Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

A local weekly arts n’ culture paper here in Seattle ran a huge, lavish cover story about, of all things, a cover band.

It is, methinks, partly an ironic joke meant to enrage the local scenesters that live and die by original music. The amount of coverage given in this article (four or five print pages plus the color cover shot) dwarfs anything I’ve seen recently given to local original acts — and we’re home to some of the biggest acts in indie/alternative/whatever-you-wanna-call-it rock right now.

The author is nonetheless respectful of the topic and does a pretty decent job of dissecting the covers vs. originals debate, even though it simply restates what many working musicians should already know: cover bands may not get the press, the accolades, or the respect, but man, they sure do gets the cash:

Though [Beatniks' manager Dean Zelikovsky] won’t divulge any actual numbers, the kind of shows the Beatniks play lead me to estimate that they grossed somewhere in the middle six figures last year, a range Zelikovsky confirms. Not bad for a cover band. Not bad for any band. By contrast, most original artists, even popular, hard-working ones with independent CDs on the shelves and solid clippings in the press kit, are lucky to make a tenth of that amount in a year.

Yeah, it’s hard not to feel ill when you read stuff like this:

[Bassist] Rick Lovrovich, who is 44 and has been playing music for more than 30 of those years, can remember a time when a band he was in once scraped out “a very paltry living. Now I own four houses, a topnotch studio, five cars,” he tells me. “I know musicians who think they’re making good money making a couple hundred bucks a night and they’re really happy about it, and I am just appalled. I don’t tell them how much I make, ’cause I don’t want them to feel bad. I just say, ‘Great.’”

I can’t wait to read the letters to the editor section next week.