When he asked me to meet him at Flip Flopz I figured something was up. Dude never calls me about anything unless it's some urgent self-effacing thing that's going wrong in his life or whatever. Maybe his fiancée was about to break up with him for the umpteenth time, who knows. I consider him my friend but he's a little much sometimes. I don't like this bar and regretted saying yes to this almost as soon as I stood in line to pay the cover charge. $10 instead of $5 tonight because of yet another fucking cover band playing. Good lord.
I'm sitting at the neon-lit bar in the corner, waiting for him, and side-eyeing the band of middle-aged, tan-faced jabronis setting up their equipment on the small front stage. Drinking my $8 Miller Lite out of an aluminum can, I spot Tony and wave him over. He barely says hi before he launches into it: he's not sure if he can handle things at home, she's nice but a little condescending, lately she's not been as touchy-feely as she was in the past, and so on. I'm rolling my eyes and raising my hand toward the bartender for another pint when the band hits the first notes of their first song.
"It's like, I'll get home after a long day, and she act like she's pissed, ya know? I know she's upset about something but she won't talk to me about it, she'll just be all passive aggressive, saying that I didn't do a good job cleaning my breakfast dishes, something like that, and I'll give her a hug and it's ice cold, she doesn't return the hug, she just stands there, which gets me worried, and I'll say something about it but she'll make some oblique comment that I don't even understand, and—" but I'm barely listening to a word. Finally, around the time of my third Miller, it hits me: "I'm sorry, are these fucking guys just playing every song from Led Zeppelin II?"
The word "contextual" floats through my brain as I'm actively not listening to Tony, how I don't mind hearing one of the best albums of all time played by a bunch of fucking scrubs if I'm just sitting at the bar, ya know? It's about context. It's a forgiving context, is what it is. Which is funny because the very same context is unforgiving when considering the interrelational turmoil of my friend and the way he always feels the need to dump his trauma in loud environments like this. If he had met me on a park bench, I'd be more willing to listen. If these fucking mopes on the stages decided to, god forbid, record the music they were playing right now, and try to sell it, like for money, then I'd be MUCH less willing to listen. But I'm sitting here, having moved onto whiskey neat, slowly sipping and listening to music that I know well, performed by strangers I don't know at all, and it's fine. It's almost relaxing.
Tony's going on about how his fiancée treats the dog better than she treats him, but I don't really care to know even the gist of it. I distract myself with finding little differences between what the too-tan Gen Xers (Boomers?) are making of these Led Zeppelin songs from their sophomore album, and what the music actually sounds like when I choose this album on my iPod, which, truth be told, has been pretty often over the 20 years since I first hear it. I guess I never thought about it before tonight, but Led Zeppelin II is one of those albums that I've heard enough times that I know every single guitar note of Page's wizardry, every inflection in Robert Plant's voice, every snare hit from Bonzo. Not that I could recreate it, but that I could easily pick out any slight variations when someone else plays it. Especially if someone is playing it on a stage in a shitty shore-town bar while your best bud rips his heart out and you're not trying to hear all that again. Distractions are good, in other words.
Like, hmm, I'm pretty sure the dude screws up a lyric on "Ramble On." Not a big deal. It's just a bar band. I don't expect this fucking dude to have a voice like Plant in his prime. He sounds bad on "What Is and What Should Never Be," but what the fuck am I gonna do about it? Complain? This guy probably works in a cubicle during the day. He probably has a wife and kids at home. He probably does this to feel alive for a couple hours each week. What the fuck, I'm gonna deprive him of that? Even if he sounds like dogshit? Like a drowning rat is singing lead vocals on a Led Zeppelin song? I can't even blast the drummer for his attempt at "Moby Dick." It's soulless but so is the corpse of John Bonham. It's just something we're all doing to pass the time, here, at this bar. I'd rather listen to some dum-dums play a close-enough approximation of some classic rock than listen to my buddy spin yarn about his own dumb bullshit. My patience for friends who should just DTMFA wears thin, but my patience for cover bands runs deep.
But the thing of it is... I think it only works here. Here, in this bar or something like it, with these drinks or some adjacent to them, with this band or millions of other dudes like them, with the balls to try something that they'll never actually be able to replicate accurately, trying it here in a live setting, here in this place, just for kicks. Something that Tony's wife will never be able to understand (and it's driving Tony crazy—see, I do listen sometimes!) is that not everything is all that serious. It's not all about you all the damn time. Sometimes it's just nice to kick back and have some fun and not worry about it. The stakes at Flip Flopz with the cover band are almost nonexistent. This can be fun, under these correct circumstances. Or at the very least, a nice pleasant distraction. Nice to think about how the guitars seem off on the breakdown in "Whole Lotta Love" instead of having to hear Tony whine about shit that, yeah, is ultimately his fault, easily fixable with better communication habits.
It works here and that's why these bands play it here, in this space. It wouldn't make any fucking sense to try to play Led Zeppelin II in its entirety and then record it and then press the recording to wax. Not fucking lick of sense to try such a thing. No. It would piss me off, honestly. Because if I'm listening to an album on my iPod, in my ears, in private, like in the car or in my own cubicle, then why the fuck wouldn't I just listen to Led Zeppelin II again? Why would I listen to I-don't-even-know-this-band's-name-I'm-just-realizing playing that music instead? An inferior version of it? No, no, it only makes sense at Flip Flopz, while I'm six drinks deep, trying to avoid hearing about how limited my friend Tony's sex life is. It would make literally no sense in any other context.
I went a little too hard on the drinking. Ended up in a ditch, who knows how I got there. Regrets were made last night. But at least I know where I stand on the cover band, and how they should operate. When it comes to that, well, I know full well what is and what should never be.
GRADE: 1 puke out of 5
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