Littlefield. (And you can often find him eating lunch nearby at Ta’am China.)

The four members of Big Dipper are seen in an undated photo. Natick’s Gary Waleik is second from right.But in Boston rock history, it is his band, Big Dipper, where he made his mark. Last year, the band delighted fans by releasing their first new LP in 22 years, and this year, they toured with Fountains of Wayne singer Chris Collingswood and The Zambonis at spots that included the Mercury Lounge in New York and the Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge. Waleik’s daughter Marlee loved the Zambonis’ song “Hockey Monkey,” and ended up singing it on one of their records. “My niece was so cute singing it,” said sister-inlaw Phyllis Werlin, a cantorial soloist who sings in the Zamir Chorale and hosts a Jewish music show in Worcester. “One time, I heard the song ‘Faith Healer’ on the radio in my car, and I really liked it, and later on, I learned that it was Big Dipper,” she said. “Of course I already knew Gary, and I had seen Volcano Suns, though they were too noisy for me.” Other Big Dipper hits include “She’s Fetching” and “All Going Out Together,” which appeared in the 1987 film “I Melt With You,” directed by Mark Pellington. “All Going Out Together,” “She’s Fetching” and “Younger Bums” were released by MTV Games in 2009 for the Rock Band video game series, and the songs are available on Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. “Big Dipper began as a bit of a lark, actually,” said Waleik. “I was not doing anything musically after I quit Volcano Suns in 1984. Steve Michener had also quit that band, and had moved on to play bass in Dumptruck. Jeff Oliphant, my cousin, was playing drums in a speed metal band. I had met Bill Goffrier in 1983, and his band, The Embarrassment, was a fave of mine. We semi-jokingly discussed starting a band together.”

The first song they wrote on Goffrier’s porch was their hit “She’s Fetching.” Because of their past indie rock credentials, they had a booking agent and a label (Homestead) right from the start. “We got good gigs, and our first record, the Boo-Boo EP, came out in March of 1987,” he said. They went on to release four albums and signed on to Epic Records before splitting up in 1990. They reunited in 2008 and decided to play out again following Merge Records’ 3-CD Big Dipper anthology, Supercluster, which was followed by their studio albumBig Dipper Crashes on the Platinum Planet.

Waleik met Resnick through music as well. “We were both playing in bands,” said the Rabbi, who was in the group The Jigsaws. “I have known Gary for about 25 years. In that time he has been a great friend, a great study partner, a parent of one of my students (Waleik’s son Daniel) and a musical inspiration,” he said.

Resnick’s Jewish Learning Institute community has more than 350 chapters around the world. “Drawing on research-based instructional design and cuttingedge approaches to adult learning, JLI’s innovative presentation of traditional Judaism is designed to be both intellectually rigorous and highly accessible,” states its Facebook page. “JLI’s mission is to make Jewish learning accessible and personally meaningful to every Jew, regardless of background or affiliation [through] cutting-edge pedagogic techniques, embracing the multiple intelligence model, and utilizing multimedia and an array of approaches to engage, educate, and inspire all kinds of minds in a dynamic Jewish learning experience. Among its programming is the Torah Café, an online learning division that offers more than 4,000 video lectures from international Jewish personalities, and Torah Studies, a weekly text-based program conducted in 275 cities on six continents.

For Waleik, it all fits in. And that makes sense to his Rabbi.

“I see time and time again that Gary is not only sincerely devoted to his work, family and to his spiritual growth, he is really one of the sweetest guys I know,” said Resnick.