Monday, November 2, 2009
National Skyline They're Hip, They're Cool, They're 35: The New Wedding Band
Posted by Tracy Moore on Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 11:16 AM
When I saw that the NYT had a story over the weekend about a new breed of wedding band, I expected that the piece would look into the trend of hiring a new breed of original (probably indie) bands for your wedding--"Lambchop plays original set for wedding, makes $10,000" sort of thing.
But this story wasn't about that: It was about ex-traditional musicians who'd gone on to families and careers, and were playing in wedding bands on the side, one of whom--The Dexter Lake Club Band--is not only really good at playing covers and entertaining 20-somethings to grandmas, but can also be credited with making playing in a wedding band cool. But can playing in a wedding band ever really be cool?
Never mind whether this is really a new trend or not, the wedding-band circuit tends to evoke images of washed-up wannabes or has-beens--mostly never-were types--who couldn't cut it creatively and sold their souls for a chance at an audience. Like, any audience. You could call it selling out if there was actually anything to sell out in the first place, naysayers seem to say.
The problem with that stereotype is that it ignores the wide range of ways folks drawn to music can be engaged by playing it--from session work to commercial songwriting to the cover-band circuit. It imagines that the only criteria for whether one should be playing music is whether it gets some kind of mainstream or critical approval. It presumes that talent only counts in original music, and not necessarily in original or interesting--or even merely faithful--interpretations of other folks' music. Not to mention the fact that that sort of thinking also ignores how much playing other people's songs--hits or otherwise--is really fun.
The Dexter Lake Club Band--composed of a former French Kicks member and some other dudes with real-life responsibilities--have been heralded in the Times piece as The Real Deal, at least as real as you can get doing covers:
Weddings, of course, have been the secret sustainer of the music world since time immemorial. But for just as long, wedding bands have been a source of embarrassment for those forced to play in them. The Dexter Lake Club Band has neatly subverted this construction by the simple expediency of creating a band that actually rocks. In the process, they've become one of New York's premier wedding bands for people who would never dream of hiring a wedding band. New York magazine called the band one of the "top 10 reasons to get married in New York," and it has played for high-profile brides like the actresses Olivia Wilde and Amanda Peet. ("I am an old lady and I was pregnant, and I still danced up a storm," Ms. Peet says by e-mail message.)
Of course, the tone of the story has to draw upon the stereotype, so it follows with an emphasis on how scruffy and hipster-y and unkempt the band is--just like "real" indie rockers--and how they know what it's like to tour in a shitty van, lest you think these are just straight-up dudes who want to play music but never really could by any stretch of cool. They choose to do this. And they actually make money, which for a musician, can ostensibly never be sneered at.
At any rate, I wonder--is just being really good at covers enough to make it cool--cool enough to transcend the Nadir of Slumming that is the wedding circuit? (Looking at our own resident cover band Guilty Pleasures, I'd say absolutely. But they're a Cover Band primarily and not a Wedding Band.) Or are wedding bands, no matter how rockin' their rendition of "American Girl," destined to credibility with an asterisk--always a bridesmaid and never a bride?
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That article put a big emphasis on the power of "Come on Eileen," a cover I saw performed by a Hip Local Band at a Musican's wedding reception. It killed 100%. Everyone held hands and danced in a circle. The moral of the story is your own songs are probably not good and "Come on Eileen" is awesome and will make drunk people dance, which is really what music is about, right? Right?
You say yourself that the wedding band stereotype "presumes that talent only counts in original music, and not necessarily in original or interesting--or even merely faithful--interpretations of other folks' music." This is a stupid presumption and is one of the most destructive "gifts" to our musical culture from the post-Beatlemania rock era. I don't think anyone previously ever saw any necessity in writer and performer being one and the same person, except in that it made for more royalties.
I think it's interesting to consider the concept of a "cover." In the pre-rock era, when the term "cover" was used, I think it almost always indicated a version of a hot new song released soon after the first version, in the hopes of either siphoning sales from the first, or at least benefiting from its transient appeal.
A new song might appear in a Broadway show, bust out on a hit record by performer A, and inspire performers B and C to record the same song immediately to ride the hit's coattails. It also wasn't uncommon for a song to be recorded in various genres, as when Dinah Washington recorded a Hank Williams number. The presumption was usually that the audiences were more or less separate, and each audience would rather hear the song performed in a style to which it was more accustomed.
