PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Cover Bands?

Having played in cover bands for over 50 years, I had some great (and not so great) times. What were your favorite cover songs to do, and which songs did you hate with a passion?


Favorites:

American Girl (Petty)
Long Train Runnin'

Least Favorites:

Brown-Eyed Girl
Margaritaville


Regards,

Bob

No Margaritaville... such sacrilege...your Florida passport and Conch Republic passport will be revoked...lol


Least Favorites:
Mustang Sally
Stormy Monday

Favorites: Big Joe Tuner OKE SHE MOKE SHE POP

Well, I'm from the country baby, just blowed into your great big town
Well, I'm from the country baby, just blowed up into your great big town
Don't try to hind-side me baby, 'cause I know what you've been putting down

Well, you know I know you baby, you're from Oke-She-Moke-She-Pop
Yes, you know I know you baby, you from Oke-She-Moke-She-Pop
Well, it ain't no city, honey, just a little old whistle stop

Oh, now you remember, please don't hold me so tight
Say, now you remember, baby, please don't hold me so tight
You know we standing on the corner and it might not look just right

Been a long time, since I carried your books to school
Yeah, it's been a long time, baby, since I carried your books to school
We used to have so much fun riding home on grandpa's mule

Now, jump into my Roadmaster baby, this time we're ain't going to ride in class
Yes, jump into my Roadmaster baby, this time ain't going to ride to class
We gonna talk about the future and forget about the past

Gonna run smooth, baby, V-8 too


Writer/s: LOU WILLIE TURNER

Least favorites? Here we go again

Anything by Skynard.
Anything by Kiss.
Mustang Sally
Brown Eyed Girl
You Can Leave Your Hat On
Come Sail Away
Some Kinda Wonderful
Margararitaville
That stupid cheeseburger song Buffet does. (His ONLY good song was Come Monday.)
Werewolves of London

Let's do it the fast way. Go to a bar with a cover band. Whatever they play, that's on my list.

I go see songwriters. I prefer 60 minutes of mediocre originals to 3 sets of perfectly executed covers.

The basic idea of cover bands came up o Facebook when I mentioned one of those places that send you food ready to cook. I said that those places are the cover bands of food. They portion it out, they match the menu items, they parcook anything that needs to me started, and you just be their hands and finish the job. In other words, you are "cover cooking". It takes far less skill to stand by the stove and follow instructions to copy someone else's recipe. Real cooks create their own dishes.

(Aaaaaaand..... go!)

Favorites:

My Way - always our last song
David's Mood

Shout

Least favorite

The Chicken Dance

After decades in a bluegrass band playing mostly traditional music (covers of a sort) I can definitively say by far my absolute least favorite was Orange Blossom Special. At a club once I saw a BG band with a sign stating:
"Requests $1 ... Orange Blossom Special $10"

Rocky Top is a close second.

Likely nobody here would have heard of our favs.

Bud

Why not give us a try. Maybe we have heard of your favorites.

Least favourite - Everything in the book entitled "101 Hits For Buskers".

Favourite - Mary Jane's Last Dance.

ROG.

Never really did the cover band thing, so have not really got sick of any, but I do have favorites we used to do sometimes.

First one that jumps into my head is Walk This Way .. easy tune and seems to be pretty accepted even when the band has fun with it. I've played bass, keys and guitar on it in various bands.

Throw a funk thumb/pop bass in, a little syncopated drums and have fun .. crowd seemed to still like it many different ways so it didn't old so fast.

Leilani and I are a semi-cover duo. We cover some songs as close to the original as possible, most of them we put our own twist on, and some are completely reimagined.

Most of my favorites are usually the newest ones we've learned because there is still a lot of adventure in them, trying things out on an improvised solo, putting some twists on the melody, etc.

We just learned "Tennessee Whiskey", "You Might Think", "You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman", "Call Me" (Blondie), and "Addicted To Love" so they are my current favorites, but as soon as we learn the next song, they will be moved to semi-favorites.

I only have one least favorite, "Yakety Sax". We only play it when requested. However once the music starts, and put the sax in my mouth and take the first deep breath, I forget that I've played it too many times and have fun performing it, in spite of myself.

"Mustang Sally", "Brown Eyed Girl", "Sweet Caroline", etc. are the musical equivalent to junk food to me. Not much nourishment, but a lot of fun to play.

We play some more interesting songs as well, see http://www.nortonmusic.com/cats/songlist.html and what we play is determined by who we have in front of us.

I just like to play music. Playing "Yakety Sax" is still way better than any day job I can think of.

