Sticky Fingers, Let It Be, Tapestry: a rocking comeback for nostalgia
From Bob Dylan to the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones to Carole King: how the delicate art of covering rock ‘n’ roll classics became big business.
It’s a Friday in April at the Fortitude Music Hall in Brisbane and, as it says on the ticket, we have gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the ninth album by British rock band the Rolling Stones.
In a pandemic era of live entertainment that has hummed with the distinct undertone of uncertainty for more than a year now – with rescheduling, snap border closures, venue density limits and cancellations each causing their own headaches – there’s a lot to be said for certainty when you lay down your cash to attend a concert these days.
Sure enough, Sticky Fingers is exactly what unfolds, from the sharp opening electric guitar riff of perennial party-starter Brown Sugar through to the gently strummed acoustic chords of comedown album closer Moonlight Mile, followed by an intermission and a second set showcasing the band’s greatest hits.
In that sense, there are few surprises, but what quickly becomes apparent with a resounding thunderclap intensity is that the musicians on stage aren’t much interested in simply approximating the sounds that emerged during those recording sessions circa 1971. They’re here to own the whole f..king thing.
These players and the rotating cast of four singers – Tex Perkins, Tim Rogers, Adalita Srsen and Phil Jamieson – have set their sights on nothing less than exhuming the album’s essence, transferring their enthusiasm inside those old bones and making these mighty songs swing just like the Stones did.
As any serious musician will tell you, this is hard work. It takes balls, skill, precision and relentless study to inhabit the signature snare rolls and cymbal feel of Charlie Watts, or the spidery, interlocking guitar lines of Keith Richards and Mick Taylor. But they nail it.
And when the ticket says you’re playing Sticky Fingers, you’ve got to commit to the whole trip, including the unexpected and frankly bizarre saxophone-led detour that the band decided to take halfway through Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, the seven-minute-long fourth track.
Led by guitarist and musical director Jak Housden, this touring band is magnificent, and their intentions are pure. Despite their abundant chops, there’s nothing clinical about their performances; the band leader’s guitar heroics and drummer Hamish Stuart’s stick-work are particularly impressive throughout.
The real work of rock ’n’ roll is in making something that requires extreme focus come across as effortless. That’s true in the recording studio, where a band is tasked with capturing for all time what it has spent countless hours finessing in rehearsals.
It is perhaps doubly true in this sort of live tribute situation, where a group of Australian musicians is reprising a set of sounds and songs that a singular band cut to tape 50 years earlier.
“With the Stones, you’ve got to find the balance of being true to what’s on the record, but also just going with the feel of where you’re at on the night – which is what they would do every night,” Housden tells Review. “They would never play Can’t You Hear Me Knocking the way it was done on Sticky Fingers; they’d never do that again.”
For Housden – a self-described rock ’n’ roll nerd who also records and performs with Tim Minchin and the Whitlams – there was never any question of aiming for perfection when it came to the musical direction for these shows.
If you can close your eyes and it sounds exactly like these songs did when you were a child or a teenager hearing them for the first time, then he and his bandmates have done their job.
Sensibly, Housden is nowhere near self-absorbed enough to expect that the average punter might give much of a thought to the amount of time each player had racked up, playing and rewinding and replaying the album and various YouTube clips to get their brains and hands and bodies around how the original musicians played this music.
“When you go and buy a drill at Bunnings, you’re not thinking of all the work that went into designing it, and patenting it, and all that sort of stuff,” he says with a shrug. “It’s probably the same with music: people should just come along and enjoy it.”
Sure enough, that’s exactly the vibe conjured by Housden and co resurrecting these great licks, riffs, runs and melodies at the Fortitude Music Hall. It’s a space where, for two hours or so, the audience of largely middle-aged men and women can happily smash beers, sing at the top of their lungs and dance along to songs that first rocked them in their youth.
The singers in these shows have their own challenges to contend with, chiefly due to the undeniable fact Mick Jagger is one of the greatest rock performers to have picked up a microphone.
To step on stage to sing a set of Rolling Stones songs is to take a leap of faith on at least two counts: that you’ve got enough self-confidence to attempt to pull off Jagger’s moves – in voice and in body – and that the audience is right there with you, too.
Grinspoon frontman Jamieson has toured the Beatles’ White Album three times nationally since 2009 alongside Rogers, Chris Cheney and Josh Pyke but, for him, singing Sticky Fingers did not come naturally.
“The Stones are really hard to cover,” says Jamieson. “I knew that Tim and Tex would eat it up for breakfast because they grew up with it. Adalita and I had to really dig in and work on it. That’s the antithesis of what the Rolling Stones are – you don’t study them! – but, ironically, I had to.”
