So, you want to play in a rock band. An obvious question is, what kind of music do you want to play?
Maybe you don’t want to play rock at all. Perhaps being in a country band is more your thing, or you want to do folk music, or jazz, or electronica, or hip-hop, or R&B, or some crazy experimental thing that defies categorization that no one’s ever heard before, even in a hipper-than-thou Brooklyn club. But you need to decide what you want to play, and if it’s rock, what variety, whether classic rock, death metal, hard rock, Top 40, and so on.
You need to have a brand…er, band identity. Check that…you do need to have a “brand” identity if you expect to get booked. Club and venue owners won’t hire you unless they know what kind of music you play. (Even then, until or if you ever build a following, you’ll be banging on doors constantly trying to get gigs.) And if you ever get to the point where you might get a record deal, label execs will have to know what category to market you in (or they’ll shove you into one). You also want to be in a group with fellow band members who want to play the same music you do.
The basic dividing line to consider is that there are two types of bands: cover bands, and those that play original music.
Cover bands are overwhelmingly more prevalent, and there’s some real money to be made if you’re in a tribute band, do corporate gigs and weddings, or build a strong local and regional following. You might have heard of some of the more successful cover bands or even seen them, like Brit Floyd, or the Fab Faux. Many tribute bands go through great pains to get the original band’s sound, look, and even stage lighting as exact as possible. Listening to and watching The Musical Box, the world’s premier Genesis tribute act, is spooky, like going back to the 1970s in a time machine. (Perhaps it’s not surprising that they’re officially sanctioned by Genesis and even use some of Genesis’s original props and slides.)
Looking the part: Beatles tribute band Britain's Finest. Courtesy of the band.
But if you really want to follow your artistic vision (or the band’s), and have aspirations to a record deal, radio play, and artistic recognition, you’re going to be playing in a band that does original music. You’ll never be the next Taylor Swift or Bob Dylan or Chris Stapleton or Rolling Stones by playing in a cover band.
The odds are strong, though, that you’re going to wind up playing in a cover band. Whether your band plays originals or covers, you'll need to develop an appropriate repertoire.
This goes hand in hand with what kind of band you are, what kind of gigs you’ll be playing, and where you’ll be playing them. Bar bands in my neck of the woods (and from what I've seen on various forums, elsewhere) play a pretty standard group of songs, some of which haven’t changed in 50 years. (More on that in a bit.)
Playing in the (bar) band: Corn Cob Mojo at The Laurel, East Northport, New York, July 2024. They play Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, the Band...they don't play Beyoncé or Billie Eilish or Sam Smith.
Wedding bands have a very different set of expectations to fulfill – they have to play cocktail hour music, a first set, a dinner set, a dancing and partying set, and know all the expected songs for Italian, Greek, Irish, Jewish and other ethnic-group weddings. For library gigs, you need to have a theme, whether it’s the music of the Sixties, a doo-wop show, playing the Great American Songbook, and so on. Corporate gigs are run by the event planner, and their word is law.
For family-oriented events like outdoor festivals, fairs, art walks and car shows, you’ll need to play songs that are familiar and family-friendly. Motown, classic rock, pop and country will go over, and Meshuggah, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Nina Hagen will not. At an outdoor festival this summer, a School of Rock band played “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine. For those not familiar with the song, it ends with the lyric “F*ck you, I won’t do what they tell me” repeated over and over. I wonder what teacher thought that would be OK for a crowd that included very young kids? The host of the event was not pleased.
Rockin' the Showmobile: The Soul Jam Revue at the East Northport Chamber of Commerce Festival, September 2024. The all-ages crowd loved their blend of soul and R&B. They did not play "Killing in the Name."
Naturally, and this goes along with your band’s musical identity, you’ll need to choose songs that fit your style. Classic rock audiences are going to want to hear Pink Floyd, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, Skynyrd, Petty. Classic country bands better know their Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. Soul/funk/R&B bands will be playing Earth, Wind & Fire, Sly, Stevie…you get the idea.
Then there’s the age-old consideration: do you want to play the songs you and your band want to play, or do you want to play crowd pleasers?
Sometimes there’s an inverse relationship between the two. Almost every musician I know dreads playing the same hackneyed old bar band standards that have been played for years and decades. Poke around online and you’ll see the litany: “Brown Eyed Girl,” “Sweet Caroline,” “Keep Playing That Rock and Roll,” “Keep Your Hands to Yourself,” “Valerie” (which has become a rite of passage for aspiring female singers, almost comically so), “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Tequila Sunrise,” and the single most dreaded cover song of all time for veteran musicians: “Mustang Sally.”
But these tired old numbers get people singing along or onto the dance floor every time. So, do you refuse to play stuff like this because you don’t like the music, or do you have the attitude that you’re there to entertain, you’re getting paid, this is the stuff that people want to hear, so do your job, stop complaining and play the songs! Many musicians who do it for a living take the latter attitude, and hey, entertaining a crowd and having them like you doesn’t suck. Although every musician I know is mystified by how popular “Wagon Wheel” has become, the Bob Dylan song popularized by Old Crow Medicine Show some years ago. Whether it’s a bar or street fair, a young or old crowd, everyone lights up and sings along when you play this. I don’t get it. And yes, I’ve played the song. Many times.
