The Long and Winding Road

The Johns, the Pauls and the Georges have come and gone through the years, but Rolo Sandoval, beneath his mop-top wig, has kept a steady beat for all of them. He’s warbled “Yellow Submarine” in dingy casinos and at a Rose Bowl benefit. He’s been heckled as a fraud and cheered as a living reminder of a lost era.

Rolo Sandoval, you see, is a Ringo.

Sandoval has played the drums in about a dozen Beatles tribute bands over the last two decades, and now he is in one of the most successful, the Fab Four. Ask him about the peculiar life of a specialized mimic and he gives a shrug that seems to say, “yeah, yeah, yeah.” “It can be strange,” he says, “but it is a gig, a good gig.”

And, these days, a surprisingly fashionable gig. The tribute band, an oddball offshoot of celebrity culture that resides somewhere between glitzy Las Vegas revues and amateur karaoke contests, is enjoying a surge of recognition.

There was the recent Hollywood film “Rock Star,” with Mark Wahlberg, that offered the rags-to-Spandex tale of a tribute band singer who finds his own voice. Then, last week, a new documentary, “Tribute,” debuted at the AFI FilmFest in Los Angeles with stories of, well, the real fake singers. There’s also the popular Web site https://www.tributecity.com, which celebrates and catalogs the vast ranks of the quirky community (by some accounts, there are tens of thousands of tribute acts in the world).

But most telling of all, on any given night in Southern California, you can find a nightclub where, if you blur your eyes, you can watch Jim Morrison, Freddie Mercury or John Lennon come alive on stage. The roots of the scene go back to the king of the copied, Elvis Presley, and his legion of impersonators and to such stage productions as “Beatlemania.” The breadth of the tribute world is surprising--Doors and Rolling Stones impersonators are expected, but who would expect performing mimics devoted to Wings, Thin Lizzy, Mike + the Mechanics or Deep Purple?

The allure of tribute acts is a mix of kitsch and, in some measure, necessity. Classic rock remains a dominant radio format, especially in the nation’s heartland, but many of its biggest bands are defunct or touring with lineups that have barely any connection to their glory days. Worse, concert ticket prices have skyrocketed in recent years. As one concert industry insider put it, when Rod Stewart is charging $100 a seat, “that Rod Stewart impersonator for $10 at the local bar sounds better all the time.”

There’s also the subtle, collective effect of years of celebrity docudramas, lip-sync contests, the karaoke fad and all the other fakery rituals that make it perfectly natural for audiences to watch a paid performer wear someone else’s clothes and sing someone else’s songs.

“It all shows that the song and the audience are, in a way, bigger than the original group or its members,” says Rich Fox, who co-produced and co-directed “Tribute.” “The song takes on a life of its own.”

Without a doubt, the life of Lennon-McCartney songs provides a living for Sandoval and his mates in the Fab Four, and it’s a living that gives them a quirky mix of quasi-celebrity and struggling bar-band anonymity. A recent show at the California State Fair in Sacramento was a perfect example: The crowd, many of them fairgoers who just happened upon the free stage show, cheered and danced as the group delivered precise versions of classic Beatles hits, but most didn’t notice that the Sgt. Pepper’s uniforms were threadbare and that the performers stuck around afterward to lug their own gear to a van out back.

The members, all Southern Californians, met at Beatles fan conventions and on the tribute band circuit. Their impersonation (they don’t use taped music to buttress their sound as many tribute acts do) is so polished it has taken them to gigs in Brazil, Japan, Argentina and beyond. They performed close to 200 shows last year and at major bookings can make a few thousand dollars each.

The Fab Four members won’t divulge their ages--after all, they portray a band with young members--but all appear to be in their 20s or 30s. “You don’t want to be in your 50s doing this; that’d be pretty sad,” says Ardy Sarraf, the group’s Paul. “I’ve got a few more years in me.”

And what then? The plan had always been to hook up with a band playing original music (“I think we’d all quit in a minute for that if it was the right opportunity,” Sarraf says) or segue into the more workaday life of studio musician or jingle writer. But now they may be at a crossroads that offers a different direction.

