Tribute

So I saw the Egg Babies Orchestra last week at the Metro Gallery. EBO is a local cover band, but they somehow rise beyond the discomfort that the words "cover band" inspire in the hearts of some music fans. Their schtick is that they perform each song in their vast and ever-expanding repetoire once and once only. And I guess it amounts to more than schtick, in that there's a bit of the new on display (even in the fairly straight delivery of these well-known tunes that the band has clearly practiced into the ground). Standouts included their renditions of "Video Killed the Radio Star", " "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)", which they prefaced by saying they were about to play a song by Edison Lighthouse (as, indeed, that song is). I knew that I knew a song by said group, and thought that I probably liked it, but couldn't immediately recall what one that was. For a moment, I thought maybe "Ride Captain Ride", but then I remembered that's by Blues Image. Those Egg Babies should try that one some day. Anyway, that's about as far as I got with guessing, because they started in to the tune, and its opening brought me back around.

Such a great song. But, then again, no...

It's a very good song, but not great. But the arrangement and the production and performance on the recording add up to something great, and the EBO brought it that night. I'm still taken aback by how much I enjoyed the show overall. There was a sort of reverence for the source material, and everything was played pretty striaight, so what were we enjoying, really? I've seen wedding bands where they're not really doing anything profoundly different, but the fun factor just isn't there with the wedding bands. Was it knowing these were our one shots at these covers (at least by this group?). Was it the, dare I say, professionalism with which these tunes were rendered? Am I just too closed off and set in my ways to really take in new music, and was I really feeling relief as much as enjoyment to hear a whole bunch of songs I already knew? I dunno.

So I saw something perhaps a bit more perverse a few weeks back when I sat in on the local arts collective Wham City's production of They Should All Be Destroyed: A Jurassic Park Play. Yes, this was Jurassic Park, performed live on stage. The play, while of course taking its story primarily from the Crichton novel, paid heavy tribute to Spielberg's film of the same name, faithfully recreating a host of scenes that seemed ripped from our collective unconscious: the uncomfortable flirtations...the silly animated double helix...the arrival of the grandkids...the t-rex attack...and -- dear God -- "I see the fleas, mummy! Can't you see the fleas?"

Some of the pundits who seem to be omnipresent in just about every medium I encounter often pontificate on how we no longer have regular collective experiences in our society anymore -- usually the "there's just no Walter Chronkite today" argument or the line that goes something like "kids today with their walkmen, I mean, wuddayacallem, IPods are always walking around off in their own worlds." I'm worried about this too. The movies do seem to be one of the healthier remaining repositories for collective experience, so much so that Disney takes its movies and turns them into, well, everything: broadway musicals, ice capades, etc. The reason we have to do this, rather than just watching the movie another time (we'll do that too), is that we still feel like once in a while we should actually go see something happening before our eyes, not just something on a screen. I don't really know for sure, but I've always thoughts that the results would be, while perhaps enjoyable, kind of unsatisfying. With They Should All Be Destroyed, however, I was captivated. While some liberties were taken to comedic and other effect (the character -- whose name I don't recall but who was portrayed in the movie by the actor who also played Seinfeld's "Newman" -- sloppily ate [sort of] the better part of a raw chicken in the first act ), the overall approach seemed to be appreciative recreation of scenes from what has become a cultural touchstone. I left feeling both touched and stoned (metaphorically, in both cases).

So here's your homework. Is Barack Obama trying to "cover" Abraham Lincoln, or do the talking heads just really want him to?