Srsen, the Magic Dirt frontwoman, concurs. “I have to remind myself to be myself,” says the singer-songwriter, who also performed in a David Bowie tribute show in 2016. “I get very forensic about it: to examine how I’m doing it, I’ll record myself or I’ll go into a rehearsal room and sing it through a PA. I do all sorts of tricks to try and make sure that I’m bringing my actual self into the role of delivering the song, so it’s not a karaoke version.”
After more than 250 shows across 10 years inhabiting Johnny Cash for his theatre show The Man in Black, Tex Perkins brought a wealth of experience to the stage.
“The band Jak put together for Sticky Fingers is f..king perfect; Hamish Stuart is the Charlie Watts of Australia, if you will,” he says. “They’re students who really understand the science of it and of how this works. It’s a really enjoyable process to pull apart this music you’ve instinctively enjoyed all your life. There’s a real joy and love of being able to play this music that is part of us, really.”
As well, there’s the satisfaction of sharing these shows with his friends, too. With a laugh, the former Beasts of Bourbon and the Cruel Sea frontman says, “Rogers is in his element. This is Rogers’s playhouse. He’s got all the clothes. I actually prefer Tim Rogers’s Mick Jagger to Mick Jagger’s Mick Jagger.”
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It wasn’t all that long ago that these sorts of tribute shows were looked on with suspicion, if not outright derision, by the mainstream live music industry, which was content to let the covers band circuit toil away in suburbia.
Only occasionally would a promoter stump up the resources to develop quality shows that were booked for inner-city theatres. The White Album Tour was first promoted by Spiritworks in 2009 and so well-received that Jamieson, Rogers, Pyke and Cheney were coaxed back for two reprises in 2014 and 2018.
Its success preceded another quartet of renowned musicians to band together under the banner Antipodean Rock Collective, or ARC, pronounced “ark”. When Powderfinger guitarist Darren Middleton got an offer to perform classic Australian covers for sports-mad fans at the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil, he called Spiderbait drummer Mark “Kram” Maher, You Am I guitarist Davey Lane and Jet bassist Mark Wilson to join him.
The foursome played so well together that they decided to try their hands at re-creating Abbey Road, the final album recorded by the Beatles, to coincide with its 50th anniversary in 2019. Suddenly, ARC was no longer a lark; it was a serious entity attempting something mightily challenging.
With Live Nation on board as promoter, the initial run of theatre shows was so successful that the quartet – backed by several special guest musicians, including singer Linda Bull and guitarist Ash Naylor – regrouped early last year, just before the pandemic. All up, the two tours sold nearly 20,000 tickets.
“There are plenty of tribute bands and cover bands floating around in the club scene; you can probably go to an RSL and see an AC/DC or an Elton John, or that sort of thing,” says Graham Kennedy, head of arts and entertainment at Live Nation. “That’s not what we’re trying to do.”
With the first Abbey Road shows in 2019, it was a matter of trying to distinguish that the players involved were all several cuts above those you might find on the club circuit.
“There’s a lot of crap out there,” says Kennedy. “I was never wary of these guys, but we were wary of people going, ‘Well, is this going to be crap?’ The positioning of the marketing was very much around who these people were. It was trying to present to people: ‘Hey, these guys really know what they’re doing. They’ve had all this combined success. Trust them.’ ”
Even having seen one of the White Album concerts in 2018, and greatly enjoyed it, I retained a reasonable amount of suspicion when I went along to ARC’s first Abbey Road run in 2019.
Any cynicism evaporated, though, once I realised just how seriously the musicians were taking the task of re-creating an album that the Beatles never performed live, as well as the pure joy with which they were putting the songs across. In particular, what Wilson managed to do with his bass guitar on these shows was nothing short of spectacular; his ability to replicate Paul McCartney’s unique playing on that album remains one of the most impressive individual performances I have seen on a stage anywhere.
Around the 50th anniversary of the band’s 1970 album Let It Be – and having lost a year due to Covid playing havoc with the live music sector – Wilson and his bandmates have been swotting up on material for a new run of shows next month.
“It’s more of a rock ’n’ roll kind of record; it’s raw and loose. As far as playing the bass goes, it is so much easier,” Wilson says with a laugh. “Abbey Road was the biggest mental workout of my life; it took me months and months to learn because it was so detailed. This time, I’ve learned it all in a week.”
