"You're In A U2 Tribute Band? Bwahhh ha haaa!!"

Not my most elegant title, I'll grant you; yet, these words were actually said to me, evil movie villain laughter included. 

I was sitting at lunch with a teaching colleague, who is a very big U2 fan, and I mentioned to him that I was going to join a U2 Tribute. (I'm a drummer and composer, if you are new here.) He almost snarfed his soda out of his nose. 

In short, he thought the whole idea was rather silly. 

Let me spin you the yarn: A little more than a year ago, my closest friend and fellow musician (who I hadn't played in a band with since the early nineties) asked me to join his new band: Mysterious Ways, which is a U2 tribute. It sounded like a good idea to me. I've always liked U2 (especially their masterpiece, Achtung Baby) and it would be an opportunity to play with him in a band again -- not to mention to do something different.

At that point, I'd never given "tribute" bands any thought, to be honest. I'd been in cover bands to make some extra cheese for years and years, and I'd played sessions with original bands and for commercial spots. 

As I become further involved in the world of the tribute thing, I guess I see my co-worker's point. A friend of mine, who is in the promotion business, said there is a big difference between "tributes" and "impersonators." She advised us not to be "impersonators." There are acts out there who, I think, are convinced the are the bands they pay tribute too. It can lean creepy -- like it is all about them living out their own fantasy; singing into the brush in front of the mirror all over again. 

Well, we're not that way, I can assure you. We don't try to look exactly like U2. Yeah, the guitar player does the Edge hat and the singer does the Bono shades, but that's about it. 

Ironically, we're all Italian-American, not Irish (we jokingly call ourselves "Youze Too") and our singer, Mark, doesn't imitate Bono's mannerisms like some tribute guys try to do. What we do do is absolutely nail the music. Forgive me, but it's true. We're all veteran musicians; we're all road-tested: we deliver a U2 concert at our shows. You get a real U2 live performance at a bargain price. 

I know. U2 is a polarizing band -- and Bono is a polarizing guy -- but it's hard to argue they are not one of the most successful popular bands of all time, even if one is not into them. They still fill stadiums and they are in their fifth decade. But, as a guy who has played in cover bands for four decades, I can tell you it is refreshing to look down at a set list and not dread the next crappy song coming up. Do you know what it feels like to be in the middle of a great song in the second set and look down and see "Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy" or "Sweet Caroline" staring back at you? Soul-draining, that's what it is. 

On the flipside, it's hard not to look forward to playing "Where the Streets Have No Name" or "Red Hill Mining Town" or "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?" Bono is an exceptional poet ["When I was all messed up/And I had opera in my head/Your love was a lightbulb/Hanging over my bed" -- I mean come on] and the music is one-of a kind, love it or hate it. Not your typical bar jams. 

But here is the best part: You ought to see some of the reactions of the audience. 

In a small venue in Pennsylvania, I saw a woman at a table in the front put both of her hands to her lips in surprise and then jump up into her husband's arms when she heard us start "A Sort of Homecoming." He spun her around and I could see she had tears on her cheeks.  U2 and that song meant something to them. 

At a bigger theater, we were greeting some of the audience after the show, shaking hands, etc., and there were some parents with their kids milling around. One woman asked if she could hug me. As she did, she said, "Thank you so much. We love U2, but we can't afford to see them or bring our son to see them. Thank you for this gift. It was like the real thing. We really want to pass this music along to him."

At another theater show, a kid who was sitting in the front row with her dad and, seemingly, glaring with sinister intent from her darkly-painted eyes came up to me after and asked, in a middle-school monotone: "How long did it take you to be able to play like that?" I answered, "A lifetime. [She wilted a bit.] But it was fun!" She smiled (for the first time that night, I think) and said she loves U2 and she is trying to learn drums but sometimes she gets frustrated. I gave her a pair of sticks and told her I still get frustrated sometimes, and she said, "Thanks," started to walk away, stopped, turned around, and said, "Really, thanks. Maybe I won't quit." Her eyes glittered a bit through thick rims of black eyeliner. 

