Tribute and cover band music.




 
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That band is impossibly fucking tight.

When I lived in California I played in a bar band (read: "cover band") for the better part of ten years. Sure, we'd have preferred to have been playing our own stuff, but when people go out to a bar to hear live music, they want to hear songs that are familiar to them, regardless of how good or bad the original stuff might be.

Here's a picture of me from back in the day. Looking at the guitar and the hair, it's probably September or October of 2003, as the gig was at Qualcomm Stadium before a San Diego State Aztecs football game, and I'd gotten the hair cut in June of 2004. We played in front of about 25,000 and it was a major league rush.

My ex-wife set fire to the hat. I loved that hat...

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Hell, I used to pay my mortgage with "band money"...
 


That band is impossibly fucking tight.

When I lived in California I played in a bar band (read: "cover band") for the better part of ten years. Sure, we'd have preferred to have been playing our own stuff, but when people go out to a bar to hear live music, they want to hear songs that are familiar to them, regardless of how good or bad the original stuff might be.

Here's a picture of me from back in the day. Looking at the guitar and the hair, it's probably September or October of 2003, as the gig was at Qualcomm Stadium before a San Diego State Aztecs football game, and I'd gotten the hair cut in June of 2004. We played in front of about 25,000 and it was a major league rush.

My ex-wife set fire to the hat. I loved that hat...

View attachment 397422

Hell, I used to pay my mortgage with "band money"...

25,000 is a lot. My feet would weigh 100 pounds each walking out there.
(Like the Carlos Santana Woodstock story, where he's 18 years old, and Jerry Garcia gave him some LSD a few hours before he went on and he had to keep it together in front of half a million while his guitar neck was trying to wiggle like a snake lol)

Have you ever seen this ? ( I posted it before) - the famous walking solo @5:00....
 
25,000 is a lot. My feet would weigh 100 pounds each walking out there.

I was surprised at how nervous I wasn't.

Towards the end of my days in California, I played with a trio in coffee houses and such. I was a lot more nervous in those, because the people were mere feet from you and if they gave you a dirty look, you saw it!
 
25,000 is a lot. My feet would weigh 100 pounds each walking out there.

I was surprised at how nervous I wasn't.

Towards the end of my days in California, I played with a trio in coffee houses and such. I was a lot more nervous in those, because the people were mere feet from you and if they gave you a dirty look, you saw it!
And then you have to take requests for songs
that you hate or you're sick of playing....especially someplace like Nashville or Austin where you have to know dozens of tunes from different genres...rock, country, blues....whatever.
 
One of the guys I regret not seeing live is Tom Petty. Saw Frank Murray and his band about two years ago in Boise. Had a lot of fun dancing with my girl and singing along. Frank does him justice!

 
25,000 is a lot. My feet would weigh 100 pounds each walking out there.

I was surprised at how nervous I wasn't.

Towards the end of my days in California, I played with a trio in coffee houses and such. I was a lot more nervous in those, because the people were mere feet from you and if they gave you a dirty look, you saw it!
And then you have to take requests for songs
that you hate or you're sick of playing....especially someplace like Nashville or Austin where you have to know dozens of tunes from different genres...rock, country, blues....whatever.

This is true.

We used to have fun with that, though. We could always figure out the first few couple of chords to just about any song but, if we'd never played it before, shit usually went south pretty quickly. So, we decided that, in the event we started to fuck up a request, every song would end up being either "Tequila", "Hotel California" or "Girl From Ipanema"...
 
One of the guys I regret not seeing live is Tom Petty. Saw Frank Murray and his band about two years ago in Boise. Had a lot of fun dancing with my girl and singing along. Frank does him justice!



Saw Petty a few times, the first time being at the first US Festival in San Bernadino back in 1982. He always put on a great show...
 
I don't usually say anything's 'better' than the original, but, I don't even
like U2 - this is an awakened version of a pretty good song. I love this drummer - just him and Martin mixed this in his studio in Germany.

 
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