Tyranny! of! Covers!
Rock and roll is dumb and simple. The promise of rock and roll is something anyone can play and express whatever they want. When I see covers bands I think — why don’t you try and write your own songs?
I played classical music for a long time. Today, I’m going to play some Schubert. Classical music is an endless sea of covers. Think of classical musicians as really good Smoke on the Water cover musicians. They are all vying to play the best version of Smoke on the Water, the most technically impressive, the most heartfelt, the most surprising. They devote whole lives to being the best Deep Purple interpreter. Replace ‘Deep Purple’ with Bach or Mozart or Beethoven. Then imagine covers as an overwhelming force so powerful being a violinist who plays ‘originals’ as a novelty — or, in rockist terms, imagine in two hundred years time every one is still trying their best to interpret Smoke on the Water (but for real — there’s no metaphor here). I find people who willingly prescribe to this worldview in rock n roll very strange.
There’s nothing wrong with the riff to Smoke on the Water. It’s a great riff. It is an all time riff. It is not as good as say, a great AC/DC riff or a Black Sabbath riff, but it’s up there. It’s not as good as Black Sabbath because it’s too complicated. There’s too many chords. Black Sabbath riffs (or Ramones for that matter) aren’t hard. Anyone can play them. Smoke on the Water demands a certain amount of technical skill combined with the potential for endless solos — it’s the ultimate rockist cover, because it’s a pot bellied middle aged man’s idea of Ultimate Guitar Competence. Black Sabbath riffs are embarrassingly easy to play.
Covers offer both protection and codification. If you’re playing your own song nobody can judge it (against all the other Smoke on the Waters.) No cover can ever be that awful; it’s coupled with the recollections of pot bellied old men — goodwill and all that. There’s no risk.
In Oamaru there are a perplexing number of cover bands. I play in a couple of bands: Trendees, Moonrakers. We play in other cities. We play in Dunedin, where the music is currently has flecks of electronica strewn over it like a polyester cape, or in Christchurch, which is harder, because driving to Christchurch takes ages. We play in Auckland, Melbourne, etc. In the cities people ask us: what is the music scene like in Oamaru. I joke, ‘more like the covers scene’ —secretly I’m embarrassed, though. City folk sometimes smirk. They must think: so provincial, those provinces — probably the only culture they get is Rhys Darby doing his animal impressions.
Covers can be interesting if they’re done by people with a body of work behind them — Peter Gabriel’s ‘Scratch my Back’, Bob Dylan’s ‘Shadow’s in the Night’, et al. This feels distinct to bands that only do covers, whose only lens is the cannon of classic rock or whatever. Lou Reed covering Blind Lemon Jefferson is lent context by the body of Lou Reed’s work; Reed’s cover sounds nothing like Blind Lemon Jefferson’s, nor does Keiji Haino’s sound anything like Reed’s.
Covers-only bands howl into a vacuum of other covers, howling themselves into irrelevancy.
Once I played in a covers band. The publican owned the bar and gave us free pints. He was the drummer. I was 18 and went home stinking of beer. Then the pub collapsed and I didn’t do that anymore and I don’t listen to Tom Petty anymore. Tom Petty makes me break out in hives. Like Deep Purple, Tom Petty is obligatory for a certain type of covers band.

I saw this come up on my facebook feed — TOP OAMARU COVERS BAND. They are playing at The Penguin Club. The Penguin Club once hosted Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, The 5, 6, 7, 8s, Don McGlashan, et al. Now it hosts TOP COVERS BAND. Clearly, TOP COVERS BAND scores one over Bonnie ‘Prince’. Covers are where it’s at. All hail covers. Long live covers.