You’re sitting in an intimate concert venue, buzzing with anticipation for the show to start. The lights go down. The crowd silences. And then, the moment you’ve been waiting for. The familiar and all-too-powerful opening chords of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” fill the room, with guitarist Lindsey Buckingham plucking the strong and twinkling chords. As the music swells, a spotlight shines on the majestic Stevie Nicks, who whirls and twirls across the stage, her raspy voice singing about the titular Welsh witch whom you’d “just love to love.” 

Enthusiasm abounds, and suddenly you and the rest of the audience are cheering and singing along to Fleetwood Mac, watching them live and witnessing their youthful prime at the height of all of their powers. Even if you know only the hits, you can’t deny the unrelenting omnipotence of this musical institution. 

Except, it’s not Stevie Nicks and it’s not Fleetwood Mac — they disbanded in 2022 after keyboardist Christine McVie’s death. Instead, it’s Jessa Campbell singing lead for the Fleetwood Mac tribute band Taken by the Sky at Olsen Run Comedy Club and Lounge on April 9 — and you only paid $35 to go. 

The price is low and the band is different, but the concert experience, to the best of Taken’s ability, is the same.

Tribute bands are not to be confused with cover bands. While cover bands are simply bands who cover the repertoire of another artist, being in a tribute band typically means that performers are adopting the physical and musical mannerisms of the musicians they are portraying. Campbell says that this type of performance bodes well with her theater background.

“We’re not trying to just recreate the songs the same way that you heard them on the record,” says Taken’s bass player, Brian Link, who plays Mac’s “John McVie” on stage. “Our approach has been that we want you to see Fleetwood Mac live on a good day in their prime.” 

That approach clearly works for them. Taken by the Sky played two sold-out shows that night, and Link notes that several people stuck around for both. “My favorite thing in the world is when we do meet and greet after we play a show, and people will come up and list five or six different venues that they’ve seen us at,” he says.

This type of following is indicative of where the music scene is, and how tribute bands fit within it. Though tribute bands are no stranger to their fair share of criticism, a select few have risen to the top and garnered dedicated fanbases.

The Australian Pink Floyd Show, for instance, is one of the biggest tribute bands in the world, having sold 5 million tickets and toured across 35 countries in their almost 40 years together. In 2025, they performed at London’s Royal Albert Hall just months before original Pink Floyd frontman David Gilmour took the same prestigious stage.

On a smaller but still significant scale, the musicians of Eugene’s own Ween tribute, Brown Stallion — who consider themselves more as “A tribute to Ween” than a tribute band — have found their own special place in the region — and more specifically Eugween, a community of local Ween lovers. 

“We started playing shows every now and then,” Brown Stallion frontman Adam Corkery says, and Eugween “would just show up and get down with us and sing along to the songs. They just brought everything to that next level.” It was because of the community, Corkery says, that when Brown Stallion played the Cuthbert Amphitheater in a 2024 pinch when Ween itself canceled a scheduled concert due to Dean Ween’s mental health concerns, the show was a success. 

“I had tickets to take my son to his first Ween concert,” Corkery says. “There are not words that can explain how special that night was and how the Eugween community and the homies from afar came out and showed up. It was almost 2,000 people.”

Tribute acts have been around since the mid-1950s, when Elvis Presley impersonators popped up around the country to pay the sincerest form of flattery to The King. In the 1960s, the tribute band was born when acts such as The Buggs learned all of The Beatles’ musical techniques and fashion tendencies, with each musician in these groups taking on the role of a specific Fab Four member. 

Back then, tribute acts were few and far between, mostly only to be found in dimly lit bars and nightclubs. 

Now, “The market’s oversaturated,” says Jason Fellman, a Pacific Northwest concert promoter for more than 200 tribute bands (and the drummer for Journey tribute band, Stone in Love). According to ProTributeBands, a service that connects tribute bands with buyers and gigs, there were an estimated 15,000 tribute bands touring the U.S. in 2024. 

Fellman says that the demand for tribute bands these days comes from a lot of places. One of them is that “The real bands are either retiring or so many members have been replaced.” Touring bands like AC/DC and Iron Maiden may only have one original band member remaining, which makes them, as described by Fellman, “essentially a tribute band.” 

He adds that “You’re gonna see the real band once every two years, if you’re lucky, even if they exist,” whereas one can see a single tribute band quite a bit because “the price point is so different.” Tribute bands also often hang around right after the shows to get pictures with fans.

That being said, Fellman says that he doesn’t position his bands against the real thing “in any capacity,” calling the comparison “apples and oranges.”

