Hell's Belles rocks

I was out very, very late last night hanging out with a bunch of over-the-hill rockers listening to Hell's Belles. All female AC/DC cover/tribute band. They rocked. A lot. Highly recommended, if you get a chance to go see them.

I do find it a little odd that you can make a living imitating another band, though. I mean, first of all, where do you get the idea to start a project like that? I don't think most wannabe musicians start a band with the goal of playing covers of other people's music. Then again, as Sarah pointed out to me, the vast majority of professional musicians (studio musicians, classical musicians, etc) never play anything but music written by other people. I suppose you could start a band, and do one or two AC/DC covers as part of a set, and get such a positive response that you'd learn some more, and more, until eventually that's all you play.

The second thing I wonder about is whether or not being in a band like that would make you start to hate AC/DC. I think I'd get pretty darn sick of playing the same stuff over and over (could be worse, though, I suppose, if you were an 80's-night DJ at a club or something...) I'm guessing they make pretty decent money, though, given that the Fox was pretty close to filled up (there must have been a solid 500+ people) and tix were $16 or something. That's what, $8000? Figure the club takes half, and you spend another 25% on overhead and travel, and you're at $2k for a 2 hour night of work, split among 5 band members. Then again, I don't know squat about the economics of being on tour with a band. $200/hour sounds like a nice wage to me, but they might make a lot less. They did try to sell some t-shirts and CDs (who in their right mind would buy a CD of AC/DC covers, especially when the whole point of the band is to sound *exactly* the same as AC/DC?) so maybe they make a few more bucks there.

In other news, I'm off to Indiana for Thanksgiving all of the coming week. No work will get done, though I'll probably be checking email erratically. Don't bother trying to call if you need to get ahold of me, I probably won't have my phone out there. My uncle Ronnie is a former IRL chief mechanic, and he has some cool stuff like a WIND TUNNEL in his shop, so I'm going to take the camera and try to get some pictures of the neat machines.