Illustration by Leandro Lassmar
The lights dim in Ludlow Garage’s basement theater. A band of shimmering Swedes explodes on stage, dressed like they just beamed down from 1975. The rhythm section builds a bassy four-on-the-floor beat and breaks into ABBA’s hit song “Voulez-Vous.”
This is Direct From Sweden, and they’ve literally arrived directly from Sweden, we’re told by faux “Agnetha” and “Anni-Frid,” who sport cute kitty dresses and Swedish accents. The ABBA tribute act’s “Benny” wears bell bottoms and a sequined cape. His name is actually Gary and, according to his LinkedIn profile, he’s from Nevada. Not that it matters.
“Are we ready to party?” the lead singers ask. Yes, we are. Direct From Sweden proceeds to play one ABBA hit after another. The audience, a mix of Boomers and college students, goes bonkers. We’re standing, clapping, and dancing in the aisles. My child hangs onto his seat, eyes moon-wide.
Like many Cincinnati live music venues these days, Ludlow Garage in Clifton has a number of tribute acts on its concert calendar. On this fall evening they’re advertising upcoming shows by R.E.M. tribute band Dead Letter Office, Rush tribute Lotus Land, and Revisiting Creedence. An audience member behind me says he’s bought tickets to an upcoming Journey tribute called E5C4P3.
Rumours of Fleetwood Mac and Strangelove: The Depeche Mode Experience played the Taft Theatre in recent months. Ten: A Tribute to Pearl Jam and The Four Horsemen, a Metallica tribute band, will perform at Bogart’s in January.
While tribute bands run the gamut from huge, globally-touring productions to regional homages, the acts and their fans have one main thing in common: love for music we all know well.
I used to see guitarist, teacher, and composer Brad Myers perform with Rays Music Exchange in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Filled with CCM music students, the band seemed like a musical time machine bent on deconstructing and reassembling soulful jazz, funk, and fusion. Myers still plays with Rays but also spends a lot of time leading Aja: A Tribute to Steely Dan.
When I reach out to get his take on the tribute band phenomenon, I don’t expect him to be quite so enthusiastic, given his wide range of musical tastes. “Actually, it’s a fairly big part of my life,” Myers says. “The trend is driven out of a need. If there’s still interest from die-hard fans in seeing a band’s music live and the original groups aren’t going to tour—because it’s no longer practical or age or death or whatever—tribute acts are filling a void.”
Photograph bu Scott Preston
Aja has been around for two decades, playing live shows at Oakley’s 20th Century Theater and elsewhere. The band has built a good reputation for replicating original Steely Dan recordings, says Myers, as well as studying their live performances.
Rick Auhagen played with Aja for 20 years. “In my younger days, I was a bass player who sang and did the weekend bar band thing,” he says. The funny thing is he wasn’t much of a Steely Dan fan before answering a CityBeat ad from Aja searching for a vocalist.
Auhagen quickly became immersed in The Dan, partly because of “the pedigree of the people the band had put together,” he says. “For the first 10 or 12 years of its existence, Aja had some of the best players in town at each position in the band.” They even worked with famed drummer Bernard Purdie, who toured with the real Steely Dan and played on their 1974 album Pretzel Logic.
Photograph courtesy Cincinnati Transit Authority
At 70 years old, Auhagen has retired from Aja to save his voice for another tribute act, Cincinnati Transit Authority, which plays the music of Chicago. “If you listen to Aja or Cincinnati Transit Authority and we’re doing it correctly, it takes you back to when you were younger and you used to listen to the records,” he says. “And spot-on renditions of the songs are what people appreciate. It’s a good time to be in a tribute band.”
Ticket prices for original acts have soared, even for bands that don’t have many original members left. The real Chicago is down to just two original members, Auhagen says. “So if you’re a middle-income family, you can’t afford $125 for a nosebleed seat. But you can go see Cincinnati Transit Authority do it like Chicago did it back in their heyday.” And get close enough to feel that big horn section hit you right in the chest.
It’s a bit weird that tribute acts often catch flack for being derivative and for cashing in on an earlier act’s fame, when all music and art builds on the work of those who came before. Elvis Presley and The Beatles interpreted and reimagined R&B songs and styles from Black American musicians, and almost every rock act since those days has built on The King and the Fab Four—yet Elvis and Beatles tribute acts are dismissed as “copycats.” Isn’t what tribute bands are doing, in a way, the highest praise? Aren’t they helping the music outlive the musician?
