For David Geisler, nailing George Harrison’s tone came down to getting the tiniest details right, including finding the same strings used by the late Beatles guitarist.
“After I got the guitars and the Vox amp, I thought, ‘There’s something missing here, some piece of the puzzle,'” Geisler says. “It’s that unique Beatles tone that we all grew up with.”
Geisler, 64, is a piano tuner and musician who lives in Old Lyme. He plays the role of George Harrison in Ticket to Ride, a popular Beatles tribute band. He signs his emails — to me, anyway — as “George.” Ticket to Ride, like most other Beatles tribute acts, attempts to re-create, as faithfully as possible, the experience of seeing the Fab Four, down to the sound, look and witty stage banter.
Tribute acts occupy an important, though much-maligned, segment of the state’s musical economy. On any given week, you’ll find musical tributes to the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, the Band, David Bowie (recently, anyway) or (of course) the Grateful Dead somewhere in Connecticut, from the Acoustic in Bridgeport to the Pacific Standard Tavern in New Haven to Hartford’s Infinity Hall.
By booking tribute bands, venues can count on people showing up, paying the door price and drinking beer. By forming a tribute band, a musician beyond the age of pop-star dreams can bring home a steady paycheck. And for a certain subset of jamming musicians, supergroup-style tributes, which seem to be growing in popularity, offer an excuse to congregate with musician friends and to play danceable music in front of an enthusiastic, paying crowd.
But lumping all tribute acts into the same category is misleading.
Ticket to Ride represents an older, re-creationist strain. “We try to make the instruments as authentic as possible,” Geisler says. “We don’t care if they were made in 1964. Modern instruments are OK with us. I think of my guitars and amps and whatever as tools.”
Formed in September of 2010 by Geisler and two other members of Abbey Road (a Beatles tribute that itself had been around for nearly three decades), Ticket to Ride has a Facebook page crammed with posts by fervent fans. Geisler groups them into two types: the “I’m sorry I missed you guys” fans, and the “lineage” fans; the latter, he says, “were Beatles fans as kids, or their parents were fans.”
“If you really start to get into this and spend some time on the Web, you really start to understand that this is an industry,” Geisler says. “But the music was so good. It survived. What else that came out in 1964 survived? The Rolling Stones. There’s not much more after that.”
Another segment of the tribute-band universe takes songs by one or more artists and uses them as vehicles for improvisation, like jazz musicians improvising over standards. Some of these groups — Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, a NYC-based Grateful Dead tribute, or Pink Talking Fish, who strings songs by Pink Floyd, the Talking Heads and Phish into seamless sets — aren’t concerned with sounding like the bands they’re emulating; they sound like themselves.
Several years ago, Bill Carbone, 38, a drummer from Middletown who plays in Max Creek, formed the Z3, a funky, organ-trio tribute to the music of Frank Zappa, with guitarist Tim Palmieri and organist Beau Sasser, both of whom perform original music in the jam-fusion band Kung Fu.
“For me, the Z3 doesn’t feel like a tribute act,” Carbone says. “The music is so hard, and the outlay of energy is so overwhelming … there’s nothing left on the stage [energy-wise] when it’s over.”
The Z3’s success, Carbone says, comes from not sounding exactly like any of Zappa’s bands. “The ‘lineage’ market is saturated by acts like Zappa Plays Zappa [led by Dweezil Zappa, Frank’s son] and Project/Object,” Carbone says “That market is tapped out. We’re successful because we don’t do that.”
Carbone was once a member of Sparkplug, a tribute to the music of the late groove-jazz guitarist Melvin Sparks. (Its core members were Sparks’ backing band when he died in 2011). He joined bassist Rob Stoner’s Rolling Thunder Revue, a tribute to Bob Dylan’s mid-’70s period, for a handful of gigs. He has played with nearly every working Grateful Dead tribute band from Bridgeport to Springfield, but not that much lately.
“If I wanted to, I could play Grateful Dead music three nights a week, every week, and probably make $75-$125 a night,” Carbone says. “I could have a really nice time and play with my friends and have a day job, or whatever. But I’ve always followed what I like more than what makes money.”
Tributes Are Trending
“When I came to Arch Street, the person who previously held my position had a no-tribute-band policy,” says Mitch Moriber, 23, the venue and music manager at Arch Street Tavern in Hartford. (One exception: Shakedown, a popular area Grateful Dead tribute band.)
A year ago, Moriber took over the booking at Arch Street. The venue now books tribute bands every month, “a minimum of two or three, but it could be as many as four,” Moriber says, including Seven Below (Phish), Borboletta (Santana) and Boo Yah!, a resident collective that performs tribute shows every Wednesday night.
“A lot of these bands are doing something new and something cool for the audience,” Moriber says. “It’s a privilege to hear and see the music you love re-created. It can be an exciting experience for the listener.”
Tribute bands are easy to market. “You can target a specific fan base,” Moriber says. And supergroup tributes — assembling players from, say, Kung Fu, Dopapod, Turkuaz and other original bands — can easily sell out the venue. At Arch, Moriber doesn’t often hear griping from original acts who feel shortchanged.
“We pass the ball pretty fairly,” Moriber says. “The tribute acts we work: It’s a pretty tight circle of bands we respect. They’re not ripping off the music. They’re re-creating the experience and giving the audience an opportunity to hear that music.”
One term you won’t hear at Arch Street: “cover band.”
“If you go down to a pub or dive bar, that’s where you’re going to expect to see a cover band,” Moriber says, referring to bands that play music by other acts (but not limited to one). “A cover band in a good venue is not even passable, just because of the reputation that’s grown around it.”
Going forward, Carbone plans to direct more of his energy into original material. He recorded a new album with Georgia singer-songwriter Zach Deputy, with all the musicians contributing to the writing. “I’m trying to push in that direction,” Carbone says. Still, he finds that it’s more difficult to get people to listen to original music, and it can be harder on the artist.
“It has to be really strong to come together,” Carbone says. “The time it takes to develop original material is overwhelming, without any financial regard. You’re usually losing money.”
In Ticket to Ride, meanwhile, Geisler focuses on the sounds. He scours YouTube for instructive clips and dissects chord structures — including the famous, chiming intro to “A Hard Day’s Night,” the secrets of which have haunted Beatles tribute bands for decades.
“Even the Beatles themselves disputed it, so now what?” Geisler says. “With the three guitars onstage, and those two chords, it sounds the way it’s supposed to sound. Who’s going to argue with that?”