In neither case, however, was the recording of a "cover" likely to be seen as somehow dubious or inartistic. (It might be resented on a commercial basis if it did in fact horn in on the original record's sales, as it did when major labels started having white people like Georgia Gibbs and Pat Boone perform slick, denatured versions of R&B by people like Lavern Baker and Little Richard in order to grab back young white record buyers.) Generally, the song would have been written by a professional songwriter who did not make records of his own, or at least didn't expect them to be hits. Anyone was entitled to interpret the song and lay his interpretation before the mass audience to laud or ignore. When a songwriter was in fact also a successful performer, as in the Hank Williams case, his writing was still seen as fair game for anyone--he was happy to make royalties off it, after all, and the reason he was writing his own songs was that he was very GOOD at writing them. He wrote great songs which could be made into plenty of good records that didn't all sound the same. Dinah Washington's being an obvious example! He was a songwriter AS WELL AS a performer--he wasn't just writing songs to have something to play himself.
Other than the passing commercial problem of stepping on an original release's toes, the concept of "covering" was pretty irrelevant in the pre-rock era. A song was a song, and didn't belong to any one artist (with certain exceptions, of course, like "Rocking Chair" and Mildred Bailey, or "Strange Fruit" and Billie Holliday.) Songs were written by professional or sometimes amateur writers, and plugged, and matched with performers by A&R men, and recorded. For a long time there was in fact an assumption that there was little point in recording a song recorded more than a year ago or so, but that was because the music men assumed the public would no longer be interested in a song that was yesterday's news. The song was the focus, not its association with a particular performer. Eventually the concept of the "standard" arose, which made certain songs independent of both time and artist affiliation--they'd be recorded again and again, and while certain renditions would be prized and remembered, the songs didn't "belong" to anyone.
Further, the excitement of popular vocal music then would be in the collison between song and singer (and arranger, and band). Did it matter that Billie Holliday wrote almost none of her songs? Of course not. The better of the songs she did (some of them were pretty mundane) were nimbly written songs about real emotions, and she had experienced the emotions and could connect with them, express them. Maybe she might subtly comment on the text in her tone or phrasing, making possibly a level of interest that wouldn't be there if she had written the song. When she recorded a good song that she "felt," she was expressing herself even if not singing autobiography. Personal expression in the literal singer-songwriter sense is vastly overrated. Performer, 99 times out of 100 I honestly am not interested in you as a person, so if that song you wrote doesn't entertain me, don't hold your breath waiting for me to give you money. Find a song by someone else that speaks to you and that you can do something with and call me back.
I think one key difference between then and now is that the song used to loom much larger in the industry. A popular song was probably written to a formula of sorts but into the best ones went the imaginations and training of very bright men and women who were specialists at what they did. If you had the copyright to a song you wanted to get it recorded by as many people as possible. People would buy records for the song, not really caring about the artist, much more than they do now. On the popular radio show "Your Hit Parade," the most popular songs were performed by in-house performers, live--they didn't play the hit records. Songs were much more than simply proprietary material for a single band.
Extrapolate from this a bit to the functional music of the 30s-50s--the music made by local performers at weddings, parties, sock hops, banquets, bars, etc. I'm sure they were likely to learn and work, say, the latest hit by Frank Sinatra. But they probably mixed that with old pop tunes that were local favorites, maybe folk songs, maybe ethnic material. And they probably wouldn't try for a carbon copy of the Sinatra--they'd be likely to have a much smaller band than that on the record, or a singer whose voice was totally different, or they might do it with a local or ethnic flavor. And I really doubt their version of the Sinatra would have been seen as a sort of substitution for the "real" version. It was just music that was on people's minds and that they wanted to hear--maybe it was a gas for them to hear it at a social function loud and clear, rather than at home on the radio. They expected to hear a SONG; they didn't expect a particular RECORD to be reproduced for them.
I can't claim to have seen many wedding bands. I hope that they don't see their job as reproducing popular records as "faithfully" (i.e. slavishly) as possible, and I hope that isn't what their audiences expect. If so, it's a shame. A good song is a good song. Let every musician in the world see what he or she can make of it.
that't great... i didn't heard until now of something similar .. that a band plays only wedding songs,good luck in their carer
Good to hear there are better wedding bands these days. The same-old-same-old southern Tyrone "Super T" Smith Revue style band is just done to death. Playing 80s or "oldies" to the joy of the 35 - 65 year old at the reception. What if the bride or groom want something cool mixed in with the stereotypical tunes that get people on the dancefloor?
Very nice article. I thought to let you know that you website isn't getting displayed properly on skyfire web browser on my pda.
I wish that increasingly number of web masters would reckon the fact that there is an ever growing number of users browsing webpages on the mobile.
Regards
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