Beth Harris is probably best known locally as one half of The Hiders, with Billy Alletzhauser. She’s performed and toured with Brian Olive and others and, when I reach her by telephone, just returned from touring with Heartless Bastards.
Photograph by Gianluigi Ross
Harris met Myers a few years ago doing a Johnny Cash musical and recently joined Aja as an official backup singer after the previous singer moved to Scotland. She used to take issue with tribute bands, she says, “because that was the only way to make money as a musician. Audiences will pay money to hear other people’s music and don’t necessarily pay to hear original music, and for a long time I was focused only on playing my own music.”
But Harris finds that performing Steely Dan’s intricate songs has helped her build relationships with excellent singers and players who offered to play her music. “And that was the first time I’d had a band behind my songs,” she says, “so it’s really changed my mind about singing with a tribute band. Plus, Aja in particular is a pretty special thing. There are 10 people on the stage and most of them gig all the time. They’re so talented, and they just can’t not play. I get that, because I have to sing.”
Tribute bands can also become fertile ground for creative cross-pollination and for providing a place where young up-and-comers gain experience. Spencer Merk has made a name for himself as a composer and plays in a jazz band with his two brothers. When playing trombone in Cincinnati Transit Authority, Auhagen asked him whether the stuff Chicago did and still does is appealing to young horn players. “He basically told me that, because of their music’s complexity, he found it challenging and was incredibly into it.”
Merk says his time with the tribute band was one of his favorite formative musical experiences in Cincinnati, “because the band was full of great musicians well-versed in all kinds of music, not just the music they were paying tribute to,” he says. “I learned a lot trying to fill the role of James Pankow [Chicago’s trombonist and songwriter].” Listen to Merk’s album Stories: Big and Small, and you get the sense that his research paid dividends in musicianship and eclecticism.
While tribute acts tap into a rich vein of nostalgia, the current boom in retro acts speaks to a hunger for live music in a world where digital streaming has disrupted the once-common experiences of concerts and full-length albums. Sure, tribute acts are riding waves of historic, multi-platinum record sales and surfing atop decades of heavy radio play that wore deep grooves into our hearts and memories. And there’s something a little through-the-looking-glass about how music that was once edgy, decadent, and generationally divisive now feels relatively wholesome and family-friendly in the hands of an excellent tribute band.
You’ll see multi-generational families swaying side by side to tribute bands, as I did at the ABBA show: Boomer grandparents who swooned over The Beatles, their middle-aged offspring who made out to classic hits in their parents’ cars, and their kids, who know the tunes from digital streaming playlists. Tribute bands live in the gap between what was and what is and fill a yearning for the emotional release and sense of communion only a live concert can provide.
“You’ll drive 18 hours to Texas and load in instruments and amplifiers, and you twist your ankle or smash your fingers and your back aches and your knee hurts,” says Sean Perry, frontman of The Four Horsemen. “I’m 50 and still doing this like I’m 20 years old, but you have to play for the fans.” Speaking over Zoom from his home office in Akron, Perry looks the part with headbanger hair and handlebar mustache. He exudes that calmness metalheads sometimes have that suggests they’ve burned up plenty of rage on the altar of heavy metal music.
“I was a huge fan of Metallica when I was a kid,” he says. “I had a broken childhood, a broken family, and I escaped that through music. I’d put on the Sony Walkman headphones and go up in the attic so no one would bother me.”
Perry’s band plays material only from Metallica’s first five records, partly because he thinks they’re the best and partly because those records mean the most to him. “Metallica helped get me through some dark days,” he says. “If you’re going through life like that, letting the music be your best friend, you don’t want your music to be disrespected.”
Respect for the music and what it means for fans makes Perry, who used to play in a Cleveland-based semi-progressive metal band, a stickler for detail in the extreme. For many who come out to see The Four Horsemen, he says, the evening might be a rare chance to blow off steam. So Perry gets out there in the crowd, takes selfies, fist bumps with concertgoers, and hands out glow-bracelets to kids whose parents bought tickets to connect over the music they grew up enjoying.
If playing in a Metallica tribute act is already a little Bizarro-world, Perry, who actually credits Metallica with saving his life, recently started getting DMs from friends congratulating him on The Four Horsemen’s appearance in the forthcoming film documentary Metallica Saved My Life. He hasn’t seen it yet, and he’d forgotten about signing a release for the movie production company.
