In Praise of the Cover Band: Why Fayetteville's Summer Runs on Tributes
Scroll this summer's free-concert lineups and you will notice something. Gates Four opened its season with Gimme Back My Skynyrd and hands August to the Dalton Davis Band. Rock'n On The River stacks Heart Breaker (Heart and Led Zeppelin), ZZ Top Notch, Krossroadz, and Harley & Big Country. The marquees read like a classic-rock station's fever dream. And you know what? Good.
It is fashionable, in cities with a "scene" to protect, to sneer at the tribute act. When WUNC rounded up six notable new North Carolina albums this month — Durham, Asheville, Hillsborough, the Triangle — not one came from Fayetteville or the Sandhills. That absence is real, and worth naming. But the wrong conclusion is that Fayetteville doesn't have live music. The right one is that Fayetteville has a live-music economy, and it happens to be built on the songs people will actually leave the house for.
Consider the math. A tribute band on a free country-club lawn puts hundreds of families, retirees, and off-duty paratroopers on chairs on a Saturday night, spending at the food trucks and the bar, some of that money flowing to a cancer charity down at the river. That is a functioning ecosystem. It keeps sound engineers working, keeps stages built, keeps audiences in the habit of going out to hear humans play instruments loudly. A scene that forgets the habit has nothing for its originals to plug into later.
And the originals are here, if you know where to stand. Nicholas Vernon and Rob Cole have both headlined Dirtbag Ales this month with their own material. The brewery circuit — Dirtbag foremost — is where Fayetteville's songwriters get reps in front of crowds that a tribute act warmed up for them years ago.
Here's the case for optimism. The tribute economy and the originals scene are not enemies; they're the same pipeline at different stages. The Skynyrd covers pay for the PA that the kid with the four-song EP eventually gets to use. The lawn full of Heart fans is the audience you convert, one weird original at a time.
So no apologies. Fayetteville will spend its summer singing along to "Sweet Home Alabama" performed by men named Big Country, and it will be one of the more honest things happening in North Carolina music. The town knows exactly what it likes. The job now is giving it something new to like — and building the rooms where that can happen.
Play the hits. Then play us something we've never heard. This town shows up for both.
Sources: Gates Four Summer Concert Series kicks off sixth year (Up & Coming Weekly); Six new albums from North Carolina artists you might have missed (WUNC)