Loud Love: Uncovering the relevance of covers

by Drew Wilson on Feb 03^rd, 2012

Starting out as a lesser known band, lots of difficulties and situations arise that well-known bands don’t need to worry about.

Everything from getting your cut of the door money, to making sure the venue has the appropriate plugs is something a smaller band will have to worry about. One issue hardly worth mentioning in the grand scheme of things, but that comes up all the time in arguments between band members or in conversations about your “artistic integrity” is whether or not to throw cover songs into a set.

Cover songs have a long, time-honored tradition. Seriously, it’s hard to write your own songs and other people have written such great ones! When you’re a smaller band, most people won’t recognize your songs or know the lyrics to sing along too, especially when touring, which makes it tougher to win them over. However, everyone knows “Don’t Stop Believing,” why not just throw that into your set and have a guaranteed sing-along the crowd will enjoy? That’s the crux of the argument. Throwing in a cover or two is always fun for the crowd (unless they’re too cool of course) but it takes away from your own songs, and it feels bad as a band when no one cared about the songs you worked your ass off to finish and put on your album — those lyrics that reflect your life and times.. and yet the crowd went crazy for the 8,000th time they’ve heard “Sweet Jane.”

If you’re a band that’s playing gigs in a college bar on Friday nights, this isn’t really a problem, you’re gonna play all covers, maybe sneak in one or two of your songs if you even have them, but you’re just playing so drunk kids can have some fun, and that’s why the tried and true sing-a-longs exist.

If you want to be a real band that is taken seriously, however, deciding to play covers and which to play is a fairly major decision. You don’t want to play that same ol’ bar track, but maybe if you make your own or play it differently, people will still recognize it and enjoy, but they will also being enjoy your band, since it’s your own spin. The other main compromise option, is to cover a song that not many people know, but your fanbase might! This is a route many bands go, as their fans get to both enjoy a familiar song, as well as feel like they’re part of an in-crowd that recognizes it and appreciates that song. They now feel even closer to you as a band since you share the same influences.

If you’re playing in a garage band, and you play a cover of The Oblivians’ “Strong Come On,” for example, there’s a good chance your audience will be way into it, singing every word and loving it while the other part of the crowd will have no idea why everyone else just rushed toward the stagefront. In the same vein, for a band like talented local rockers Dogs of Oz, when your band sound takes a lot from the Clash and your singer obviously idolized Joe Strummer, it would seem almost disingenuous not to play a Clash cover in your set. When you wear your influences on your sleeve, there’s no point in not wearing them proudly, and playing a solid cover of “Rudie Can’t Fail” is part and parcel. Plus, you know your audience will be into it, guaranteed.

Still, for all the benefits and fun that playing covers involves, there is a stigma that goes along with it as well. Playing covers isn’t a “real band.” It’s basically doing karaoke on your own. People love karaoke, but nobody buys the album of the people up there singing. You have to strike out on your own and make your own place in the musical scene. There are many covers that are done of songs that aren’t so well known that they almost become part of the new band’s catalog. I mean, they go out of their way to credit Jawbreaker every time they play it, but by now half their fans are probably convinced “Kiss The Bottle” is a Lucero song, and it’s become one of their signature live tracks. That’s putting a new spin on a cover and making it your own, and it can work. Look at the band Alien Ant Farm that got popular in the early 2000s. They really had only one major hit, and it was a cover of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.” Covering a Michael Jackson song is risky even if it wasn’t one of his bigger hits, but most of their younger fan-base didn’t even know it, plus the song was done in such a different fashion than Jackson’s original. It hit #1 on the charts, yet the band never made much of a dent afterwards, and was never taken seriously by critics.

The punk rock world of course is so well known for its covers that “punk cover” is essentially a genre of its own — meaning a sped up, power-chord- happy version of the original song. There are a hundred compilation CDs devoted just to this, with names ranging from the always clever “Under the Covers” to something along the extremely honest lines of Firewater’s cover album “Songs We Should Have Written.” Me First & The Gimme Gimmes are a band founded on the principle of only doing punk covers, and it worked well enough for them to have quite a few albums and headlining shows as big as Warped Tour and even PNC Park in Pittsburgh, which was such a disaster that after being booed off-stage the first night, the next two nights were cancelled. It’s hard to take a band like that seriously, even if they are a supergroup of sorts with members of well-known punk bands. Then again, they don’t take themselves seriously either, playing in matching hawaiian shirts and the like. So if it’s a all a big joke does it matter if no one takes their music seriously? They sold a ton of albums, so I guess that’s success in one form.

Tribute bands are a different matter entirely. Tribute bands take their covers very seriously. A tribute band basically becomes a popular band, and plays only songs by that band in their sets. These are usually very talented musicians who make their money playing as session musicians for other bands, so playing someone else’s music isn’t a big deal. They also tend to absolutely love and admire the band they are paying tribute too. It would be hard to be so serious about recreating music if that music wasn’t a huge influence on your playing in the first place. A recent all-star KISS tribute band show at the Mercy Lounge showed this off to full extent. Playing over 30 KISS songs in extremely impressive and true to the band form, the tribute band basically was KISS for a night. They wore the outfits, they put on the face paint, they even recreated stage banter memorized from real KISS live shows. That is not a cover band, it’s a tribute band, and they packed a decent sized venue with people who knew every word to most of their songs. Arguments for the other side include an excellent local band from New York called Code Anchor. When they were new they played fast covers of a different old cartoon theme song in their sets for fun. It was fun for them and fun for a nostalgia-loving audience as well. But after establishing themselves as a band, having the crowd yell requests for “Ninja Turtles!” and “DuckTales!” during your set got kind of old, and they cut them from their playlists entirely. No band that isn’t a cover or tribute band wants to be more known for playing someone else’s songs than their own. That’s not what the band got together to do in the first place, and there is a measure of pride involved.

It’s a difficult line when you play covers and it’s a decision every band has to make. They don’t need to take it so seriously as we are here — you play a cover, people enjoy it, it’s fun, no problem. That’s how it will go most of the time, just don’t start coming to expect it, or they might resent it. Keep the covers fresh, but make it something your crowd wants to hear, or make it your own. And let’s not even open up the can of worms that is samples either…

As a bonus, we’re going to include a mix of some of our favorite covers — punk or not, famous song or not. Listen, enjoy, try to name the original artists, and see if knowing that every song on this playlist is a cover means anything different to your enjoyment of the song itself, because in the end, that’s all that matters.

Under the Covers from Loud Love on 8tracks.

D.Rew
Loud Love