A Tribute To Cover Bands

I used to play in a band with a really talented guitar player. I don’t know what happened to him, the last time I met up with him he was already so drunk that he rambled incoherently for half and hour then passed out. Not seen him since. I called him a couple of times and both went straight to voicemail. I never bothered again as he was one of them people who was always losing his phone and getting another number.
When I played with him me and the bassist always had to try to hold him back. Get him to cut guitar solos to a minimum. If a song was going to have a solo then it would have to be a short burst of one that fitted into the song. Before then he had no concept that less can be more.
Then once a week or so he would have a gig with his cover band that did standard classic rock songs. This is where he would get his ‘look how good I am on the guitar with this ten minute solo’ fix. God did they play in some dives. Well actually they only played in dives. When at a loose end one night I went to see them play in a pub in All Saints, maybe the most shittiest part of East London. If Dawn of the Dead had a local pub then this was it. I didn’t stay long.

I can understand if you’re a bunch of old mates and just want to get together and bang out some tunes in a pub for beer money. But a young band getting together and playing someone else’s songs, usually badly. Why don’t you just play you own?

But what is much worse than playing in a cover band is playing in a tribute band. Pretending to be someone else. Copying all the moves. Please, have some respect for yourself.
I’m sure that most tribute bands are just having a laugh. But I have first hand experience that this isn’t always the case.
In my late teens a band I was in started off playing in a local venue. (we didn’t get much further than the local venue) After playing a few times there we got offered a gig on a Saturday night. Great, we can get a lot of people down on a Saturday night no problem. We were the second of three bands on. The headline act was a Status Quo act who took themselves ever so seriously. We got a ten minute sound check as did the other band. The tribute act took forever. Especially for the song In The Army Now. There’s a bit in the song that goes “Hand grenades flying over your head.” then the drums imitate hand grenades exploding by doing a plodding drum roll on the toms. The drummer took about twenty minutes getting every tom tom level and sound just right. They asked if they can have the grimy backstage room all to themselves. Well they didn’t ask they took over it and when we went in there they told us the owner said that’s it’s exclusively theirs for the night. Bunch of wankers.

Well we did get a good sized crowd down to see us. Most of whom left when the tribute act came on, meaning that they played to a much smaller crowd than what we did.