Posted in Music, The Past

Fake Cover Bands

Posted on by Jeremy W Patton

So I’ve been doing a bunch of digital capturing of old VHS tapes lately. I have a lot, not as many as I used to though. There are definitely some old VHS tapes I wish I still had. I know at one point I recorded myself playing my original NES by running my Nintendo through our old vintage Hitachi VT-11A VHS top loading VCR and capturing the footage to tape. This would have been around 1986 in Hawaii. Fast forward a few years, now in Oklahoma and in High School (1994, I gotta find the actual date of this…), I find myself on a band field trip to Six Flags Over Texas theme park in Arlington, TX. I do NOT recall how we decided to do this or who even paid for it, but somehow we managed to “Mime” cover / perform two songs at music video recording booth thing! I still have the VHS copies they gave us.

So two things, #1, we are NOT playing the instruments (obviously, right?) and they were total garbage! No strings on the guitars and the drums were some wacky hardcore sturdy kit but with no drum heads. So nothing could really make any sounds, despite not even being plugged in. #2, the song you are hearing is NOT the original recording by the original musicians / band. It is some ‘cover’ version by some random studio house band. I would love to find out who actually did the recordings for all these songs. There was a lot to choose from, if I remember correctly.

We did two songs, one was ‘Hmm mmm mmm mmm’ by / not by The Crash Test Dummies. Check it out (or here). The original music video to this song can be found here. This song was pretty dang huge when we were in High School. The video was super as well!
The other song we did was ‘Alive’ by / not by Pearl Jam, check it out (or here). The original music video to this song can be found here. We all ended up seeing Pearl Jam in Oklahoma City on their Vs tour with Urge Overkill.

So after you watch the videos and compare them to the originals, it’s SUPER obvious that these recordings are by some generic ‘way to get around selling copyrighted music’ house band. I remember seeing this sort of service offered in a couple of theme parks and maybe even some shopping malls at some point?

So I guess I have a few questions :

  1. Who are these musicians and is it all the same band?
  2. Did they get paid? Per song? Timed recording session? On the clock?
  3. Were royalties paid to the original bands? For each sale / usage or an original ‘one time’ licensing fee?
  4. Are these musicians still alive and what else did they do musically? What was their ‘day job’?

The videos feature the superb miming performances by :

Crystal Humble (Patton) : Rhythm Guitar & Acoustic Guitar & Lead Vocals
Nathan Coffey : Lead Guitar
Brooke Crawford (Cook) : Bass & Keyboards
John Clyde Wootten : Lead Vocals & Bass
Jeremy Patton (Me) : Drums

I would love to sit down with these people NOW and watch the video together / remote viewing, while recording a ‘reaction’ / audio commentary.

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