I believe you’re 100% correct. I’ve never played in a pure tribute band and I have never even had an interest in playing in one. I know and have played with some others who’ve gone that route. While it can be very fun and satisfying it can also very frustrating keeping one rolling and booked all the time.
The primary issue is what happens if a key member leaves. How quickly can you find a replacement who can come in and handle his parts note for note instrumentally and/or vocally? Two local tribute bands I’m very familiar with come to mind. One is an Eagles tribute band and the other an Allman Bros. tribute band. They’ve had some success performing but also quite a few periods of down time as they had to acquire new members to replace those who left. It’s a tough deal sometimes.
I’ve also been friends and played with the members of Firefall some years ago. I know how many personnel changes they’ve been through and how much effort Jock has spent keeping them together and still performing. Several of the original members have even returned at times to help keep things going. It’s always a challenge because they have to play their 70s hits at every show.
The cover bands I’ve been a part of are just as you have described. Flexibility is a key to molding a style and certain tunes around the bands members and their own abilities to play the material. Some very good sounding “accidents” happened as a result of being far looser in our interpretation of the material. That’s a whole lot of fun too. We’d often use other cover bands one off versions of well known cover tunes and work those even more into our own ways of doing them.
In the era of the club bands we all played our own versions of cover tunes and as you posted if the crowd was dancing and partying we’d often extend the song with a repeated verse or chorus or extend our solos. It’s different now and from what I’ve experienced bands and gigs themselves are much different. Now they’re “shows” with more originals and more listening than dancing. It’s a different era.
Well that was the case at one time although I wonder if it is any longer since unless it’s a hip hop band I don’t find a whole lot of current stuff all that danceable. My son in law plays in an originals band and I’ve been to a couple for their shows where they shared the gig with another band. Nothing I heard was dance material.
Maybe I’m biased because I’m old but it’s tough to top 60s and 70s R&B stuff as far as dance material goes because it was written and produced for that purpose. Even the Beatles covered some of it while they were still gigging in clubs before they began to record their own material. It’s pretty universal stuff.
In my era the whole purpose of a cover band was to get the crowd dancing and drinking all night long. I often said we weren’t really musicians we were liquor and beer salesman who just happened to sing and play musical instruments.
I’m a social dancer, instructor, and DJ - Swing, Blues, Tango, and fusion. I’m younger than you (early 40’s), and would largely agree with this.
But there has been a lot of great dance music since, and there continues to be. (I could go off on a looooong tangent here…)
I think the biggest change in music that has led to being less for dancing is really the tech shift to smart phones. Phone speakers suck. Earbuds aren’t very good. They can produce voice sounds decently and higher pitches sorta okay, but can’t handle bass at all. So you get a shift to music that is vocals with a lot of higher-pitched percussive sounds. It’s really mid-tempo bass that gets people moving.
Same as mid century transistor radio speakers more or less actually!
There are eight gazillion tiktok dances for recent music so I’m not buying any argument you can’t dance to it.
Nobody is dancing at the instrumental prog metal concert, but I don’t see many people dancing when Dvorak’s New World Symphony is performed either and that’s hardly brand new!
Not arguing there isn’t modern dance music. There obviously is.
I think popular music being composed for dancing got much bigger in the 70’s with the release of the BoomBox and dropped significantly in the early '00’s with the iPod and other portable MP3 players. Even more so with the proliferation of SmartPhones.
I do think you may be right that the trends towards dance-pop seem to be picking up in recent years though.
Again, you don’t catch fish without putting your hook in the water. Inanotherwords–go out there and sell yourself; up close and personal with a smile and a handshake. Live performers are the last bastion of genuine human/human contact. You initiating the first face to face meetup speaks volumes about you.
LOL…maybe it’s just 'cause my definition of what’s called music differs from others. I don’t see beat driven electronica and some of the hip hop stuff I’ve heard as being music or even musical. It seems to be more effective for inducing mass hypnosis.
But then I’m also overly fond of yelling at clouds like most old guys my age.
Not a fan of hiphop myself, but “beat driven electronica” for “inducing mass hypnosis” is very close to the primal experience of our forefathers, dancing to drums around a fire in a cave
How it’s “categorized” vs how it’s perceived my someone my age whose spent most of his career creating and playing dance music with an instrument not a computer/synthesizer is where we will most likely differ in our beliefs.
I consider myself a musician not a programmer of electronic music. That’s not to say I’ve never found any electronica listenable it’s just to me it’s not all that musical in terms of how I define music. If all dance music can be created that way why bother buying a bass or a guitar at all. Spend the $$$ on a computer and a keyboard.
As someone who finds most music in the charts absolute sh#t, I am bothered by admitting: dance music is music you can dance too.
That includes all music I hate! No exceptions.
So in that regard we agree at least somewhat as to it’s true purpose. No doubt it’s designed to appeal to a more primal brain center and in a sense acts somewhat like a drug in that respect. I’m not criticizing it or it’s purpose as much as I’m simply defining it and it’s space in the world of musical entertainment.
That it doesn’t appeal to me all that much is a personal choice in much the same way that I find certain classical and/or symphonic music to be overly complex and annoying to listen to. I enjoy listening to music as much as playing it and certain styles don’t give me anything I can relate to for that purpose.
But I do understand you. I was into electronic music much more before I started playing bass. I still love electronic music on partys (like last weekend), but “handmade” music with “real” instruments has it’s own magic, especially when a composition (or the bass player within it) starts “speaking” to you.
It’s the little imperfections, the deepening, the little details of the melody or voice that gives this music an individual soul that differs from that of electronic music…
It’s most likely a generational thing. My father who played sax to tunes by Glenn Miller, the Dorsey’s and others in 1940s dance bands would never consider some of the rock or r&b/soul tunes I played dance music. In that same respect I prefer the genre of my generation to what may currently be defined as dance music.
It can be labeled whatever way whoever is selling it wishes to label it. But even when a fast food place like Freddy’s wants to call what they serve a Steakburger to justify it’s higher price to me it’s still a ground meat hamburger with a fancier title. We see things as we do colored by the lens of our own experiences.
Methinks you are listening to the wrong hip hop for your tastes. Especially as a bass player, there is a lot of FANTASTIC bass-driven hip hop.
Start with ‘The Low End Theory’ by A Tribe Called Quest. They collaborated heavily with bassist Ron Carter on many of the tracks. Especially the opening track:
For contemporary hip-hop, check out Anderson .Paak. His bass player is killer and drives a lot of his songs. I love his ‘Malibu’ album.
But you see, what you call “programming of electronic music” is really just the modern version of composing for an orchestra. You just have way better tools and your available orchestra is much more rich and vast (and technically precise… or not, depends on you really).
What you’re IMO missing here is that now a keyboard and computer is simply another instrument, and has been for at least 40 years.
