I can give you a lot of my own experiences to go by. I live in Nashville, TN, and everyone plays in more than one project here, but my main gig for a long time was ‘Little Queen – the Music of Heart’:
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We still do some gigging here and there (we headlined Walt Disney’s ‘Sounds Like Summer’ concert series last year – 22 shows in a week at EPCOT), and it’s a great time, but it’s a completely different gig than either covers or originals. I also played in ‘Eclipse’, a fairly busy touring Pink Floyd tribute. As far as assembling the band, there’s some great advice here – Bert Slide: “I played in a hair metal tribute band for a few years and it was a big money maker. I think it was easier than copying one specific group like Van Halen. You better have an insane guitar player to pull it off.” Bluewine: “If it's a start up, I would take a pass on it.” – In my experience, tribute acts are a lot more work musically (if they’re any good) – the attention to detail is far higher than playing covers in a club band; we had discussions on whether to replicate small mistakes on the original recordings, on how to reproduce layered tracks of 4 guitars or bongos that were added after the drums were printed, etc. The sonic accuracy is directly proportional to how much time you put into it and how precise the players are. I agree re: needing a mad guitarist, but I think you’ll find it even more difficult finding a David Lee Roth-style vocalist who looks the part, can jump around like a madman and still pull off those Dave-style squeals. Eddie’s a great guitarist, but I think we all know a guitarist or two by this point who could do a credible job playing a couple of sets of Van Halen, and the vocals and front person are the number one thing that will help your audience to suspend their disbelief. Booking is an issue as well – if you’re a tribute, you’re playing one flavor – get ready to travel, because you can only play the local venues so often by bringing in the music of a single artist/act for several hours. If you want to play bars, either learn some covers, or book a package performance with a variety or 80’s opener – that’ll reduce your stage time a bit, letting you play only the biggest hits, and it’ll make you more bookable. If you’re a festival/theater/corporate act, it may not matter so much, but carrying your own opener – particularly if some of your band is *in* the opener – will give you more booking opportunities. As far as bookings goes, there are several booking agencies that specialize in booking only tribute acts; unless they can guarantee you a certain amount of work (and 99 times out of a hundred, they can’t no matter what they say), *do* *not* sign an exclusive. You also have to take into account the other tribute acts who do what you do – it’s best if the other tributes are *good*, but not in your area – part of the problem we ran into booking initially was an endless number of talent buyers who would say ‘no thanks, we had a Heart tribute in here last year, they didn’t go over at all’ – then I’d look them up on youtube, and they would be awful, but because they’re doing the same tunes, they’ve basically burned the bridge for us along with the other Heart tributes. There are a lot of Van Halen tributes – I’d look around in a 150 mile radius or so and see if there are any others (We have 3 Journey tributes within 50 miles of Nashville) – if there are, see if they’re any good – if not, I’d walk, because they’ve already crapped where you’re planning to eat. Another thing to consider is the organized fan base and management that you may have access to; I imagine that VH has a very organized national fan club that works with VH’s management, and these guys can absolutely get you plugged into gigs, merch and publicity faster than anything else. Look up whoever is managing their fanclubs and ask them if they have an official VH tribute (Heart’s recognized tribute acts are divided up somewhat geographically, and there are about 7 of them that Heart’s management recognizes). If your act is good, all you need is for something to go out through their fan club pointing people to your website, and you’ll get booking leads. There may come a time when you need to get approval from VH management or VH themselves to play a big gig – this is another time when you can investigate the other VH tributes to see who may have been actually authorized by the band to perform their material (these will likely be the very best VH tributes) – generally, unless they’re very local, tributes are pretty cool to each other and will help each other out, so someone in that act can likely tell you what they had to do to get authorization to play larger gigs (large festivals will sometimes want this, any Disney property will require a written authorization, casinos often as well, probably other large parks, etc.).
Man, I hope it helps. We’ve had a great time, but in retrospect, I’m not sure if I’d done this one if I’d have known how much work it would be. In my experience, it’s harder to book small/local/bar gigs, but easier to book fairs/festivals/parks/casino type gigs. Money is across the board better for tribute acts, but because you’re playing one flavor, you’re traveling more (if you’re working steady).
Also, ice tea looks just like Jack Daniels in the bottle.
-s
) . Not an easy task. Nothing against the other musicians in VH but I think any good players could handle the drums and bass parts, it is the sound of Eddie's licks and the attitude and voice of DLR that are Van Halen to me.
