Play ‘Stairway!’ Tribute bands like the real thing

Back in 2004, Steve Zukowsky, guitarist for the tribute band Led Zepagain, was into the third or fourth song of an opening set at the House of Blues in Los Angeles when a member of the crew tossed him a note:

“Page in the house.”

That would be Jimmy Page, the hammer of the gods wielder himself, lead guitarist for the real Led Zeppelin. For any Zeppelin fan, knowing that one of the members of the band was within a 25-mile radius is enough to elicit a Robert Plant-like wail of ecstasy. But when you’re a guitar player, and you’re doing Jimmy Page, and Jimmy Page walks in, it can mess with the head.

Fortunately, Zukowsky survived. “I just kinda shoved that to the side of my brain and tried to concentrate on what I was doing,” he explained.

And even more fortunately, Page — who had been in town for the NAMM show that year and took in the Led Zepagain performance at the prodding of a friend — loved the show so much that he hung around until the end and greeted the members of Led Zepagain in their dressing room, hugging each one. That kind of validation is almost as hard to obtain as a ticket to a Led Zeppelin reunion gig.

And a footnote: Led Zepagain (zepagain.com) went to the December 2007, Led Zeppelin reunion gig in London, as guests of Page.

Not all tribute bands are granted an audience with an iconic member of the audience. Some have brushes with the celebrities they impersonate, while others merely plug along, with only the musical bond to connect them with their artists of honor.

Yet tribute bands are not only satisfying to their members, they can also be financially rewarding.

Randy Cordeiro is “Surreal Neil,” lead singer of Super Diamond (superdiamond.com). You can probably guess the act.

When he was a youngster, his parents gave him an eight-track tape of Neil Diamond’s greatest hits, but he stopped listening around the ninth or 10th grade, he said. “Peer pressure. I just remember I wasn’t supposed to listen to music that my parents gave me,” he said.

Video   Super Diamond "Surreal Neil" and "Super Diamond" get the crowd moving to Neil Diamond classics. MSNBC

Later, when he was a musician and songwriter and was playing in a band, he would slip in some Neil Diamond songs. They received such an enthusiastic response that it involved into a full-time Neil Diamond tribute. Now, the Northern California-based Cordeiro said, he and Super Diamond play about 100 shows a year, and he was able to quit his day job as a design engineer a number of years ago and devote his time to being Surreal Neil, and also to compose his own stuff.

Cordeiro, too, had an encounter with the real thing. But whereas Page politely declined Led Zepagain’s invitation to perform with the band, Diamond took Cordeiro up on it, also at the L.A. House of Blues.

“It was insanity,” Cordeiro said of Diamond’s appearance on stage at the December, 2000 show, which had been planned and expected. “All you could see were these hands reaching out to the stage.”

Tribute band videos AC/DShe Female tribute band "AC/DShe" rocks the crowd with AC/DC classics. Super Diamond channels Neil Diamond Purple Reign performs ‘Let's Go Crazy’ The Atomic Punks are ‘Hot For Teacher’ The Machine plays ‘Welcome to the Machine’

And then there is Prince. Notoriously media shy, the Purple One did meet Jason Tenner, who performs a Prince tribute (purplereign.net) in Las Vegas. But Tenner said he couldn’t tell one way or another if Prince approved of his act, and he characterized the meeting as “different.”

“He doesn’t seem to mind me,” Tenner said. “He doesn’t try to shut me down.”

Like most tribute bands, Tenner’s Prince came about slowly. In 1996, he went out for Halloween dressed as Prince. “People were following me around, going, ‘Oh, my God! It’s Prince!’” he said. Eventually it grew from a few songs to an entire performance.

Tenner’s act covers the “Purple Rain” era of 1984 through 1994 or so. His act even includes a Morris Day and the Time component. “My bass player said, ‘Man, there’s a guy down at Macy’s shoe department who looks just like Morris,’” Tenner recalled. “As it turned out, he wasn’t lying. And he was a singer and an entertainer.”

Finding musicians for a tribute band isn’t always easy, especially when they keep getting pilfered by the likes of David Lee Roth.

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