THE HAIR REMAINS THE SAME


I hope I don't come of as too flippant or dismissive of these guys. They earn a living playing music people love. Who could hate them?

From the VC Reporter, July 21, 2005



Steve Zukowsky of Led Zepagain romances the crowd.





July 26, 2004

Party like it’s 1969
Rockers turn back the clock at Ojai’s Libbey Bowl
by Chris Klimek
Live 8, schmive 8. Sure, it featured everybody from Bjork to Brian Wilson playing in nine more or less simultaneous gigs in different cities around the globe. Sure, it opened with U2 backing up Paul McCartney on his first-ever live performance of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Sure, 3 billion people supposedly watched at least part of it on TV, presumably raising a whole crapload of awareness for Africa or whatever.
But I ask you: At Live 8, did John Bonham rise from the dead to swing once more the Hammer of the Gods? Did Jim Morrison slither up from his Paris grave to again embody the Lizard King? Did Keith Moon and Brian Jones return to the Who and the Stones, respectively, the bands that have soldiered on for decades after their respective demises but have never again been what they were?
No? Well, then Live 8 will have to go down as the second-biggest multi-star benefit gig of 2005. Because last Saturday at the Ojai Classic Rock Festival, Bonz, Morrison, Moon and Jones walked among us, restoring Led Zeppelin, The Doors, The Who and the Rolling Stones to their late-sixties/early-seventies zeniths.
Kind of.
The festival, a benefit for the RageJax Foundation, which seeks to fund the construction and staffing of children’s community centers in Costa Rica, was comprised of a bill of six “tribute” acts—each one a sonic and, to a lesser degree, visual doppelganger of the Vietnam-era incarnation of a classic rock outfit. The 10-hour event was bookended by sets from 4 Way Street, the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tribute band who opened the show; and Cubensis, the Grateful Dead impersonators who provided the concert’s psychedelic finale. Filling out the bill were The Who Show (playing the songs of The Who, natch), Sticky Fingers (dubbed for the 1971 Rolling Stones album that featured the FM staples “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses”), the wonderfully self-explanatory Led Zepagain and Peace Frog, a Doors tribute.
While the real McCoy versions of most of these acts can still be found on the road, dutifully playing greatest-hits sets to boomers who routinely pay more than $100 a head, seeing a tribute band offers its own pleasures. Anyone who has ever attended an arena or stadium rock concert knows that the audience wails in recognition and anticipation from the moment its heroes take the stage, offering a degree of noisy approbation that usually has little to do with the actual quality of the band’s performance on that night. The copycats, by contrast, have to work for it. The audience might only be listening to hear how accurately the band replicates the sound of the originals, but the side effect of this is that they’re listening.
The crowd that appeared to fill the Libbey Bowl to at least three-fourths capacity Saturday was surprisingly diverse in age, ranging from boomers who might actually have been at Woodstock to kids who don’t yet have learner’s permits but who do appear to have impressive collections of Led Zeppelin T-shirts. During Led Zepagain’s muscular midafternoon set, the pit in front of the stage filled up with bopping gray heads and pumping, liver-spotted fists. Instantly, you love these people, if only for showing no trace of the grim, I-had-to-kill-a-hobo-to-get-these-tickets-and-I-am-going-to-have-some-F-U-N-god-dammit determination that you always see in the audience when these kinds of bands play the Staples Center. The band’s sturdy renditions of Zep warhorses like “Rock and Roll,” and “Kashmir” brought roughly half of those seated in the Bowl to their feet for a partial standing ovation when the Zeppelgangers left the stage, despite the oppressive heat. Before Zepagain’s set-closing stomp through “Heartbreaker,” vocalist Swann Montgomery shared the band’s philosophy. “We’re not trying to be Led Zeppelin, because nobody can be Led Zeppelin,” he said, in what sounded, ironically, like a credible imitation of Robert Plant’s girlish speaking voice. “We’re just trying to keep the magic and the spirit of Led Zeppelin alive.”
Indeed, one of the most charming elements of tribute-band experience is the erasure of the line between performer and fan. These guys are, in a sense, Trekkies after all—people whose fandom is so profound that it compels them to dress as their heroes and congregate. But performing in tribute bands can also be a way for musicians to make a living performing the songs that made them want to become musicians, according to Jim Wootten.
Wootten would know: a triple-threat who stands in for John Paul Jones in Led Zepagain while moonlighting in 4 Way Street and the Long Run, an Eagles tribute, Wootten now makes more of his living from performing than he does from his day job as a bookkeeper. “Tribute bands work the most,” he says. “They can get gigs because they draw more people than just a regular cover band.” Wootten says that Zepagain, in particular, has exploded in popularity in the last two years, watching its e-mail list grow from around 200 subscribers to more than 2,000. The group traveled to Germany and Bosnia twice each to perform for American soldiers there. By January 2004, word of Zepagain’s chops had spread sufficiently to summon a distinguished guest to a Zepagain gig at the House of Blues, Sunset Strip: Mr. Jimmy Page himself. (Photos of the meeting, along with a charming account of the evening from Zepagain’s own Jimmy Page, Steve Zukowsky, appear at the band’s website.) It was hardly Wootten’s first brush with music royalty: His father played with Lawrence Welk and Benny Goodman, and his is uncle is Les Paul—only the inventor of the solidbody electric guitar.
While Wootten says he’s content simply to earn a living playing the music he loves, others dream of moving the tribute band beyond novelty status. Howard Tattow, who dons a wig and fake mustache to play the part of David Crosby in 4 Way Street, predicts increasing respectability in the coming years for this niche musical genre. “You’ll see us start to be embraced by the Hollywood music companies,” he says, saying that big-budget multimedia shows will soon be the province not just of established stadium acts like the Rolling Stones, but of their knockoffs, too. “Once people start to get hip to it, it’s just going to be another thing,” he says. “Friday night, people will say, ‘Do you want to see a movie? Do you want to hear some standup at the Comedy Store? Or do you want to go hear that tribute band that’s playing the Pantages?’”

Posted: Thu - July 21, 2005 at 02:23 PM          

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