U2 means something to people and there is something profound in being able to use our years of experience and our talents and all of our energy to bring them live music and, more than that, the live music of their favorite band. 

So, it's not funny, after all. It could be funny if we didn't put the music first and if we pranced around like morons who think they are actually U2, but we do put the music first. And there is nothing silly about playing "Bad" with all we have and making a 55-year-old feel like it's the summer of 1985 again. There is nothing silly about a hard-working mom or dad being able afford to expose their kid to live music and say, "See -- these are the kinds of bands we had when I was your age."

I'm proud of what we do. 

Little Buddy Rich: A King Richard Band Adventure

We all know, thanks to Robert Plant and company, that communication can break horribly down. But is it possible that a man, in his sixties, could have really believed, on St. Patrick's Day, that I had invited his two-year-old grandson to sit in with the band?

I was setting my drums up for the evening, and up he came with the boy -- the boy who was clutching a pair of 5A, nylon-tipped sticks in his cute little mitts. I smiled at the two of them.

"He wanted to see the drums," the man said to me. "His grandpop is a drummer. This kid loves drums. He sleeps with these sticks in his hands."

I waved and said hello to the little fellow, feeling the usual awkwardness of situations in which little kids think I am some kind of rock star because I am in a club band. (I've even signed a few cocktail napkins, feeling like total ass -- but, how do you say no to a little kid?)

Anyway, I waved at the little fellow and said, "You want to come up and try the drums out?"

The grandfather smiled and nodded at the kid and the kid smiled and I got up to let him come back and sit...and they walked away from me...

Okay, I figured -- the kid got cold feet and they want back to their dinner. No biggie. 

We played through the first set and, for the first time in my playing career, our most energetic audience was an entire extended family, from two to sixty-something, jamming out, right in front of the stage, including Little Buddy Rich and his granddad.

Straynger in a Straynge Layund

People misunderstand me. I'm misunderstood. Poor me. I'm really such a nice fellow. It's just that I react...energetically to stuff.

Music, for instance. If I hate a piece of music, I hate it with a regurgitative kind of hate. I, for instance, loathe The Doors. I don't think they are bad musicians or that Morrison was a bad lyricist or singer or that their music was low-quality... I just hate their music. No real reason and no real evaluation of merit or the lack thereof lies under any of it. When a Doors song comes on the radio, I actually curl my upper lip, for some reason, and fumble to change the station as if swatting at some horrible insect. There is no good reason for this; it is as if, as stated above, I ate a food that disagreed with me.

The best pictures of the band are ones
in which my face is obscured by a beer bottle.

But I don't believe there is a such thing as an intrinsically bad genre of music. For every -- literally every -- genre of music I have heard, there has been at least one song that I have really liked. (Yes, rap included.)

I don't, for instance, generally like "country music." It has, however (slowly...insidiously...like the growth of a tumor) become a part of my life because I am in a band that plays and has always played what is popular. We were a classic rock band and then alternative came along and then grunge and we shifted with the times. We never fit into the Spinal Tap cliche -- we have never dressed the part of any  particular music movement and we have never become rock stars in our own minds.

Men In Kilts: A King Richard Band Adventure

The trad band playing on the bar, before us. 

It often occurs to me that I live a rather strange life. Not the visited-by-aliens-who-tell-me-to-wear-lederhosen-and-throw-cheddar-at-people kind of strange...just...odd. Sometimes absurd.

Take last weekend. St. Paddy's Day weekend here in the old US of A. Our band, King Richard, played Saturday to an enthusiastic (and unusually attractive, for some reason) audience of green-clad dancin' fools. With a quicker-than-usual turn-around, we had to set up at ten o'clock the next morning for a job that began at 5 PM that day -- on the actual St. Paddy's Day.

From the moment we took the stage, I knew the banshees, redcaps and sidhees has crawled forth, either out of the fairy earth or they had emerged from a woodland lake of Guinness and toadstools.