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.