In the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, local rock bands were no less common than they are today, perhaps more plentiful. Bands playing original songs, however, were decidedly rare. Working bands played music that was currently or enduringly popular and that fell within the stylistic wheelhouse of the players. When they were going out, people expected to hear music they already knew; anything else was a surprise as well as an artistic gamble. There was no small hubris implied in the act of playing your own songs, for most of the good songs—as you proved every time you included a Beatles, a Carole King or a Cars cover—were already taken.
Singer-songwriters had been a la mode for decades, but the role of the performing musician remained primarily interpretive on the local level, as well in entire spheres of the industry unaffected by the singer-songwriter revolution. Before Buddy Holly, Dylan and the Beatles broke form, a small class of nine-to-five professional songwriters with hit-seeking sensitivities stocked the pop industry with its songs, issued from Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, the musical theater, and the great houses of Nashville. A staff writer might compose with a specific singer in mind—aim for Dionne Warwick, settle for someone lesser—but the goal of the song was to catch a share of universal feeling, one that could potentially work in the mouth of anyone who could sing.
After the massive success of Dylan and the Lads, audiences began to assume not only that the singer was singing her own song but that, experientially and emotionally, something about that song is unique to and inseparable from its writer. Songs still aimed for universal connection but through a personal process, a subtle change synced to the New Journalism, the confessional poets, and other cultural trends that celebrated the inescapable subjectivity of experience.
The wheel keeps turning. Since 2012 and what was supposed to be a one-off Joni Mitchell birthday celebration, the bassist, producer, and NRS studio owner Scott Petito has found himself serving as the unofficial musical (and casting) director of a long running series of successful local tribute shows at Colony, the Falcon, and several other local venues. These shows lavish a great deal of musical attention and skill on the music of the singer-songwriter age, without the costumes or theatricality often associated with mainstage rock and pop tribute. Petito insists that the only theatrical act he has ever committed in this rigorous pursuit was dusting off his ’63 Hofner violin bass for a few of his Beatles shows.
That Petito would become the local dean of interpretive tribute is more than a little ironic. When the Kingston native came out of the Berklee College of Music in the ‘70s, armed for bear with jazz playing and composing skills as well as a fascination with the still-rarefied art of recording, he couldn’t have predicted that within a decade he would find his niche as a first-call, artisanal producer/arranger for the singer-songwriter set, those very artists who led the industry away from interpretation as its dominant mode and toward a new aesthetic in which the singer, the song and the definitive recording are one.
Or are they? That’s the question that hovers over this new age of tribute. In these concerts, Petito treats the proudly idiosyncratic music of his own generation as a corpus of new standards, ripe for re-interpretation. In fact, at my first use of the word “tribute,” Scott bristled sportingly. “If you went down to Symphony Hall and they were doing a program of Beethoven, would you call it a ‘Beethoven Tribute?’ We’re taking an artist—or lately I like moving into albums because that’s our modern symphonic creation in a sense—and treating it as repertoire. The Beatles, Joni, this music has been around for 50 years. We’re acknowledging that this music is going to be known and played long after the artist and the original performance is gone. At least I think so.”
What began with Joni evolved of its own accord through Steely Dan and other tough-study, player-centric subjects before settling, as about 50% of all tribute seems to, on the Liverpudlians. As the focus has narrowed, the cast of players has itself hardened into a set of regulars, and he is quick to insist that, while he is the organizational pivot of the undertaking, the creative directions taken in these shows are very much a product of “group think,” with the individual players enjoying an interpretive latitude that a Beatlemania cast member could only dream of, or wouldn’t know what to do with.
“With this troupe,” Petito says, “we have some continuity now, so there’s a lot of group interpretation. For most of us, it is about respecting the music first, then it is the wonder of, ‘oh that’s how they did that.’ We’ve all known the music for years, but maybe we’ve never taken it apart like this. So everyone learns their parts and also figures out how they can bring themselves to it, find the places that allow them to interject their own ideas and sensibilities.”
Different subjects indicate different approaches. “Joni was the hardest,” he says, “and not because the music is so difficult. It is because it is so interpretive. It can be done in many different styles, and people will still accept it. We often go far from the recorded arrangements. Hell, I often don’t even like the recorded arrangements and find the definitive versions come from live shows that only a certain audience was privy to. But that’s the jazz side of it.”
When working with Beatles music, however, Petito acknowledges that the details of the recorded versions are beyond definitive; they’re scriptural. “With the Beatles, more than anything else, the arrangements are incredibly powerful in terms of pulling it off. Most audiences, unless they’ve been classically trained, don’t know that, in the scherzo of a Mozart piece, this or that novel group of instrumentation happens. No one is excitedly waiting for that detail. Well, that happens when you play the Beatles. When you’re building up to the end of side two of Abbey Road, everyone knows where it is going, and you need to take them there. Also, as a bass player,” he adds, “I find it extremely difficult to deviate far from what Paul McCartney played because of the integral quality of his lines to the composition. It is counterpoint almost on the level of Bach.”
While conflicting schedules sometimes require substitutions and stand-ins, the current stable lineup of players includes a lot of familiar names. Woodstock legend Joey Eppard of the band 3 handles many of the most challenging lead vocal roles, and recently he has been playing more guitar alongside Adam Widoff (of Lenny Kravitz fame) and studio owner/producer Danny Blume, the longtime guitarist of Kid Creole and the Coconuts and many others. Former Mecury Rev keyboardist Jeff Mercel sits on the all-important Ringo throne, though a recent scheduling issue required Petito to bring in drummer Rich Pagano, who plays in the Fab Faux, perhaps the most artistically successful and obsessively accurate Beatles tribute band of all time. Petito’s wife, the songwriter Leslie Ritter, covers most of the difficult harmony parts. “She’s a great singer,” Petito says, and an especially great harmony singer. Whenever there is a weird part, I look to her, and she’s already on it.”
A composer himself with a brand new jazz fusion record out (Many Worlds, featuring the likes of Steve Gadd and Randy Brecker) Petito is not insensitive to the idea that nostalgia—from tribute shows to the never ending stream of box sets and reissues—tends to steal bandwidth from new music, in the venues and in the audience’s listening time. “It is very hard to get new music out there,” he says. “But on the whole I think the concept of the tribute band is helping a lot of people find an audience. Everyone is out there slogging away trying to get their original songs heard and a great tribute band puts people in a good place for getting an audience.”
Petito is currently investigating a Kinks show as well as reviving the Stevie Wonder Songs in the Key of Life concert that was canceled at the start of the pandemic, a show that featured a diverse band including the keyboardist Rachel Z and Bowie collaborator Gail Ann Dorsey. “The further away we get from the original recordings,” he says, “this will likely become more interpretive music, in the same way we listen to a field recording of Robert Johnson. I do think that could potentially happen to pop music. Great songwriting always lives on, regardless of recording and interpretation.”
For more information, visit scottpetito.com.
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