For years, when tribute bands called the Cat's Cradle nightclub looking for gigs, club manager Derek Powers had a ready answer: No, thank you.
Occasionally, a few would turn up onstage -- Zoso (a Led Zeppelin tribute act), Cosmic Charlie (Grateful Dead), the Back Doors (Doors). But as the Triangle's prestige alternative-music venue, the Carrboro club has always been more accustomed to presenting hip, rising rock acts like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Sonic Youth.
"It's not like I was on higher ground or anything," Powers says. "But I'd get calls from bands who'd say they played Seven Mary Three songs when Seven Mary Three was still around and still popular. And I'd tell them, 'We, uh, do mostly original rock.' But look at our calendar now. Lately, we've had the Neil Diamond All-Stars, Dave Matthews Cover Band, Rawmoans, Zoso, Bjorn Again, Appetite for Destruction. It's an interesting phenomenon."
It's also a growing one. Tribute bands are about the only growth sector in a sluggish live-concert industry that has produced few new breakthrough acts in recent years. Unlike cover bands, which just play someone else's music, tribute bands try to re-create the experience of seeing the original act by using similar outfits, gear, props and stage patter.
Such bands have always been around, mostly covering absent icons like the Beatles or Elvis Presley or re-creating the spectacular stage antics of Kiss. They've long been a staple of secondary venues such as college fraternity parties, state fairs, amusement parks and showrooms from Las Vegas to Myrtle Beach.
In recent years, however, tribute acts have gone mainstream, onscreen as well as onstage. They're the subject of a serious documentary film, "Tribute," executive-produced by the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh. The phenomenon also figured into the 2001 movie "Rock Star" -- loosely based on British heavy-metal band Judas Priest, which drafted the singer from a tribute band to replace its departed frontman.
Various local clubs, including the Cradle and Raleigh venues Lincoln Theatre and Tucker's Music Hall, do several tribute shows a month, and not just the hits of yesterday. Nowadays, tribute acts cover current acts such as Britney Spears, 'N Sync, Destiny's Child, Limp Bizkit and Shania Twain.
"You name it, there's somebody out there doing them," says Gary Bongiovanni, editor of the concert-industry trade magazine Pollstar. "I guess it's a sign of how big you are. And there are absolutely a lot more tribute bands now. It's not the unique novelty it once was."
Specific figures on tribute acts are hard to come by. One measurement is the Tribute City Web site (www.tributecity.com), which lists more than 800 acts covering everybody from Abba to ZZ Top, with a half-dozen others signing on every week.
Lenny Mann runs Tribute City and plays guitar in the California-based band Led Zepagain -- one of 20 Led Zeppelin tribute acts on the site. Before joining Led Zepagain in 1999, Mann struggled for years in a series of original bands.
"I even kind of gave up on music for a while," Mann says. "The whole thing of traveling hours and hours to play for 20 people who don't know who you are, it just got to be too much. A lot of bands start out doing this on the side, but then they realize how rewarding it is to play in front of large and appreciative audiences -- and they might do this full time. We just did a show in Las Vegas where we pulled in over 2,500 people."
Local talent
Triangle-based tribute acts include Appetite For Destruction (Guns N' Roses); Seattle, an Appetite for Destruction spinoff that covers grunge bands Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains; Terrapin Junction (Grateful Dead); and BackBeat (the Beatles). While the latter two acts just play the songs, Appetite and Seattle try to conjure up their subjects with costumes and role-playing.
Appetite for Destruction bases its standard set on Guns N' Roses' legendary 1988 performance in New York City (which MTV televised), complete with recitations of singer Axl Rose's stage patter and song introductions. But the group stops short of some tribute acts, where the members won't break character even when they're offstage.
"Basically, the way we look at it is the show is onstage," says Appetite's Brandon Sexton (who wears a wig onstage as part of his impersonation of Guns N' Roses guitarist Saul "Slash" Hudson). "Offstage, we want to hang out and party. But onstage, we treat it like a play or an act; try to portray it as closely as we can."
John Covach, who teaches the University of North Carolina's rock history class, finds many aspects of the phenomenon puzzling. Covach also leads the Beatles cover band BackBeat -- which doesn't dress up.
"The minute people find out we don't wear wigs or do the accents, they lose interest," Covach says. "If we'd adopt the wigs, this same band could charge more and work a lot more. I just find it goofy, this expectation that 40-something guys would put on wigs and try to look like kids in the mid-'60s."
