I agree, you can spend hours learning to play "Portrait of Tracy" or whatever as an advanced beginner (and I did) but at the end of the day all you'll have a is a fancy show piece that you can't apply to anything and that you'll eventually forget 80% of.
The only way anyone will even know you can play a piece like that is if you start using it as an example in a TB post about learning complicated songs too early.
Nobody is going to ever ask you to play that for an audition, nor is anyone going to care that you can play it, but they are going to expect you to be able to play off chord changes, learn simple songs on the fly, improvise fills and stay in time.
You need to learn simple songs (lots and lots of them) and make sure you understand them in terms of chord progression, key, chord/scale degrees that the bassist is using, rhythmic feel...etc. IMHO the hardest thing you should be messing with as a beginner is some finger style Chili Peppers, maybe some Zep or RATM (if you're into rock that is). Leave the virtuoso stuff for when you want to become a virtuoso.
