"...fails to understand..." -NHI Review online

Page Two

 

There is also devotion to the type of music being played. A band may launch into something brand new that may not seem to be something they are used to playing, or that doesn't fit with the rest of their repertoire--maybe the guitarist pushes a pedal to cheesily imitate a sound he is barely able to muster and obviously not comfortable with, or maybe the singer is giving you his best Eddie Vedder but sounds like Steve Perry doing Al Jolson. This band does not garner the respect that would, say, some guy with a battered guitar working through some Hendrix tune that's giving you chills he's so on it, someone who's obviously deeply into the music he is recreating. Probably the former band is giving you a pedestrian delivery of a tune only because it is popular, while the latter group is really playing a song because they think it's worth their time and yours. And the subject of devotion brings us to another category of cover bands, a section distinguished by the seriousness of those playing the music and by the fans in the audience: tribute bands.

This is the most fascinating territory in cover band land--Tribute bands: bands devoted to recreating the sound and usually the look, of specific famous acts. Rather than simply snatch cover songs from the current top-forty, tribute bands, like Elvis impersonators, exist to play the music of one artist. The obsession alone of these acts should be enough to elevate them far above the lowest-common-denominator covering of their top-forty relatives. One website listing cover bands from around the world named seventeen Pink Floyd tribute bands, and a Beatles tribute from Japan called the Rickettes [According to NPR there are 1000 Beatles tribute bands around the world]. This site also lists twenty three Queen tribute bands, including Kween, billed as "Japan's best Queen cover band." Kween has several recordings for sale through their website. Some are originals done in a style similar to Queen, including one song celebrating the life of Freddie Mercury. And another cd consists of Queen songs arranged for an "unplugged" type of setting, kind of a what-if for fans wondering what it would have sounded like had Queen taken part in that unpleasant pop music fad.

There are a few Zappa tributes in existence including Bogus Pomp in Florida, and Project Object out of New York. Ex-Zappa singer and guitarist Ike willis occasionally sits in with these bands--mostly Project Object. Having seen the latter both with and without Ike I can say there is more than a small difference between a tribute band and one containing a member of the band of origin. In this case, that booming voice really made it happen, even on tunes that he hadn't originally sung. It's no surprise, the added legitimacy it gives a band to have an accomplished musician sit in--especially when that musician was in the band whose music is being covered. This starts to blur things--when members of established bands appear in cover bands doing their music. Original acts can have rotating members, or can lose and replace musicians till there is maybe one original member left. It can get so the only reason guitarist X and drummer X are not in a tribute band is because the person standing in front of them singing is the last member of the "original" band.

 

Importance of the pie-hole

There is something very, very different about seeing a band that has replaced its singer, versus a band that has replaced one or all of its other members. It's like that singer's voice characterizes the entire sound, the entire band, no matter how strongly unique the other players are. While new band members obviously change the sound of the parts they are playing, being their own style to it, there is just no comparison to the effect a change of singer has. Which raises the question--are acts that have lost their singer and continue on with someone new, now really glorified cover bands? I've gotten this feeling every time--either live or on tv--I've seen this situation. there is something so important about the voice, something we connect with, associate with that is integral to a band.

 

Elvis

At the pinnacle of Cover Mountain the tribute flag has been planted by Elvis impersonators. This is a tribute genre way outside the frame--all to itself. Freaky cover acts and then-some. It's all there--the extreme fandom, the close attention to re-creation, the defining obsession. Elvis, baby.

 

Period Instruments

Some tribute acts go to lengths to use the same kind of instruments and amps as did their band of subject. In the future if this equipment has deteriorated and disappeared, if the types of instruments in use are very different from what is available now, maybe tribute-type bands will have to make incredible efforts to get retro gear. Guitars will have to be custom made. Replicas of ancient amplifiers will be put together from preserved schematics, with parts fabricated by a few specialists since newer electronics will have long since displaced the old stuff. It will be a rare and special thing to see a tribute band with their custom equipment playing this music that is a lost art.

 

Looks dead to me

Now and then I like to do something that normally I would not be doing; it's kind of an experiment; maybe something can be discovered, something to my liking--or otherwise--or more likely just the experience itself will be the pleasure, and something within that will be the reward for stepping out of the routine. It was in this spirit then, and partly for zine material research for a topic that was on my mind, that I went to a bar not far from my house to see a cover band, a tribute band, playing the music of the Grateful Dead. I can't think of a band I'd like to see less than the Grateful Dead, except of course a cover band playing their shitty music.

And play the music they would. I didn't know anything about the band except that they had a weekly gig at this bar and I had seen their name around. Going to the bar for my first beer, I asked a guy standing there whether the band played only the "Dead."[1] Yes, it was true--they play all Dead; it was going to be a long night. The readers had better appreciate this.

I've never been to a Dead concert, and if this band was any gauge of how boring the real band was, then I have wisely saved my time in the past. In the first hour after taking the stage the band played about four songs, and some of these only contained two chords. Two chords for fifteen Goddamn minutes; was this some kind of a joke being played on us? I looked around; the DeadHeads loved it. They danced, spun around in circles, threw their arms around like they were batting away invisible cobwebs. The guitarist kept playing the same licks over and over all night. I guess we can't blame him for that though since he's just trying to recreate what the Dead used to do.

Near the entrance to the bar I saw someone assembling a clothing rack. I went closer--it was T-shirts, about fifteen of them. No, people weren't buying T-shirts of this band...I went closer, in a way that a character in a Sci Fi movie who is on a strange planet approaches a wrecked hulk of a spaceship or an abandoned dwelling, sticking his neck out, unsure of what might pop out at him. It was T-shirts of the band designed with graphics like those on Grateful Dead albums. People were enthusiastically browsing the shirts. I went back to the safety of the bar.

The Dead could not do rock, which was evident when this band would veer in that direction, playing a few tunes that I think may have been cover songs already when the Dead did them. The band sucked the rock right out of tunes, bringing them into the fuzzy, desexualized Dead music world. It was weird, the Dead universe. This jamming that belongs in a garage; it takes them too long to get there--the band needs an editor.

I would be remiss to not say anything good about the night however. The band? No, not the band--they blew; I'm just talking about the night in general. Here, as I'm sure at Dead shows as well, anything that might resemble dancing is welcomed. No matter how dorky, white or rhythm-free you are, you can get out there and cut a rug, shake it, put your freak on. And that's good. The audience was really mixed age-wise and sub-freaky-cultural group-wise, which is good to see. There even were a few black people there; and black people getting into the music of the Grateful Dead was something that made me stare.

 

 

 

[1]. You notice I said "the Dead" so I could fit in the "Deadhead" culture and move among them without making them self conscious. You see, the Deadheads never say "The Grateful Dead," but always abbreviate it to "The Dead" because of course everyone who knows anything knows who the Dead are. In the same way, they will also speak of "Jerry"--Jerry Garcia, singer and guitarist for the Grateful Dead--with no other identification of who this person is. Jerry Garcia died a few years ago and this made the band's followers so upset that many converged on San Francisco (home of the Grateful Dead) and just kind of hung around, weeping a lot and sucking up free services that normally would be used by San Francisco's normal population of homeless and bum-type people. This caused some enmity between groups who usually would be gushing over each other with unconditional love: the self-indulgent hippie Grateful Dead fans who descended on the city, the young white homeless population who actually have nice comfortable homes only in other parts of the country, and the salving-their-guilt-warped-psyches-through-fighting-the-system's- injustices social workers. About the only group involved that didn't say much during this were the too- honestly-insane-and-fucked-up-to-know-what's-going-on.

 

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