Insights and incites by Notes

Semi-cover? What is that? A song is either cover or original, and I know you don't write because you have said so. Even "your own twist" doesn't change that a song is a cover.

I played in copy bands for decades too. I loved playing in a band, the travel with people I liked. On stage was boring as hell unless we played originals. The first really good band I was in had a solid 6-7 originals that we could play with the people on the stage (some required another guitar, some required more horns, etc) and when we did those originals that the leader had written THAT made me feel like I was doing what I wanted to do. Then came the Bryan Adams and it was back to the doldrums. After that was the Motown band and we did 4 original songs that I wrote. A lot of people validate and rationalize the fact that they can't write by saying "The crowd only wants to hear songs they know." And I throw down the BS card as I yell TRUMP and win the trick, because not one time did anybody sit down off the dance floor when that band broke into an original. 3 were uptempo and nobody knew the weren't obscure Temptations or Isley Brothers songs. The 4th was a ballad and the guys who would only dance slow would immediately hit the dance floor, so again I call BS that originals won't go over. Every band I was ever in worked toward the goal of putting out a CD, and I am NOT going to put out a CD of Temps covers.

I simply dislike covers and cover bands, and I don't support them. I WILL buy a CD from every band (especially the locals) I see that has one for sale, but only if there are no covers on it. I don't want to read YOUR copy of War and Peace. I can read Tolstoy's original.

But that's me, the songwriter wannabe, to whom money means absolutely nothing. I have no desire to be the richest corpse in the graveyard. I am much happier playing an hour of original music to 20 people who understand what songwriting means than a night of copy for people who are just there to drink and act stupid because they drank too much.

My first band was The Lost Lads. I was 15, and we played a lot of frat parties at Rutgers/Camden. Both guitarists played through the same amp.

We were the scourge of South Jersey!


Regards,

Bob

Be careful what you ask for. If one of your original tunes becomes popular you will be playing it for the rest of your life.

I would rather listen to the piano player play covers in a bar than the juke box.

We have always played a mix of covers and originals. We played what people wanted to listen too because that what we got paid to do.

I know it is a PITA to play Mustang Sally because I have played it a thousand times. But if that is what makes the people you work for happy then that is what you play.

If you are so tired of playing what people want to hear then stay off the stage until you get so famous you only are ask to play your own stuff.

If Mark Knopfier will play Restless Farewell by Bob Dylan and dozens of other cover tunes why would I be to good to play them?

Arrogant self absorbed musicians are way to prevalent and seriously irritate me.

Billy

IMO a cover band is a band who tries to replicate a particular recording.

To reinterpret a recording is an entirely different thing to me.

Would you call a famous band reinterpreting a song a cover band? When the Beatles did a Motown or Buck Owens song did you think they are a cover band? When the Stones did "Harlem Suffle" or "King Bee" did that make them a cover band? When Aretha Franklin did "See Saw", "Respect", or "A Change Is Gonna Come" is she a cover artist? When Tom Jones did "I Who Have Nothing" or "Kiss" was he a cover artist? When Hendrix or anyone else did a Bob Dylan song did that make them cover artists? Zeppelin re-doing many songs by blues artists? Mac Rice did "Mustang Sally" first, does that make the Rascals or Wilson Pickett cover artists? Talking heads doing "Take Me To the River? UB40 doing "Red Red Wine"? Linda Ronstadt doing Warren Zevon, Buddy Holly, and quite a few others' songs? Or are Diana Krall, Stan Getz, Oscar Peterson, Eliane Elias, and hundreds of other jazz artists doing standards all cover artists? What about all the people who sang the songs penned in the Brill Building?

Go to secondhandsongs.com, and you find millions of people who are famous for doing songs that were done before them. So I guess if we take that as the definition of a cover song, then Sinatra, The Animals, Elvis Presley, Dusty Springfield, Sonny Stitt, Herb Ellis, Oscar Peterson trio, Stan Getz Quartet, The Temptations, The Supremes, Vanilla Fudge, Eric Clapton, and thousands of other famous people are simply cover artists or cover bands.

There is a difference between covering a tune and reinterpreting a tune. Unfortunately, the abuse of the term is blurring the difference to some people. I guess that't the evolution of language, but where there is a difference, the same term shouldn't apply.

No, we don't write songs.

Yes we cover some songs.

Yes we reinterpret others.

Call us what you want, we've been a duo since 1985, were never out of work until COVID came along, paid off the mortgage, traveled to 6 out of 7 continents on vacations, and never needed a day job.

Whatever you call it, is OK. I call it success.

Insights and incites by Notes

You missed Sinatra. That is usually at the top of the list people who don't write cite.