His experience stepping out with ARC and mastering classic material has led to an unexpected career sideline for the Jet bassist, who recently made his debut as musical director for another Live Nation tour celebrating the 50th anniversary of Carole King’s album Tapestry.
An initial run of 18 shows in April and last month sold nearly 20,000 tickets nationally, and an additional five concerts are booked for August.
Wilson played bass, while singing out front with a band for the first time in her life was Esther Hannaford, the award-winning actor who played the lead role in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical across more than 300 dates in 2017 and 2018.
“He was the mastermind as far as creating the dynamic of the group,” Hannaford says of the tour’s musical director. “I found a lot of joy in it; I definitely loved not playing someone else, and being able to just be there with the audience – and being able to speak and share, and have that space – definitely ignited something in me. It’s been a bit life-changing.”
As for why around 40,000 people have bought tickets to the three album tribute tours he has been involved with so far – two Abbey Roads and a Tapestry – Wilson offers this.
“Nostalgia is pretty big at the moment, especially after the year we’ve had,” he says. “I just put on shows that I think people would like to see, and do it really well, and it’s working so far. They’re good records, aren’t they? And you can’t see these people play, so it’s fun to go and see some other people do it, I guess. It’s probably something that I never used to like, but I don’t think anyone was doing it very well. That’s the reason. We’re trying to change that.”
Next year, Wilson will work with his ARC bandmate Middleton again when the former Powderfinger guitarist assumes the musical director role for a rescheduled tour centred on an album released last year by Nashville-based Australian singer-songwriter Emma Swift. Named Blonde on the Tracks, the album – which reached No.9 on the ARIA chart, and No.1 on the domestic vinyl chart – featured Swift reimagining some of her favourite Bob Dylan songs.
These shows will mark the first time that Swift performs her take on the music of the American songwriting great before an audience. Four concerts were originally booked to take place this month, with the singer-songwriter flying back to Australia to undertake two weeks in hotel quarantine, before the recent Melbourne lockdown and venue restrictions forced a change of plans.
“I’m very much following in the footsteps of Bob Dylan, who plays the songs however the hell he wants to when he’s on tour,” she tells Review with a laugh. “I’m not one to feel too tied down to how things are recorded. When you’re playing with a live band, you really want to bring out the best in every musician that’s on stage, and really accentuate their particular skills.”
“Blonde on the Tracks is a record that I made, and if people want to feel cynical about me doing a concert of all Bob Dylan songs, that’s absolutely OK,” says Swift. “There’s also something to be said for what happens with musicians on stage, when we get to play these songs from other artists that we love. You get to learn so much when you get inside those songs, and really celebrate the very reason that we became musicians in the first place.”
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Thanks to the current crop of high-quality theatre shows celebrating the work of classic rock ’n’ roll artists and albums, I’ve come to realise that tours such as these can – and should – be consumed as part of a balanced live music diet. Seeing great songs from the past shot through with the passion of some of the nation’s most electrifying and skilled musicians can be every bit as thrilling as a show centred on the music of today.
Still, if a concertgoer only attends tours that remind them of the soundtrack of their younger selves, they’re not exactly learning much or developing their tastes.
As the veteran of three White Album tours – plus the Sticky Fingers run, which resumes next month – Tim Rogers has wrestled with the artistic tension of striding out on stage to sing old songs, at the potential cost of audience members missing the opportunity to discover a new artist they love.
The contrast between those two modes of performance, old and new, is timely for Rogers. His band You Am I recently released and toured its 11th album, The Lives of Others; he’s also sharing the stage with 1990s-era alternative rock bands including Grinspoon, Jebediah and Regurgitator at the upcoming Spring Loaded touring festival.
“I just like to turn people on to good things,” he says. “If you go and see a theatre show, I like to say, ‘Hey, what about tomorrow night you take a punt on something? You may get to kiss the drummer, or speak to somebody next to you, because there’s nothing like discovering something with a stranger that can turn you into lifelong friends.’ It’s not a Messianic attempt; it’s just that I know how good it can be.”
There was a time when a few people took a chance on buying a ticket to watch a new band called the Beatles, before that name meant anything to anyone.
That still happens today; it could be happening at your local pub tonight. It might cost you 10 bucks to get in and it might change your life. That band up there, on that tiny stage playing to a small crowd? They might become your Beatles.
Sticky Fingers resumes on July 15 (Adelaide) until July 30 (Sydney). Let It Be runs from July 15 (Caloundra) until August 1 (Newcastle). Tapestry resumes on August 13 (Perth) until August 21 (Brisbane). Blonde on the Tracks will be rescheduled for 2022.
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