Folmeister said:
I will be the first to cringe when some of the songs that others are carping about are requested, but I really feel that a successful cover band knows which side their bread is buttered on. Hell, I have had to play "Mustang Sally" THREE times in one evening. But, you know, our tip jar was overflowing after we did and people were happy. That's the point of being in a cover band.
And there is the rub. Originals are emotionally fulfilling, but pay crap. Covers are musical prostitution, but like real prostitution, pays better than emotionally fulfilling work. I have actually referred to this as the 'Musical Equivalent Social Worker-Stripper Continuum', or MESWSC.
On the one extreme we have Social Workers, struggling mightily to make the world a better place in the face of complete disinterest and a total lack of support. Musically this would be the guys playing all original stuff in a non-commercial idiom. Basically their gigs are just for them and their close friends...if they can get a gig, that is.
On the other extreme we have Strippers, also struggling somewhat mightily, but in a very different way. They receive a
LOT of attention, make a
LOT of money and get to have a lot of fun in the short run. But they probably wouldn't want their grandkids to know what they did when they were young. This is the guys you see in the successful party bands, great crowds, great response, 'Sure we can play that song...again.' They make the most money on the local scene. But much of their performance sounds exactly like the recording that they could be replaced by.
In my old band, we were much closer to the Social Worker end of the Continuum. We had a few dozen originals and one cover for our regular nights. If we had a really responsive crowd and had to stretch the shows out, we could fill in with any of several more covers, mostly chosen for ironic reasons.
My current band is leaning pretty hard towards the Stripper end of the scale. We're not naked yet. But we're probably past topless, so to speak. We try to tweak songs to be interesting, rather than blind copies. But we aren't really planning on doing any of our old originals except as a request.
