Something that's been on my mind for the last...I don't know how many years, more than a decade for sure, but I've often times wondered about how much liberty a tribute band can take with the arrangements they choose to play onstage. A few cases in point:
Led Zeppelin: anyone who's ever heard or seen The Song Remains The Same knows they didn't play Stairway To Heaven and No Quarter even close to the way they sounded on the respective records. If you've heard the bootlegs, you know they didn't even play the same from night to night. There was lots of improv involved. So do you replicate the studio versions, the versions on the live album, or do you improvise as the original band did, taking care to stay true to the band's style of improv (e.g. your proxy Page shouldn't be dropping John McLaughlin or Steve Howe licks into his solos).
Should a Zep tribute band reproduce the backwards slide guitar lick in the choruses of Whole Lotta Love, or make do without it, as Zep actually did. Do you do a 15 minute version of the song, with bits of other songs thrown, along with an extended theremin solo?
Queen: I once saw a Queen tribute band play Killer Queen, Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy, and Bicycle Race in their respective entirety, pretty much the way they were on the record. Well, ok, obviously four musicians can't recreate all the overdubs on the record, but they otherwise did everything. On Killer Queen, the bass player even whipped out a triangle at the appropriate moments (fyi: so did John Deacon circa 74-77) and the song's coda, and on Bicycle Race, they even did the bicycle bell interlude.
But Queen never played those songs like that onstage, as far as I know. They were always played as part of a medley. Killer Queen, they'd do just the first two verses and the guitar solo, after which they'd segue into something else.
Yes: do you do the Yes Album version of Yours Is No Disgrace, or the Yessongs version? Do you include that little jam on the intro? Likewise, should Ritual sound like the way it did on Topographic Oceans, or the way it sounded on Yesshows (or even the way it sounded on the Roosevelt Stadium show)?
I guess what I'm asking is, how far is "too far"?
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