For those of us in bands, here's something that never, ever stops sucking.
You're moving towards the end of a show. You've just spent 40 minutes rocking your way through a bunch of your band's originals. It's been a good night: No technical glitches, you haven't fucked up too badly and you remembered to grin like an idiot when you did. The crowd's responded pretty well, clapping at the end of songs (some of them, anyway) and even nodding their heads to the beat.
The sound guy's voice comes over the monitors, telling you "okay guys, one more." You nod and go into your designated show-closer, the re-worked cover of "You Shook Me All Night Long" (or "The Cowboy Song," or "I Wanna Be Sedated," or "Color Me Impressed") you carefully chose to convey just the right mixture of ironic and sincere appreciation for the glorious butt rock that inspires us all.
And the crowd goes fucking nuts, shouting and jumping and – holy shit, is that someone actually dancing? Bastards! Sons of bitches! Goddamn them!
On the surface, it seems silly to get mad at the crowd for getting excited for the cover – hey, they're fired up about your band, right? But when it happens again and again and again over the years, it gets a little oppressive. You put your heart and sweat and fingertip skin into crafting songs that mean something, that reveal some deeply held belief of yours up for the world to see and evaluate and the audience saves the real excitement for the stuff someone else wrote. It's hard not to be frustrated.
From the audience's point of view, it's understandable. People like to hear songs they know. Even if I'm seeing some national act that I like play at a big venue, I'm generally going to react better to the stuff I've already heard. Sure, I like to hear some new songs in a set, but if they do three or four in a row, I start getting pretty itchy to hear something I recognize.
The crowds you're playing to in our hypothetical club are in more or less the same position, except most of them probably aren't even familiar with your back catalog. There'll be a few hardcore fans/friends who know the songs, sure. But most of the people there – unless your band is so big you just read this column for nostalgia about your days playing Tuesday night shows – are totally unfamiliar with all of the material you're throwing at them. No matter how good the material is, they're a little bit lost at sea. And for them, hearing that cover is sort of like having a life preserver tossed at them.
(You could even look at it this way: Hearing how your band attacks a cover they've heard previously gives the crowd a context by which to frame your awesomeness. It's like an experiment with one less variable than your originals. If they know what the song's "supposed" to sound like, your variation from the original Van Halen/Patsy Cline/Smiths version helps to define where you stand. Ferinstance, my first real appreciation for Halloween, Alaska came when I heard – and loved – what they did to Springsteen's "State Trooper.")
There are ways to deal with this, of course. You could not play covers, for starters. But that'd suck ... the truth is, covers are fun. It's a blast to learn "Don't Bring Me Down," the ELO song where everyone gets to say "rhooose!" during the chorus. Covers are your chance to play the songs that got you into music to begin with. So skipping covers outright isn't much of an option.
You could pick more obscure covers. This lets you celebrate your cherished songs while often leaving the crowd with the idea you wrote them (you'll want to be careful not to actually encourage that idea, though, unless you're a dickhead). And this is workable, but it does deprive the crowd of their chance to catch their breath with a song they know. You're making yourself slightly less accessible to them, marginally lowering the odds of converting them to the ranks of your band's superfans who can be counted on to show up whenever and wherever you play.
More often than not, it's more fun and rewarding for everyone involved if you just play whatever covers you feel like playing and have a good time playing them. And if the crowd saves their love for the songs someone else wrote, well, just get mad at them and channel that anger into the kickass thrash-metal version of "Don't Worry, Be Happy" you know you're secretly dying to play.
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