Tribute Bands

So this friend of mine is a huge, huge Pink Floyd fan, and why not because they are pretty much awesome. (Me, I arrived at the Floyd late--something about deliberately disliking anything my mom liked, simply to be different. As time has passed, absolutely everything she liked is now at the top of my list. Ain't it always the way.) But several days ago, said friend saw on PBS a performance by a group calling itself Australian Pink Floyd--a tribute band. (Their website is fun--I particularly like the mock album cover for Wish You Were Here, with the flaming guy shaking hands with a big pink kangaroo.) Yon friend grew very excited, and knowing that I too am a fan of the Floyd, he purchased tickets for the both of us. Which will represent the first time I have ever gone to see a tribute band of any stripe. This of course sets me a-wonderin'.

Being a writerly sort, it's probably natural that my first thought on almost any new subject is, "What's it like for someone to go through X?" Obviously these musicians love Pink Floyd music, which is unquestionably great music well worth loving. Isn't it an odd thing, though, to turn that love into a career? It's the same question you might ask of an Elvis impersonator: what's it like when your chief means of artistic expression involves the close mimickry of someone else's chief means of artistic expression?

I do understand it a little. I was enormously impressed by seeing Richard Burton when I was 15, and in an acting class I once did a scene from Night of the Iguana with Burton's Welsh-English accent, completely ignoring the fact that Tennessee Williams wrote the character to be an American Southerner. And once, when Peter O'Toole came to Chicago to sign his first book (which is marvelous, by the way), and after shaking his hand (and marveling that he's my height, which is to say quite tall indeed) I said that it had taken me years to get his acting style out of my system. O'Toole smiled and said "Oh, why bother."

Yeah, that's right, I'm name-dropping. You got a problem with that? This is a blog, after all--self-indulgence is the name of the game.

So. You love an artist, and you wish you could somehow achieve something like what they achieved. The most obvious, direct route is to just do what they do exactly. Any writer can tell you that they had several periods when their work closely resembled that of another writer whom they admired--my own such periods ranged from Harlan Ellison to G.B. Shaw. But most artists eventually find that mimickry isn't terribly fulfilling, plus it has certain dangers--to this day, even after his well-deserved Nobel Prize, there are still many critics who can't help comparing Harold Pinter to Samuel Beckett. (But then there are those who accuse Beckett of aping James Joyce, a chain you could probably follow backward forever--and you also get into the thorny area of influence rather than mimickry, and let's not go there or I'll digress forever.)

What's it like, then, to be Aussie Floyd? To know, as you walk onstage, that your audience is applauding for ghosts who are not in the room? To know that the sole criterion on which you will be judged is not your musicianship, but your ability to sound like those other guys?

I caught a little of the band's PBS performance, watching their take on "Shine On You Crazy Diamond." It was, in fact, extremely well played--they are both capable musicians and capable mimics, even if they needed two guitarists to play what David Gilmour can play alone. But then the bass player started singing, and suddenly my interest plummeted. His voice didn't sound right; and what's even worse, the passion wasn't there. Roger Waters may not be a great singer, but undeniably there is passion--and this guy singing with Aussie Floyd, he didn't even sound like he was trying. I turned off the TV and went to do something else.

Therein lies the danger. Maybe the bass player is a good singer with different kinds of songs; maybe, in the end, he should go off and do those kinds of songs. Because my only interest in his work was in how well he sounded like a band I'll probably never see play live (you have to believe that the Live 8 performance won't be repeated), on the principle that if the next-best-thing is all you have, then you go for the next-best-thing and make do. With such a formulation in mind, however, disappointment is always lurking close behind.

But what the heck. The tickets are bought, so I'll go and see what there is to see, and on the whole I'll probably enjoy it. And then other thoughts come to mind as well: do tribute bands get girls in the same manner as "real" rock bands? Or do they get, say, "Hungarian Pamela Des Barres The Tribute Groupie"?