It still mystifies me how this song got so popular. It'll never be on my iPod playlist.
You need to have a set list. For me, the most amateur unforgivable sin a band can make is playing a song, then looking at each other and going, “what song do you want to do now?” “I don’t know, what song do you want to do now?” And repeat, and repeat. It wastes time, kills whatever momentum you might have built, and makes you look really, really, really unprofessional. Have a set list for each of your sets.
Those sets need to be carefully paced. Usually, you want to hit the audience hard right out of the gate and play a few of your best and most up-tempo numbers. Then the band can ease up a bit during the middle of the set, and end with a few strong songs. If you’re a dance band, it’s a great idea to string a bunch of songs together to keep the momentum going. Not for nothing, club owners want to see people dancing, having a good time and drinking. The more cynical among us will say that the job of the band is to sell drinks. I’m not quite that jaded, but it’s a fact of life.
If you're playing in a bar band and there's a dance floor, this is what you want to see. Original Gossip at the Memory Motel, Montauk, New York, May 2024. Yep, the place the Stones wrote the song about.
That said, don’t look at your set like it’s cast in stone. You need to be flexible and read the crowd. If everyone’s dancing in a conga line around the pool table, ditch that slow song. Conversely, if the bar is emptying at 1:30 in the morning and you’re playing to three people zoning in front of the TV, you can experiment with trying out newer songs.
Set list from a band (I didn't catch their name) who played the Lindenhurst Summer Concert Series, Lindenhurst, New York, July, 2024. If you guessed they were a country/rock band, you'd be right.
Once in a while people are going to ask for requests. If you know the song, great! (And you might get a nice tip.) If you kind of know it, I’d say try to get through it as best you can, as the person requesting it will be very grateful, and usually, experienced musicians can finesse their way through a song. In fact, this is the one situation where I’d consider it acceptable to read lyrics off an iPhone.
How do you become able to play off the cuff? Play, play, and play more, and when you’re not playing, listen to the music you encounter in day-to-day life, absorb the chord changes, develop an ear, and if in doubt, lay out. Most rock and country songs are not so complicated that you can't fake your way through it if you're an experienced player.
If your band doesn't know the song, politely say that you don’t know it, even if, and perhaps especially if, you’re dealing with a belligerent drunk. One thing that works well is to tell the person, “we don’t know that song, but how about if we play one like it, or another song by the same band?” That’s usually fine. Or you can take the hard-nosed approach, which also works: tell the person you don’t know the song, then signal the rest of the band and immediately count off and go into the next song you were going to do anyway. If you have a regular gig at the venue, you can tell someone that you don’t know the song but can learn it for next time. (FYI, the times our band or the person making the request remember this at the next gig has been exactly zero.)
On the gig, whether you're in an original or cover band, pay attention to what works and what doesn’t. As noted, there are certain cover songs that just work live, and if you have the audience’s attention, do everything you can to keep it! Again, this involves a balance between what you want to play and what people want to hear. One of the bands I used to play in worked up a very cool (if I say so myself) and intricate version of “Modern Music” by Be-Bop Deluxe. We loved playing it. It died every time. The band I’m in now plays “Cruel to be Kind” by Nick Lowe. It’s a guaranteed winner.
If you’re playing all-originals, you’ll also find out which numbers engage the audience and which fall flat. You and your band members (and if you're on a higher level, your manager and producer), should already have a good idea of what your stronger songs are, but there's nothing like playing them in front of an audience to find out what works...and what may not. Sometimes they may not always coincide. There are many stories of artists being caught off guard by how popular a song became. Joe Walsh wrote the lyrics to "Rocky Mountain Way" in the middle of mowing his lawn. After decades of audiences wanting him to play it every night, in an interview, he said something to the effect of, “if I knew that this song was gonna be the one I'd be playing for the rest of my life, I would have written a different song!”
Know your band’s musical and vocal strengths and weaknesses, and play to them, literally. If you’ve got a vocalist who can nail Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California” or “Crazy on You” by Heart, then let them loose to blow everyone away with their talent. However, most bands don’t have vocalists with that kind of range, so be realistic. I have a less-than-stellar voice, so I’m never going to be able to sing a Daryl Hall and John Oates song and sound anything but terrible. But I can do a good Johnny Cash. If the band has great instrumental soloists, flaunt them! No one would have wanted to hear guitarists Duane Allman and Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers restricting themselves to four-bar solos.
A band’s repertoire is a constantly-evolving process. Aside from seeing what works and what doesn’t, there are always new songs to write, or cover, and as you add more strong songs to the set, you can cull the weaker ones. Sometimes the band just gets flat out bored playing a song one or 50 times too many.
Aside from playing your own gigs, go out there and listen to other bands and study what they’re doing, whether it’s the dad band at the local dive bar or a drum-tight Las Vegas show band, a young new singer/songwriter finding their way through their material or Steely Dan playing with note-perfect precision. Every time I see a band or play a gig, I learn something. You can too.
Header image: a wall at Stitch Bar and Blues, Manhattan, New York. They will be expecting you to play blues.