Yet, in order to be in a successful tribute band, musicians still must be experts in who they are portraying, which requires a lot of research. Randy Cordeiro, otherwise known as Surreal Neil, has been the frontman of Super Diamond since it was founded in the early 1990s. It is one of the most popular Neil Diamond tribute bands in the world. Along with mastering Diamond’s seductive voice, Cordeiro says over the years he has spent more than $60,000 on sequined shirts to emulate the stage costumes the crooner was often associated with. 

However, when he started out as Surreal Neil, Cordeiro says his first shirt was white and ruffled. A seeming misstep that Cordeiro retrospectively justifies because he has since seen “photos of Neil wearing a white, ruffly shirt like that because he took fencing in college.”

Mastering the musical skill and technique of a tribute band’s real-life counterpart is essential for an audience to be receptive to it at all. This is especially true when it comes to bands whose tribute comes with a twist. Hell’s Belles is an all-female AC/DC tribute band with a large following, who are also a Eugene favorite. 

As an all-female group paying tribute to a band with a very devoted and mostly male fanbase, accuracy was imperative to the Belles’ early survival — especially in a time when tribute bands were still a novel concept. Adrian Conner, the lady Angus Young, says that when she first joined the band in the early 2000s, perfection was law, and the frontwoman at the time ruled with an iron fist. “Show up and kick ass and don’t waste my time, and don’t waste anybody else’s time,” Conner describes. 

Though the Belles are now established enough that they no longer have to worry about that kind of scrutiny, Conner says that playing AC/DC to a T is still always the priority. They make sure their show is “the best it can be, and that we’re taking care of our bodies, warming up our voices and practicing and delivering it without flaw.”

GayC/DC is another tribute band that deals with something very similar. They, too, are an AC/DC tribute band, but they perform with the concept of “What if they were all gay from the start?” says bass player Chris Freeman, who is also a co-founder of ’90s queer punk band Pansy Division. GayC/DC’s show is very homoerotic, with props such as dildos, giant inflatable penises and boatloads of glitter. They wear thongs and fishnets, and Angus Young’s schoolboy costume is now a big, bodybuilding schoolgirl. They take creative liberties with lyrics, such as “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” pretty easily becoming “Dirty Dudes Done Dirt Cheap.” 

With all that in mind, Freeman says, “If we’re an all-gay band, what’s the first thing they’re gonna say? ‘You can’t play.’ We want to knock that out. They got to know that we’re set on this. So we spent a lot of time getting the music right.” For GayC/DC, their gimmick is only successful if the music is phenomenal.

The large scale of skill and professionalism translates to many of the biggest tribute bands. Most members of all tribute bands write their own music, and are also in multiple tribute bands (Taken by the Sky’s Campbell, for instance, is in an ABBA tribute, Band After Midnight, and a Talking Heads cover band, Life During Wartime). Todd Jensen, Journey’s current bass player, got his start with a very popular PNW tribute band, Petty Fever.

When Fellman promotes his concerts, he says that one of the biggest reasons tribute bands are so important (and profitable) these days is because of the community. “Community is a buzzword that gets used and all that, but this is the literal definition. It is literally a community of people around the shared interest of nostalgic rock.” 

Fellman runs five tribute music festivals throughout the year, with HareFest in Canby, Oregon, the most popular. In 2025, Harefest sold upwards of 10,000 tickets. “Before you know it, it became just as much about seeing your tribute band community at these shows,” as it was to see the bands.

There is also a community within tribute bands themselves. For instance, Brown Stallion are very close friends with other PNW Ween tributes, Poopship and Weener. 

So, before you turn your nose up at a tribute band the next time one comes through Eugene, consider that you may experience the live concert experience of a band in its prime for a third or less of the standard concert price, at an intimate venue performed by skilled musicians who have brought together a community of people who really love music.Band After Midnight, an ABBA tribute, performs 6 pm and 8:30 pm Thursday, April 23, at Olsen Run Comedy Club and Lounge. The concert is 21-plus. Tickets are $39 and are available at OlsenRun.com. Life During Wartime, a tribute to Talking Heads, performs 8 pm Friday, May 1, at WOW Hall. Tickets are $22 and are available at WOWHall.org. Brown Stallion, a tribute to Ween, performs 8 pm Saturday, May 30, at Blairally. Tickets are $15. More information at Blairally.com. Harefest is in Canby, Oregon, July 16 through 18. For more information on HareFest and other Oregon tribute festivals, visit HareFest.com.