Would you play WHATEVER it takes ..........

[Team Transylvania]

Nickelback is underrated when it comes to this. Everyone bashes them, but they are talented and write some great tunes!

Nope. Youre not gonna convince me of that!

[grimmbass]

It all comes down to what you want. If you are playing to make a living, then you should play whatever will get you steady work. If you're lucky, it will at least be music that you can tolerate. If you don't care about the money or don't need the money, play the songs you love, originals or covers.

I think most of us probably fall somewhere between the extremes. In Lies Inc, I play covers, many of which I don't like, so that people might be suckered into hearing our originals. In that context, I position the songs I don't like as exercises rather than songs; there is a discipline involved in forcing yourself to play a song you loathe. Conversely, in the British Invasion, I love almost all of the material, and in the Grimm, I get to play NOTHING but material I helped write.

There is NOTHING wrong with bands covering material they like. A lot of the greats, however, performed covers they weren't crazy about (Beatles, Elvis, and Zep, to name a few). Despite this fact, the really enduring artists had one thing in common: The majority of the time, they did music THEY believed in without giving a fuck what anyone else thought about it. For that reason, the music was REAL.

The best a band can hope for is to do what they love and be fortunate enough to have others love it too. If you spend too long trying to give other people what you think they want, your own songs become empty and meaningless. If the greats had always tried to give people "what they want," bands like Tool, Rush, Yes, Faith No More, and, the mighty Zepplin would never have lasted. They were oddballs, non-conformists, and non-radio friendly....and they spanned the genre of Album Oriented Rock and the migration to FM (right JP?).

In 20 years, people will still listen to Zepplin. In 5, nobody will remember Avril Lavigne. Why? Because one group is real, while the other"artist" is a corporately-engineered product giving fan demographics what record companies think "the people want."

Just my two cents...

[Brian of the Clan Plush]

Nickelback is underrated when it comes to this. Everyone bashes them, but they are talented and write some great tunes!

-2





j/k

[bassist_25]

In 20 years, people will still listen to Zepplin. In 5, nobody will remember Avril Lavigne. Why? Because one group is real, while the other"artist" is a corporately-engineered product giving fan demographics what record companies think "the people want."

I agree with just about everything you said, Kent. But to play devil's advocate, could it be that people from Zepplin's era were more open-minded or more dedicated as fans than many of the people who listen to the radio nowadays? Perhaps people's attention spans have truly gone out the window. Again, I agree that much of the music now on mainstream radio is throwaway trash, but perhaps it's like that because that's what people want supplied to them, not the other way around. I suppose that it would be difficult to really test that hypothesis, though.

[grimmbass]

Paul,

I think the main difference between mainstream radio prior to the mid 80's is that most record companies were owned by individuals, not shareholders. People who owned record companies backed artists they liked, not ones who would always mean instant return on investment. This "love of music" mentality is alive and well, thank God, in indie music.[/quote]

[orangekick]

Would you play whatever it takes if you could have a hit record ?

Play / Record a song you don't like ? if it would be a hit ?

Play / Record in a genre you don't care for ? it you could have a successful hit ?

Nope. The music that I am a part of is the music that I make. I'd still make it whether or not anyone was listening or not.

[Fourth River]

if this were the kind of stuff you did, I'd consider the person more of an entertainer than a musician.. that's like backstreet boys kind of crap...

if you are a real musician in a real band.. 10-1 if you're doing something you don't wanna do, you're not gonna be completely happy... although I will say there is some flexibility to this kind of thing...

take for instance, John Mayer.. when he first came out he was doing pop kind of stuff... was this what he wanted to do, not completely sure... but soon as he got his money, he started doing what he really wanted.. blues n'at... heck he toured with Herbie hancock.. not sure what he's doing now, whether it's more blues or if he's doing pop again...

if it were that kind of situation, playing music I didn't hate, but didn't love I could do it for a while... even some of my favorite bands (guster, the slip) have songs that were wildly popular that boosted their followings, but now they all but refuse to do those songs... could I do something like that.. like I said, probably for a little while.. but for me, it's never about the money.. it's more about the music...

[theavantgarde]

we like playin bon jovi covers ... its what the kids these day wanna hear!

[bassist_25]

even some of my favorite bands (guster)

I just wanna say that Guster is highly underrated.

...Okay, go back to your normally scheduled thread.

[Jim Price]

Interestingly enough, I'll be leaving later this afternoon for Harrisburg to attend the annual Millennium Music Conference this weekend. And this general topic is guaranteed to surface during at least a few of the panel discussions.

I think Grimmbass hit the nail on the head on several fronts. During the panels at Millennium, the music industry panelists usually always tell musicians to stick by their music and do what's honest and in their hearts, rather than chase trends and try to anticipate what the national music industry is looking for next.

And I think that applies to cover songs as well. I think there is a big difference between bands and musicians who do covers because they genuinely love the material they are covering, and bands and musicians doing covers of "trendy" songs and hits they anticipate audiences might want to hear. The former category almost always sinks heart and soul into what they perform, and it is real; the latter category can often sound hollow and uninspired if they don't honestly believe in the material they're performing.