Squonk wrote
Strange enough in all the 5 times I have played live, I did one cover , Jethro Tulls"We used to Know" and although one of my favourite Tull songs I battled to try and get my own stamp on the song, almost bought a flute to do the solo ?
Ooh Squonk, (completely and pointedly ignoring the Celine comment for now) you always mention cool artists and songs. It's always tricky pulling off most of the Tull stuff solo because even their simpler stuff has a lot of interplay between the instruments.
I don't have any problems with cover bands - covers and originals are two different markets AFAIC.
The places that hire cover bands wouldn't replace them with an original band anyway - if they can't get the cover band, they go with a CD player. The "real"
working musicians are often in both types of bands. There are also those folk who cater exclusively for weddings and functions (I even know someone who caters exclusively for Bar and Bat Mitzvas). These folk certainly aren't taking work from "original" musicians - they are catering for a specific segment of the market. They are doing that as a job, pretty much like anyone else who has a job (whether it be at a bank or at a musical instrument distributor), so who the hell are we to sneer at that? In fact, it could be argued that what they are doing is purer than those other jobs - at least they are playing music for a living.
A good cover band can be very impressive with the range of styles they have to cover and with the accuracy with which they do them. I used to regularly go and see a band called Protocol in JHB in the late '80s who had an interesting mix of songs and great players who could (and did) pull off just about anything. Sudan here in CT are another great cover band. Francois DuPlessis is a great solo cover artist who is wonderful at entertaining pub audiences (and certainly no slouch as a guitarist) - always fun to watch him work a room.
Covers present their own challenges, especially solo or duo without backing tracks. I've never been a pimple on the buttocks of a good cover artist, but I'm working on a few covers at the moment (I'm starting an "open mic" night at a local pub/restaurant and want to have a few handy to pull out if needed). Even trying to whip my voice into a passable approximation of tunefulness. ??? Aside from a few easier to pull off ones from (Petty, Floyd, Heep, ELP and Clapton), I've also been fiddling with a couple that are hard to pull off properly solo (Knights in White Satin, Welcome to the Machine). Maybe not yet though... I'm only used to pulling them off with guitar synth to fill out the empty spaces or to get the size and power. We'll see...