The group has been talking to Las Vegas hotels about becoming a standing act, a five-night-a-week fixture. It would be a lucrative endeavor, but it would also mean uprooting their families and dashing their hopes of playing original music. Their decision, to be made in upcoming months: Pursue original art or profit from artifice?

Sandoval has already been fitted for a $300 plastic nose that will make him more Ringo-like for the exacting illusion standards of Vegas. “A fake nose,” he muses. “But I’m not going to get surgery. We’re not Michael Jackson impersonators.”

Tribute bands not only pay homage, in a sense they help pay the bills for the original music creators. Promoters and venues pay annual licensing fees that go into a large pool of money that compensates songwriters and music publishers for public performance of their copyrighted songs. The system is arcane and difficult to track, but, for example, it means a Bruce Springsteen tribute act is in theory making money for the Boss.

The community of tribute bands is wildly diverse, with enough room for the acts that take their cloning effort very seriously to the more frivolous fun of Hell’s Belles (an all-female AC/DC band) and Nudist Priest (a Judas Priest group that plays in the buff). Some play for what amounts to their bar tab, but a few can make careers that pay for houses in the suburbs. The common links among them are passion for the music they channel and a struggle for respect, says Kris Curry, who teamed with Fox to produce and direct the documentary “Tribute.”

“I didn’t meet any members of tribute bands that, at some level, didn’t have a fundamental understanding of the irony or paradox of this weirdness of having people adore you for not being you,” she says.

And the crowds do come. At the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip, one of the most popular concert venues in town, big crowds have packed in recently to see Super Diamond (a Neil Diamond act that has become a trendy fave in Los Angeles), Which One’s Pink (a Pink Floyd act that offers a low-tech, no-costume performance focused on exacting re-creations of the music), the Fab Four and others.

“The popularity goes up and down, and right now it’s up, there’s a resurgence,” says Kevin Morrow, a top booking executive for the House of Blues chain and a 17-year veteran of the concert business. “It was popular with groups playing 1950s music maybe 15 years ago and then it totally went away; it became taboo to be a tribute or cover band. Now it’s cool again.”

The change, Morrow says, is that today’s twentysomethings spent their teens hearing--and usually disdaining--baby boomer music but now find a winking enjoyment in singing along with “Sweet Caroline” or “Day Tripper.” Some of those fans may even be inspired to become tribute players themselves. “It can be a good gig,” Curry says, “and there is the extra inspiration now with Ripper.”

Ripper is Ripper Owens, who has become the leather-clad patron saint of tribute bands.

Tim Owens was an Ohio kid who revered the band Judas Priest--its logo could be found on every wall in his boyhood bedroom as well as tattooed on his arm--and joined a Priest tribute band called British Steel. With zeal and a mean caterwauling style, he became a local sensation by parroting his idol, singer Rob Halford.

When Halford quit the metal outfit in 1992, the other Priest members launched a massive four-year search for a replacement and sifted through thousands of tapes. When a fan mailed in a grainy video of Owens on stage, they found their man.

Owens, then working as a purchasing agent for an Akron law firm, got a phone call from the managers of Priest. The next day he flew to Wales and, after a one-song audition, got the job. He’s now on his first tour with a rock band. “It was a dream come true,” Owens says. “It was surreal.”

The 33-year-old singer also spent time in a grunge tribute band and remembers how other local bands playing original material would grow furious that his “fake” act sold more tickets. He’s still at a loss to explain the tribute phenomenon.

“It’s entertainment, I guess,” he said. “People enjoy hearing known material, things they know. Even if it’s not the famous guys doing it.... Look, I still put on goofy clothes and sing Priest songs. It’s not any different for me.”

The Cinderella story of Ripper Owens seemed like the stuff of Hollywood, so it’s no surprise that filmmakers tapped his odyssey for the silver screen. The result: “Rock Star,” with Wahlberg as a shaggy, blue-collar tribute singer who gets drafted to play in the big-time band he idolizes and (of course) learns lessons about life and love in the process. The film didn’t rock the box office, nor did it ring true with Owens, the inspiration for its tribute to tributes. The final movie bears little resemblance to his rise to real success.

“I wasn’t involved in it; I wished I could have been,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “It’s not about me, really. It’s all false. It’s a Hollywood story, and I’m worried that people will get it mixed up with me and what I do. It’s not the real thing.”