Posted by Somewhere around 1986/1987 I saw a pair of shows in Moncton at a place called The Centrum (don’t look for it, it’s not there anymore). They were both tribute acts, the first was The Blushing Brides and the next (likely a month or two later) was The Back Doors*.
These are among the very few ticketless shows that I listed in my concert albums without noting the date (two of the others are The Trees and [believe-it-or-don’t] Jeff Healey at a local bar called Ziggy’s, one is a Trooper show that happened about a year later and another was a Zeppelin cover band called The White sometime the following year at the Cosmo [also a club in Moncton], another Blushing Brides show at a country bar in Moncton called The Urban Corral and finally a David Wilcox show I worked and watched with much awe sometime early in my first year of university).
Even a flurry of internet searches can’t nail down the specifics of those shows so I’m bulking them in with the countless bar concerts I’ve seen that went completely unrecorded in my ticket albums (though many of those were as epic and memorable as many other, more ‘official’ concerts) and hence are not being included in this almanac.
However I’ve decided to write up these two shows at The Centrum as a vehicle for a bit of a rant.
The Centrum was a strip bar, and fortunately these two shows were the only two times I walked through the door. I’ve never been a fan of strip bars; I find the clientele they tend to draw generally distasteful. The places are creepy and sleazy and with my stag-party days long behind me I suspect I will never see the inside of one again.
Not even (especially?) if they host tribute acts. Though at the time I figured (wrongly) that The Blushing Brides would be the closest I would ever get to seeing the Rolling Stones and that of course The Back Doors would be my only chance to even come close to experiencing The Doors (again, wrong), I quickly came to despise the very concept of the tribute act.
And now here is a very, very brief summation of the rant I alluded to earlier, one that I’ve been developing basically since attending these shows a The Centrum:
Tribute acts are stealing unearned fame and ticket-selling power (though admittedly they can help ‘carry the torch’, as it were) from their hard-working heroes, and by concentrating on recreating something that already exists these bands are not creating something new, something that might be amazing in it’s own right (what if The Tragically Hip found they were making good coin covering The Doors, or Phish decided early on to cash in on playing Grateful Dead covers instead of writing and recording their own music?).
And by their very existence they are watering down the exclusivity of an artist. It’s akin to the disappointment I felt the first time I saw tour shirts available somewhere other than at a concert merch table. It just didn’t seem right to me that just anyone could buy a tour shirt whether they had seen the concert or not, and by the same token if you ain’t willing to get in your car and drive to Montreal to see a Van Halen concert you don’t deserve the Van Halen concert experience, no matter how many times Eruption or The Jumps play at your local nightclub.
And sure, we’d all love to get in a time machine and go back to see Jimi Hendrix or The Beatles but as adults we all have to face up to the fact that we missed out on some things in this life. Sure, I’d love to go back and see a Bach concert but I can’t. Instead I can focus on all the actual bands out there working at their own thing. Those are the guys that deserve my concert dollar, not the wax-dummy poseurs.
And speaking of Bach, people often argue that every orchestra in the world is a tribute act. No, they aren’t. First, orchestras all over the world play plenty of new music by living composers – not just old stuff – and for the rest I will argue that serious music** is a written form of music that was intended and designed to be performed by different musicians, orchestras and conductors. When you go to the symphony you aren’t going to hear Mendelssohn, you’re going to hear a particular orchestra play Mendelssohn.
And don’t even get me started on the difference between a cover band and a tribute act. It’s one thing to dedicate your career to impersonating a single artist, it’s another to play an ever-evolving collection of songs written by others. The pre-existing musical world is vast and deserves much attention; it’s not like I think a song should only ever be performed by the original artist. In fact there are few things I like better than a well-placed and well-played cover song during a concert.
Anyway, that’s the short version of my tribute act rant. I can go on about this for hours…coincidentally about the length of the average tribute act’s live show.
Back to the shows at hand: I wasn’t quite of legal drinking age yet but I drank a lot of draught beer at both of them anyway and think I probably had a really great time in spite of my future self and his silly rants.
*Amazingly enough, I recently discovered a diary that I kept rather religiously throughout 1986 and 1987; I have no recollection of keeping it but I have sporadically kept diaries my entire life, so no surprise there. Anyway, scanning through the dramas – and oh, are there dramas – I have discovered that The Back Doors show actually took place on August 29th, 1987. I found no mention of the Blushing Brides show.
**For lack of a better term. When I was in university my professors lumped Classical music, Romantic music, Baroque music, Renaissance music, etcetera together under the umbrella term “serious music”. While most people refer to all of these styles as ‘classical’ music, the Classical era only actually ran from 1750 until about 1820 and includes Mozart and Beethoven but doesn’t include (for example) Bach (Baroque) or Tchaikovsky (Romantic).
Todd Man Out 