When the Beatles started, yes they did covers. They also wrote half of the material on the first couple of albums. Covering A song doesn't make you a cover band. Doing nothing BUT cover songs, ever, makes you a copy band. No matter what you do to those songs, they are covers.

That doesn't matter to you. It matters to me. Whatever.

Somehow this oft-recurring topic always brings to mind artists who used to play The Enormodome and now play 200 seat venues justifying their aging and fading popularity with the old "we want to play more intimate venues" chestnut. (That really means "I can't sell out a 20,000 seat venue anymore". Someone is going to immediately tell me how the Eagles are still popular, I'm sure.) The same kind of spin makes bands who never broke out of their home town remind us "EVERY band is local somewhere". And if you stop your logic right there, yep, they are. Van Halen was "local" in LA. As were the Beach Boys. And if you want to conveniently leave out the part where they also ended up doing year long world tours, do so if it makes you feel better than you never got out of <insert town here>.

There was a guy here who was the leader of Cleveland's "native son" hero band. Nobody outside of Cleveland, Dallas and St Louis knew who they were. And even in Dallas and St Louis they had very limited popularity. I used to travel a lot for work and every city I went had a Tower Records store. (Yes, I am that old). I would go into those record stores and ask if they EVER sold a unit from that band. The most I ever found was one store that had sold less than 10 copies. And that was Dallas where the guy's ego allowed him to lie to himself and thing he was a somebody there. He didn't like me until the day he died because I called him out a few times. His keyboard player (and my friend) was a strong writer, and one night, likely after too many beers, I pointed out that the only songs that charted even on the Cleveland charts were written by the keyboard player. I for some reason felt the need to punctuate that by adding "You aren't even the best writer in your own band." Soon after that I was escorted from the backstage area.

Unpleasant truths are never well received.

Perception of success is what it is and it is different for everybody. And as we age, the bar moves closer and closer toward the floor so it's easier to clear. The excuses and justifications start because nobody wants to admit they did not reach their goals. I have heard more people than I can count tell me how "I made a living playing music..." Was that your goal? Just making a living? You didn't embark on your journey of a performing art with a desire to be a major success? To be someone that everybody in the world knows? To have so many gold records that you have to add a room or buy a bigger house to hold them? Does anybody set out on a labor of love like music with a goal of "making a living"?

I started music because I wanted to conquer the world. I wanted my own band plane to go from city to city and do a concert every 3rd day for the 5 months per year I wasn't in the studio recording the album for the next tour to be in support of and drive record sales. I never even got CLOSE to any of that. If that was a ladder I never even got see the bottom rung. I played in 37 states and a bunch of places in Ontario, but never did "IT". Lots of fun people along the way, but never even close to a star. I never even fronted band that stayed together all that long (because I am as close to impossible to work for as anybody you can imagine. Several eastern European leaders during WWII come to mind...)

Playing covers to me is like buying prepared meals from Freshly and calling it cooking.

My second band was The Rainy Days Blues Band!

Butterfield, Mayall, Musselwhite, Blues Project.....

We did the whole blues thang - Fedoras, dark shades. We were dangerous, man!

We worked a lot, and in some very interesting places. We had a crazy manager who booked us into any place that would pay. Band Managers are a subject all their own.

Regards,

Bob

That's ambitious to cover those guitar players. And I hope you had a good harp player because that's 2 of the best. Mike Bloomfield was almost the perfect guitar player. His tone, his touch. We lost him way too soon. I had more to learn from him. 100% blues man. And Alvin Lee! I opened for him once and sat there spellbound by things he was doing. Memphis Charlie Musselwhite is a masterful harp player, and Mayall... fuggedaboutit!! That album with Clapton and McVie was crazy good. I think I wore 2 copies of that album out. Now, digital files live forever but I will always have some form of that album to listen to. Still called The Beano album.

My first band that played gigs was "The Sands Of Time" and the word Time had an hourglass as the I on the bass drum head. From there was The TryTones. That band never left the basement, though the drummer had a hot sister who dated Gene Schwartz, brother of Glenn Schwartz, first of the James Gang, the Pacific Gas & Electric. He used to come to hear that little trio rehearse and showed me a lot about how to play big for a trio. He abruptly left The James Gang, and Cleveland, because he was AWOL from the Army and had to keep moving. Eventually, after finding religion and wanting to do the right thing, he turned himself in. The Army gave him a general discharge, and he went on his way. He died in Dec of 2018.

I toured the country in a rock band, and was the opening act for the stars of the day while their hits were #1 on Billboard. Almost got there ourselves, but the contract the record company offered was so bad our manager tried to make it better for us, and Motown looked elsewhere for someone to exploit.

