The Cover Band Learning Curve

It’s getting to that time of year again, when 5 men of the cloth ring in the Christmas joy with song. 

After the Gregorian chant books have closed. 

I may or may not be in a cover band. The disclaimer is that it’s named in honor of some of the greatest ascetic saints in the glorious history of the Church…

So the story goes that when a whole province of religious priests get together, there’s always a few musically minded ones that don’t do dominoes, and ask those other birds of a feather: “wanna jam?” It grew from back-room rhythms to playing for the other hundred padres gathered, so we needed a name to be official. “The Prophets” sounded too generic, too O.T. And then someone said: “The Desert Fathers.” I promise our adopted icon is not inspired by ZZ Top; can’t speak for whoever designed it, though:

Cover bands are thoroughly American artifacts that include everything from the doppelgängers that perpetuate the legacy of great rock groups (like The Fab Four), to just crazy-talented guys that want to play classic pop tunes (The Hindley Street Country Club, Lexington Lab Band, etc.) And while it sounds like fun to play famous songs that already exist, when you and your friends attempt to replicate –live– a beloved tune (=covering a song), one runs into an “expectation threshold”; it’s not good enough that people recognize the melody: rather, your fidelity to the original composition’s nuances will be harshly measured. It’s so much easier to play your own stuff—you’re the sole interpreter; but then until you make the Billboard Hot 100, your mother will continue to be your best fan. 

The expectations of a cover naturally vary according to the audience: for a bunch of clerics with wine and cheese in hand, we tell ourselves that if all the stars in the sky line up, they’ll smile approvingly upon us, their brother priests, holding a tune that succeeds in bringing back memories of when they first heard it on the radio. Hardly groupies. Yet the setting is not quite a Taco Cabana where clients can ignore the guy strumming Margaritaville by turning their attention to the nachos; it’s specifically a pre-dinner gathering, which amounts to priests milling about, carrying on conversations, but a nonetheless captive audience, where just enough camp out in front of the self-appointed musicians to listen to what the evening’s repertoire has to offer. Now what do we do?

Thing is, the musical introvert loves the concert that’s playing in his head, and is content with that, even (–maybe especially?–) when none of it has to spill over into the real world. A rather disqualifying trait for an aspiring band leader. But living a quarter-century in an occupation that hangs upon people getting the point, I’m hopelessly addicted to relevance: my eyes were destined to be opened –circumstantially– to the implications of producing live music. 

I found voice for what I came up against in an Elon Musk interview about his new cyber-truck. He kept insisting that production is immeasurably harder than invention, because you have to create a factory that can predictably and cost effectively mass-produce the prototype: “10,000 things have to go right, and the fate of the entire production line lies at the mercy of the weakest, unluckiest element.” And potential buyers don’t care how efficient the truck factory became, as long as they get one that works; so with the fans of a live band, which is why I balked upon realizing how many single things could go haywire and compromise the whole gig: electrical connections, feedback plagued speakers, strings out-of-tune (because the temperature rose one degree), music arrangement confusion, and full-on performance amnesia (multiplied by the number of musicians), all on a piece you’ve supposedly rehearsed in your sleep: the audience neither knows nor cares about any of this—no brownie points for effort—what counts is execution. 

Naturally, all this turns me into a frightful pragmatist; no element—hardware, software, musical arrangements, or even personnel—is spared the draconian gauntlet of a cost-benefit analysis: does your contribution when working properly exceed your hinderance when failing? An unending ice-bucket-dose of realism.

I’ve given this high-fidelity expectation vs. actual execution tension a name: translation. It’s a unique kind of tension that increases exponentially according to the incompetence of the musicians. The first step of a successful translation “from Spotify to Stage” is to map out the overall experience of a classic hit into cold, comprehensible data on paper: what key it’s played in, tempo (beats per minute), measures per verse, what instruments stand out and—of course—what lyrics are sung. But then comes the transposing of that data into something replicable by mere mortals, and let the triage begin! You think Journey’s “Don't Stop Believing” would give you a win? Commence the search for whoever can do Steve Perry’s soaring vocals (true story: when he bowed out back in ‘98 the band had to go as far as the Philippines to find Arnel Pineda to fill those shoes). Or just notch it down an octave and hope there’s no Journey fans within earshot.

Maybe a better way to ride the tension is to ask: what are those sweet-spot requirements that will showcase my guys’ talent without requiring excessive rehearsal, producing a quality piece that can be replicated without too many miracles? For my part, trying to narrow the expectation–execution gap a bit, I practice the lead guitar parts to where they’re nearly a muscle-memory, allowing me headspace to keep one ear open to the other instruments, give the nod (or just yell) at the others when their entry point comes, and if all goes swimmingly, contribute to backup vocalst. 

I can get away with that without being a virtuoso, because the beauty of the electric guitar is that only half of it demands mastery of the fretboard (=knowledge of music theory applied to this instrument), because the other half wants sound manipulation (=messing with the dozen odd parameters between the guitar's own neck & bridge pickups and the amplifier, adding any number of effects pedals in between that enhance the sound through chorus modulations, overdrives, delays, reverbs...like Boston’s Tom Scholz who used all of them). What it really means is that you can be good at one or the other of those things—or mediocre at both—and still sound like a boss, at least for a minute. Behold why the symbol of our post-Woodstock era is not the French horn.

While the goal of any band leader can be reduced to securing synchronicity, the on-the-ground experience devolves into a pathological combination of orchestra conductor, head cheerleader and battlefield medic: keep the biggest plates spinning, let the small ones fall off if need be. Because long before anyone knows their entry point into a refrain, they first have to feel appreciated then motivated (which still does not guarantee anything is going to sound good). A dozen years of youth ministry taught me a hard-earned lesson: set them up for success, which means moving heaven and earth so that the efforts of the ones you’re leading score a win. To illustrate, second guitarist will usually stroll in on the big day without having so much as looked at the setlist, so my hopes for intricate arpeggios are shot, but if I can get a chord progression in front of him, he’ll still lay down a killer rhythm...And so I go merrily trimming my expectations into the shape of sanity.  

Someone that’s choleric is always a better front man—absorbed and even lost in working the crowd—and there’s an art to that: lead singers read their people like a book, and therefore have impeccable timing; they’ll introduce a song with a childhood story, a humorous jibe, or a nonsensical dedication, all while the intro riffs of the next number are already playing. And when it’s happening, the onlookers are absorbed into the story making the performance a single continuum: a unified, ecstatic experience. And I happily outsource all that to the guy in the Christmas llama sweater.