Perry isn’t alone in seeking a degree of professionalism through a tribute act. It’s a common path for veteran musicians who’ve done their time playing sweaty, late night bar shows and are ready to do something with a little more polish. “If you’re going to do anything in show business, you have to be able to give it a name so that you can market it and find an audience,” says Myers. “Being a tribute band is just one more category of something that people can do to find an audience.”
That recognition makes tribute acts good gigs for smaller theaters or rural towns that might not have the promotional game to attract an original act. And musicians get to play on better sound systems and charge a little more to audiences who come ready to really listen.
Photograph courtesy The Eagles Project
Greg Tulley doesn’t miss playing bar shows until 2 a.m., arriving home at 5, then getting up to go to work. The retired urban planner strolls up to my table outside Roebling Books & Coffee in Newport, his neighborhood, looking equal parts rock star and consummate professional.
Tulley is the impresario, booking agent, chief instigator, and drummer behind The Eagles Project. He’s played in all types of bands. For years he drummed with the local cover band Rusty Griswolds, four members of whom joined him in The Eagles Project.
When I ask Tulley whether he or his bandmates feel the need to psych themselves up before shows in order to get into the headspace of the Eagles they impersonate, he laughs. The Eagles Project is not that kind of band. “I’m no Don Henley,” he says. “Our whole thing is: Close your eyes and see if you can tell the difference.” The people who come out to see The Eagles Project expect that Dulley and his seasoned musicians are up to the challenge of nailing those well-known hits. So, no pressure or anything. But get it right, and the payoff is an audience enraptured from the first few bars.
The idea hit Tulley while he was driving home from an Eagles concert in Louisville. “I thought it’d be kind of fun because I always liked the ’70s,” he says. He called up his Griswold bandmate Tim Keyes. “It came together really quick because people love the music,” says Tulley, “and the guys are very good at doing what they do.”
They’ve played to capacity crowds at summer festivals and municipal concert venues in Noblesville, Indiana; Rivers Edge in Hamilton; and the Blue Ash Concert Series. Their annual acoustic show, accompanied by strings, has filled Memorial Hall four years running.
And while presenting the music of one of the best-selling bands of the 1970s is an instant attraction, the band members’ overlapping fan bases help draw crowds as well. Brian Coleman and Rick Kern also play in the Judas Priest tribute band Rapid Fire. Kern, Keyes, and Coleman play in the classic rock cover band Black Bone Cat. Coleman does Acoustic Blue with his wife, and Greg Amburgy occasionally plays with blues band Gina and Johnny.
The Eagles Project’s setlists are anchored around songs that people know forwards and backwards, but Tulley says there’s still room for improvisation, just as in the 1970s, when self-expression and a mixing of musical styles created a golden age for rock bands. And that mix of playing styles and backgrounds makes today a great time for live music, too.
“The beauty of a music scene like Cincinnati’s is that there’s really something for every interest,” says Myers. “If someone likes original singer-songwriter music, there are great examples of that here. There’s jazz, bluegrass, country, Afrobeat. There are original bands on small indie labels, and there are tribute bands. So it can all coexist.”
It’s Saturday night in Madisonville, and DJ Tobe Donohue is playing a mélange of hip-hop and classic rock on the turntables outside Element Eatery. I wonder what people staying in the nearby Summit Hotel must think of the music, the pyrotechnics, and the smoke drifting from the spotlit stage. After the DJ set, Zac Sweeney lays into the opening electric guitar refrain of Guns n Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine,” and Sugar Daddy kicks off a live show.
But everyone in that hotel knows exactly what’s going on, I realize. This is familiar and completely safe. It’s a Saturday night in America, and a band has taken the stage to fill the night with rock and roll.
Sugar Daddy is not a tribute band, but the musician I’m trying to talk to in their van, Scotty Wood, has played in plenty. He’s been Angus Young in an AC/DC tribute and Ace Frehley in a KISS tribute that includes two other members of Sugar Daddy. For a while he was in The Muscle Cars, a tribute to the band that gave the world “Just What I Needed.”
“I mean, who in their heart doesn’t love The Cars?” yells Wood as he walks up to the stage. “I just love music. And I love my friends. We just want to play gigs.”
New music is essential, but sometimes it’s challenging. You should make room in your listening life for new music and original artists. But the same is true of fun. And, right now, Sugar Daddy is on stage having immense, infectious fun.
It doesn’t matter, exactly, who the band is most nights or if they’re imitating musicians who reached their creative zenith 20, 30, or 50 years ago. Right now, what matters is the song and that we’re singing along.
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