It would have been nice, but it didn't happen.

I've played concert halls, cruise ships, singles bars, yacht clubs, country clubs, dive bars, show bars, supper clubs, and just about anywhere a musician can play.

I've never written a song that I've liked, but I've improvised solos since I was a little kid. I think I'm very good at that and my audience seems to agree. That's the output of my spontaneous creativity. It's my bliss.

I've written quite a few styles for Band-in-a-Box. Unlike trying to write songs, there are no lyrics to get in the way. Whenever I try to write a song, the words seem either corny or copied to me. So writing styles gets me to write music without words.

I don't care that I didn't write the songs that I sing/play in my duo.

• When I was playing classical I didn't care that Beethoven and Tchaikovsky wrote the songs.
• When I was in a jazz band I didn't care that the songs were written by Rodgers & Hart, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis or Harold Arlen.
• When I was in a blues band I didn't care that the songs were written by Willie Dixon, Otis Rush, Jimmy Reed or Louis Jordan.
• So playing pop music why should I care that the songs were written by Barry Mann, Jeff Barry, Doc Pomus, Ellie Greenwich, Carole King, Burt Bacharach, Paul McCartney, or Elton John?

Some people write well, some people play well, some people do both, some people do neither. There are those who look down on people who don't write their own songs, but that's not my problem.

I play quite well and sing well too. Like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Elvis Presley, Stan Getz, Lester Young, Sweets Edison, Tom Jones, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Whitney Houston, Three Dog Night, The Temptations, The 4 Tops, Joe Cocker, and so many others, I'll just have fun interpreting songs other people write.

After all, a race car driver doesn't have to build his own car.

Other than two 'day jobs' I had while investigating what it was to be 'normal' I've made a living doing and nothing but music. I haven't made a career of being a wage slave to some faceless corporation but instead, I'm living my life on my own terms.

Other than those two short 'day jobs', I wake up in the morning, go to bed at night, and in between do what I want to do and what I love to do. Now that I'm older, I realize that living a happy, fun-filled life is the true meaning of success.

Insights and incites by Notes

Notes, it would be hard for me to say that any of the above didn't sound like a great recipe. Having fun and success and providing quality entertainment with well known songs certainly has benefits. A lot of people would envy such a lifestyle.

The fact is, it's a lot more difficult to emulate/interpret a lot of various artists than to just do your own material.

Having done both covers and original stuff, I stand by that assertion. To cover songs by the Beatles, then do a George Jones, then some Fleetwood, requires a different level of talent and experience.

Notes has a songlist that spans 6 decades, and that didn't happen by osmosis. It is the result of hard work, practice and rehearsal.

Regards,

Bob

And if you had gotten "there", what would you have been playing? I didn't think Motown signed cover bands.

A band I was in was once offered a gig at The Front Row, a venue in the round I have mentioned several times. I refused to play it. I am NOT going to open for a major star and play copy music. I would have been embarrassed to a degree I can't even explain to play a real concert and play bar music.

Does a race car driver have to know how to build a car? Nope! But wouldn't it be beneficial or him to know HOW to build a car so he can diagnose how it feels when he is driving it? By the inverse logic, the guys building the engine don't have to know how to drive 220 mph. But it would be an accomplishment to know how to do so.

I got into this to become a huge star. I didn't even become a small twinkle. I failed miserably. I believe it takes a different kind of skill to write songs than to play them. I never wanted to be one or the other. I wanted to be both. The list of people who didn't write is of no value to me. All I can say is that as huge a star as Anne Murray was, I can say I am a better songwriter than Anne Murray, because she never wrote a song. Ronstadt wrote 3, none by herself. Stevie Nicks biggest hits were co-written (wink wink) by Petty and Henley. Prince essentially wrote Stand Back but didn't push for credit.

The bottom line is that I never got a song onto a radio station, even college radio, and I am going to die musically unfulfilled because of that. That was my goal, to have songs on the radio so everybody in America could hear MY SONGS, MY STORIES, as they drove home from work. That goal got lower and lower. It moved to strong rotation on college stations. Then just ONE college station. The closest I have come is Graham played on one his show. I failed, and I know it, and I just have to live with it. And eventually die with it, because obviously it isn't going to happen now that I stopped trying. Even knowing that there are millions of people like me who dreamed about being a huge star, but the odds of that happening are less than winning the lottery. And winning the lottery doesn't require any talent.

Add to all of that failure having to live with the demoralizing pain of knowing my father died (in 1991) disappointed in who and what I became... Well, life has been a challenge.