“Milwaukee is a cover band city,” countless local bands have fumed. It’s a complaint I could never sympathize with, one that seems to stem from resentment more than anything else. There’s a perception that cover bands steal opportunities from “real” bands, but I’ve never seen any proof of that. For better or worse, local cover bands earn their gigs because they’re genuine draws, and they give audiences at Summerfest or on North Avenue what they want to hear.
It’s absurd, then, how much vitriol cover bands attract. They’re the second-class citizens of the local music scene, shut out of certain community concerts, battles of the bands and related events by promoters who thumb their noses at them. Mention the Love Monkeys in the wrong circle and you’ll receive an earful.
Of course, any band that’s genuinely threatened by a cover band is themselves not worth taking seriously, but the stigma against cover bands has nonetheless pervaded the greater music scene, where including anything more than a cover or two into a set is an unspoken taboo.
That’s why Halloween is becoming one of the most fun weekends for local music: It’s the one time a year where local groups are encouraged to indulge their inner cover band.
This weekend, for instance, Club Garibaldi welcomed a succession of make-shift bands covering The Replacements, Devo, Green Day and Weezer, while the Cactus Club Saturday hosted a ridiculously entertaining bill with a loving, effective AC/DC tribute ("Big Balls"), a deliberately unpolished Morrissey impersonator (“Maurosey”), a costumed Red Knife Lottery covers project (“E-Coli Cherry”), Father Phoenix’s perennial performance as The Who, and the hair metal cover band Summertime Dudes, a self-aggrandizing ensemble that doubled as much as a meta tribute to cover bands as to actual hair-metal.
It was a fantastic opportunity to see the lighter side of Milwaukee bands that don’t always get a chance to show their lighter side, and it lets musicians pay tribute to unspoken influences as well as songs they just plain love (Red Knife Lottery’s earnest set, for instance, included covers of Foo Fighters’ “Everlong,” Operation Ivy’s “Knowledge” and, awesomely, Andrew W.K.’s “Party Hard.”)
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It’s a fun tradition. Shame it only happens once a year.
