ricochet biscuit: There was a point in their careers where U2 sounded like these guys, as did Phish and Green Day and anybody else you care to name.I don't think that's true- unless we're saying this was the very first time these guys played together, including any practices... we might be cutting these guys some slack if they're brand new to music, and this was their teacher saying "Hey, we know you've only been taking 3 months of lessons, but why don't you form a band just for this event?" type of situation.
"We were at the bottom of the bill and they were top of the bill. They couldn’t understand why we were setting up this huge amount of equipment for ourselves. When our stuff was taken off, they brought out The Beatles’ stuff, and it was half the size, and they were using the theatre’s PA system, which was diabolical. The little microphones looked like electric shavers. We couldn’t understand why they put themselves through such rubbish."posted by anazgnos at 12:04 PM on December 3, 2010 [3 favorites]
cortex: I don't think you're actually disagreeing with me, here; the song is indeed straightforward, with simple time that should not be hard to keep, and the bassist in particular seems to be completely failing to keep that time. There's no song-specific excuse for the bad timing, indeed. There are woeful-lack-of-experience excuses for it, which I think may be what's primarily going on here. But the timing is awful regardless of why it's happening.Fair enough; I think I mis-read your original comment to be suggesting that there were song-specific reasons it would be tough, whereas I contend that doing a pitch-perfect, note-for-note cover would be tough but doing a passable version should be easy.
The things about Comfortably Numb that make it a poor choice for any not-good band are the iconic vocal work required and the relative famousness of Gilmour's solos and difficulty of aping that cleanly. I don't think it's a hard song to do a credible cover of if you know what you're doing. These guys clearly don't, and there are far better songs to not know what you're doing on in front of a crowd.
Baby_Balrog: of the worst stage audio experience I've ever been part of as a musician. [...] At the start of the video you can see our bass player (who is an audio engineer) going through the last ditch attempts at fixing the audio. It was a terrifying and humbling experience [...] We're scared. I feel for these guys, when the sound-guy gives the thumbs up you really never know what you're going to get.Um... that kind of proves the point-and-laughers case, doesn't it? You guys were still pretty good, and the timing was basically there and the crowd seemed to enjoy it, such that I'm not sure what the issues you were experiencing. Sure it could have been better, and that instrumental break halfway through felt... off... but no one's saying "Bands that don't churn out studio-quality performances every time are teh suck!!1"; we're saying that if you're going to be THAT off as they were in the original video, it might be worth not getting on stage yet until you've put more time in.
While she has a powerful voice, I never thought of her as someone with particular broad range and thus more easily covered- especially White Rabbit- than, say, Janis Joplin.Another tune that's hard to cover is White Rabbit, for more or less the same reasonscj_: The bottleneck isn't finding someone who can sing like Grace Slick?
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posted by Existential Dread at 9:42 PM on December 2, 2010 [8 favorites]