More broadly, Covach sees tribute bands as a symptom of the corner that rock music has painted itself into. While other styles all have standard repertories that anyone can cover, most rock songs are closely associated with the original artists who wrote or first recorded them. For a rock band to play another band's music, it has to involve parody, homage or dressing up like the original act.
"Country, blues, folk and jazz are not stuck with this," Covach says. "And musicians in all those styles can age gracefully. In all those cultures, the more senior performers are revered for their experience. But in rock culture, you get to be 50 and people wonder whether or not you should still be doing it."
Supply and demand
Aesthetics aside, a large part of the tribute-band boom comes down to supply and demand. The Dave Matthews Band, for example, is so popular that the originals can't meet the demand for live performances. So multiple Matthews tribute acts fill the bill (Tribute City lists six, several of which regularly play the Triangle).
Lance Server is president of Kentucky-based Long Distance Concerts, a booking agency specializing in tribute bands. He calls acts like the Dave Matthews Cover Band "an easy fix for a bar."
"I do tribute bands for a reason," Server says. "Either people want it or they don't, and it takes very little effort to explain. Some clubs used to turn their noses up at it. ... Not anymore."
Lincoln Theatre co-owner Mark Thompson cites Dave Matthews Cover Band, Zoso, Appetite for Destruction and The Wall (which covers Pink Floyd) as the most consistently drawing tribute acts he books. Jonathan L. Roberts, a technical recruiter for a telecommunications company in Cary, has seen all of the above and more.
"Dave Matthews Cover Band is one of the closest matches I've seen to the real one," Roberts says. "It's almost like you're at a real concert, and it's like $6 compared to $48 for the real one. It's a great way to hear favorite songs at a fraction of the price, because it's getting very expensive to go see Dave Matthews these days."
At Cat's Cradle, Appetite for Destruction was a breakthrough cover band last summer -- despite owner Frank Heath's skepticism.
"I booked them because the Lincoln Theatre guys were so hot on them," Heath recalls. "I was skeptical until we gave them a night in the middle of July, and they drew a really big crowd -- mostly from Raleigh, they drink more. I never thought a Guns N' Roses tribute band would do well over here, but they did. People have so much fun at tribute-band shows, it's a completely different atmosphere. It adds a little variety and I'm all for that."
Grooving on a fake ID
Lately, even original bands want to be tribute bands (for one night, at least). Kings nightclub in Raleigh does a festival every year, "The Great Coverup." It's Halloween for the local-music community, with bands impersonating other acts, sometimes quite elaborately.
Two years ago, Cy Rawls (a mild-mannered bank teller from Chapel Hill) covered himself in fake blood to impersonate metal singer Glen Danzig, backed up by the band Analogue II. And last year, Cherry Valence paid tribute to Aerosmith -- complete with a cameo from some friends as Run-DMC for the rock/rap crossover hit "Walk This Way." The Cars, X, Devo, Billy Joel and Lynyrd Skynyrd have also gotten the tribute treatment at Coverups.
This year's fourth annual Coverup opens Thursday night. Participants include Durham's The Sames, one of the most acclaimed new rock bands in the Triangle. They're doing an intentionally obscure tribute, music from Pink Floyd's soundtrack to the 1969 film "More."
"I, uh, don't think it will be a crowd pleaser because it's just too obscure," says Sames guitarist Zeno Gill. "But we're gonna do it anyway, on purpose, because I'm personally kind of against covers that please people. That's too easy. In theory, it eliminates the need for new music. If you cover something, and people are happy to hear it, no one will ever write a new song."
But even full-time tribute acts haven't given up on new music. Members of the grunge tribute band Seattle also have an original-music band. Once they have enough songs of their own for a full set (which should be early next year), they'll start doing two-set shows -- opening with originals, then closing with covers.
"Playing in a tribute band has been good for us," says Seattle drummer Paul Rembert. "It opens the door to get us into places where people can get used to us so we can get our originals out there."
That kind of planning is wise, since most tribute bands have a limited shelf life. Besides, somebody needs to come up with new music or there won't be any tribute-worthy bands down the road.
"People enjoy what's familiar, but if it's played often enough it will die off," says Cradle manager Powers. "Tribute bands really need to spread it out and not use it up too fast. I mean, we can only do two Zoso shows a year. The crowd is generally half genuine fans, and half gawkers like what you get at a car crash. And you only get 50 percent recidivism rates on that crowd."
