Professional cover bands are kind of like music vampires, they suck and suck and suck, getting money and a shard of fame from a bloated corpse found in rock ‘n’ roll’s past.
I can’t, and won’t, get down with this nostalgia trip.
As far as I can tell, cover bands exist because teenagers exist. That’s the age where people fall irrevocably in love with a band, where the music takes on a significance girded more by hormones than quality. And that’s fine. I’m not here to slaughter any sacred cows. Led Zeppelin rulez, dude.
What bothers me, though, about professional cover bands (the ones who make money at it) is that they bring nothing of value to the table, but still get a large benefit. All they do is prey on our worst musical inclination: a vacuous need for familiarity, coddling us by reinforcing, exactly, everything we already know.
There’s an easy defense against this line of reasoning, I suppose, and it goes something like this: “Who cares, man? It’s entertaining. Music these days sucks and … Hey bro, could get you get me a Jager shot?”
Point taken. I don’t deny that seeing a tight live band play songs that you love—even if they didn’t write them—can be a fun experience. Ultimately, I look at it this way: Striving for and supporting something new is always a better position than propping up something stale.
There’s also an argument to be made that cover band’s are just being a little bit more honest about things than the average musician. They’re throwing in the towel early, admitting defeat. And in this world where everyone and their barista are releasing records (in Portland they mostly sound like Harvest-era Neil Young), maybe it’s better to simply say, “I can’t write a great song and all I wanna do is rock.”
Nah. That’s just an excuse for laziness.
Zepparella, an all-female Led Zeppelin cover band from San Francisco, will be playing at Dante’s this Saturday. On their Web site, they say they are “… four women intent on bringing the passion, the beauty, the aggression, the musicality of Led Zeppelin alive.”
One problem: the Zep’s music is far from dead. It’s actually kind of hard to escape. Classic-rock radio is practically dedicated to Robert Plant’s penis (although some room is made for Mick Jagger’s.) And didn’t they just play a reunion show in England?
Let me read between the lines: It’s easy to make money by playing other people’s songs. Even more so if you gimmick it up with an “all-woman” motif. (See also: Lez Zeppelin, playing at the Aladdin Theatre, April 17.)
This Sunday, Nevermind: A Tribute to Nirvana will be paying Peter’s Room (formerly the Roseland Grill). These guys really confuse me, because, according to their MySpace page, they’ve been around since 1991 and are a “power trio of siblings [that have] the chemistry, stage presence and sound to match Nirvana.”
Formed in ’91? Um, Kurt Cobain was still alive and playing music. How does that make any sense? That’d be like forming a Nickelback cover band right now. (Take that, dead Cobain!)
Even more bothersome in this case is the fact that Nevermind is touring around the 15th anniversary of the Nirvana leader’s suicide, which seems, um, exploitive. Maybe not Courtney Love levels of exploitation, but still. (To be fair, I guess they’re donating part of the proceeds from tonight’s Seattle show to charity.)
Of the upcoming cover-band shows, the most disagreeable to my palate is 40 Oz. To Freedom at Lola’s Room on April 25. This is because Sublime were awful*, and a cover band won’t do anything to fix that problem.
According to the band’s MySpace page, they have “… a uniquely similar sound to Sublime as well as an amazingly energetic show. …”
“Uniquely similar,” huh? That joke kinda writes itself.
In the end, this is about one thing that I don’t think any thinking person can get behind: sentimentalizing the past. In my mind, it is a rare scene that sees that mission pay off, and cover bands can never, by design, do anything interesting.
Maybe it seems like I’m a no-fun asshole, cherry-picking bullshit to launch at easy targets. And that’s fair. But at least I wrote this bullshit myself.
*Full disclosure: I listened to Sublime when I was 13. We all make mistakes.