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By most measures, Matt Jernigan has made it. As the frontman for his band, he’s spent the past 18 years building a name and an audience, selling out shows, and making music his full-time career. At a time when the difficulties of a modern band living on a fickle music industry income are common knowledge, Jernigan and his bandmates have found success and stability. They made it by touring relentlessly, without a recording contract, or even a record; they did it by pretending to be Led Zeppelin.
Jernigan's band is Zoso, a Led Zeppelin cover band that formed back in 1995 in Los Angeles. “Me and the drummer and the bass player were out there, trying to do our own thing and get a record deal,” Jernigan explains of his pre-Zoso days. “At the time the industry just wasn’t signing our kind of acts anymore.” He had grown up listening to Led Zeppelin, one of the bands that stood out to him the most from his childhood and influenced the classic blues rock sound he was making at the time. So, when his management suggested a tribute act to the legendary rock group he and the bandmates considered it. “At the time, the idea was completely foreign to me. My idea of it was like being an Elvis impersonator.” The band thought about it for three or four months before agreeing. When they started doing shows, the act began to take off. “It wasn’t our favorite idea, believe me, but there was something there.”
Zoso aren’t the only group out there making a good living by bringing the concert element of another band’s music to the public. Badfish, a Rhode Island-based Sublime cover band that formed in 2001, stands out as a tribute act that has reached notoriety and earned themselves a cult following. Sublime’s popularity has only grown since lead singer Bradley Nowell’s suicide in 1996 and, in the years since, Badfish have served as something of a rallying point for fans old and new as the de facto touring arm of the band continues to resonate with listeners.
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Go to a Badfish or Zoso show today and it’s clear that a select handful of tribute or cover bands have the touring legs most bands can only dream of. Take Badfish’s Brooklyn Bowl show this January as an example; cover bands aren’t anything to scoff at. Playing a venue big enough to be reserved for acts as popular as Talib Kweli or a ?uestlove DJ residency, they had a full house. It was comprised of the expected mix of stoners and frat bros—cargo pants and polos were in abundance—but everyone was animated, singing their hearts out and dancing exponentially more than audience members at any typical indie show across Brooklyn. The crowd wasn’t cool, at least not by the standards I’ve been held to since sophomore year of high school, but they made up for it with uninhibited enthusiasm.
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Badfish and Zoso each have passionate crowds willing to support about 120 shows a year, and that’s built on familiarity, not originality. Both bands know the music so well that neither of them even rehearse anymore. “We’re just trying to get up there and play this music that we love as best we can,” says Scott Begin, Badfish’s drummer and one of its founding members. To him, the appeal of Badfish is parallel to the legacy of Sublime; the band represented a “vibe,” and they have made it their mission to keep the spirit of the band alive. That objective is part of the reason it doesn’t bother him that the remaining original members of Sublime have reunited as Sublime With Rome and are touring, as well as recording new music. “I think keeping this music alive is a good thing, no matter who’s doing it,” Begin defers, when asked about covering a band that’s ostensibly back in existence.
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Zoso take the idea of recreating the essence of a band one step further, attempting to literally recreate the experience of seeing Led Zeppelin in their heyday. “We had to get into the acting part of it, which was completely foreign to us,” explains Jernigan, on the high-concept tribute band Zoso is attempting to be. In their tribute, they occupy the roles of the original members of Led Zeppelin, with Jernigan attempting not only to sound like Robert Plant but look and act like him, too. “I wouldn’t call myself an actor,” he laughs, “Because I’m trying to fit the persona of someone and just trying to give the audience the experience of what it was like to go see [Led Zeppelin].” He says it wasn’t too much of a stretch as they were already musicians, but their commitment to the visual element of a tribute is clearly something Zoso has taken seriously from the beginning. Before the band gave up on finding a major label to signing, they had a “great” guitarist, but he had to be let go when it was clear he was not going to fit in the Led Zeppelin reincarnation the band transformed into as Zoso.
The recreative experience that Jernigan is trying to bring to his audience is an interesting one and not without its appeals. Contrary to assumptions, he says it doesn’t only appeal to older nostalgists attempting to recreate memories. “We’ve got kids from 14 years old to 60. I would say the majority of the people are in their 30′s or late 20′s, but it all depends—if you’re playing a college town you get all 19 and 20-year-olds. We have such a wide range of audiences and people from generation to generation are just learning about this music now.” Begin asserts a similar diversity for Badfish’s core supporters, continuously citing the “experience” that comes with Sublime’s music as what always draws back their core followers.
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Both Jernigan and Begin are avid, eloquent fans when you talk to them about the bands they cover. When asked about Led Zeppelin or Sublime each responds enthusiastically and seriously; Jernigan almost seems in awe of the raw talent possessed by the band and grateful he’s been able to delve into the mechanics of their craft, and Begin strikes me as the kind of guy who might have followed Sublime on tour for a few years had they still existed in their original form. However, the line between a band and their fans can be a harsh one, and it becomes clear when the question of what their original ambitions in music comes up. “I had always hoped to [make music] from the time I was a kid,” says Begin.”Plenty of the guys had played in other original bands and had, you know, moderate local success. We all enjoy the process of creating our own music.” Badfish still writes music under the alternate moniker Scotty Don’t, but have set it aside for the time being to focus on the original project that brought them to this point. “But reality sets in,” he explains. “We were in college and had this opportunity.”
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Jernigan remains pragmatic on his career in the music world. He started out looking to sell his own music on his own terms, but just doesn’t think there’s an audience for what he grew up listening to anymore. In many respects, he’s right. Mainstream, classic-leaning rock is dying in the pop hemisphere, with record sales to radio play to popular sensibilities all abandoning what used to be the dominant force in popular music. In the past two decades, the guitar heroes Jernigan reminisces about passionately, have all but disappeared. He’s accepted that and understands that the music he knows how to write is not the music the average listener is looking for anymore. For the ska-fusion that Sublime popularized and Badfish champion, the situation is even worse. For both bands, the audiences that are interested in the same music they want to make, are actually interested in the exact same music—not new takes on it.
“People can say things like, ‘Yeah, but you’re not writing songs,’ and I understand what that’s all about. But at the same time, it was great music and an iconic band! So it isn’t a shameful gig,” Jernigan says. He’s 45 now, and has mostly given up on writing new music, grateful for the place Zoso has been able to put him. ”We had no idea we would be doing this forever, absolutely not.”
