Ty Hurless has been playing Tom Petty in the Damn Torpedoes for 15 years. A natural brunette, he wore his hair short for much of his original musical career. Now, though, it sits just above shoulder length, dyed a gentle golden blond. The look suits him, his graying stubble and laugh-lined cheeks. As a person, not a performer, I ask him: Does he like it?
Hurless smiles shyly.
“That’s a great question.”
It’s not all packed crowds and admiring fans, assuming the role of a famous musician. Blond highlights are a hassle. As is styling and maintaining the elaborate wigs like those worn by the women of the B-52s and tracking down a Sequential Prophet-5 synth like the one Bernie Worrell played in Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense era.
The dollar amount is a moot point – all musicians invest in their gear and their visual aesthetic. Not all musicians, however, are learning a recognizable guitar playing style or copying a beloved gravel-edged voice in order to convincingly transport audiences, or simply to fulfill their own reverent vision.
“I think a lot of guys get the idea that his music is easy to pull off,” Hurless says of the joint-rolling, free-fallin’ rock star. “If you’re really trying to get the essence, it’s very difficult.” It only took the songwriter “being a rock & roll guy all my life, and knowing the music, having grown up with the music and having it be such an integral part of my whole life experience” – plus some extra intentional years of testing out his vocal range after Hurless decided to begin impersonating the raspy-voiced singer. “I’ve gotten better at doing this voice than I was at the beginning,” he says.
All that time stepping inside Petty’s head, borrowing his twang and strumming style, has taught Hurless to play as though method acting.
“I’ve never really thought of it as ‘I’m just playing some dude’s songs to make a buck,’” says Hurless. “I’m performing these songs as if I wrote [them].”
The audience, at the best tribute performances, suspends their disbelief too: You can see it in the nostalgic glow on their faces and hear it in their uninhibited cheers. In the absence of time travel, tribute bands take up the mantle of presenting your favorite artists as they once were, as they appeared in that rewatched concert video or MTV interview. To varying degrees, they pick up the mannerisms, the outfits, and the playing styles of their esteemed counterparts, re-creating a live performance that becomes more enchanted theatre work than straightforward mimicry: It’s a meeting point between the preserved body of one artist’s work and the informed interpretation of another. It’s a serious task to undertake, one that comes with a certain amount of emotional responsibility.
“I remember one guy was telling me that his dad had passed away, and they loved listening to Foo Fighters together. I really do feel the nostalgia of the tribute band. It runs pretty deep,” says Mark Turk, the Dave Grohl stand-in of Oof Fighters. “It’s [that] power of transporting you to the time that you heard [the band] the first time, or when there was a special moment in your life and this song was playing or it reminds you of your best friend from high school.”
Like most tribute players, Turk started out as a fan, introduced to the Nineties-born group via Nirvana, of course, and captivated into sticking around by Grohl’s “easily digestible rock – fun, kind of yelling, screaming, totally hooky” – and his crowd-embracing stage persona.
“It’s really fun for me to pretend to do that. I mean, I would do that anyway, but it’s nice that I get to do that as a part of the schtick,” Turk says. “That’s a part of the experience that the audience member should want. They should want to feel like they’re going to see the Foo Fighters on the cheap.”
Cutting out stadium pricing and nosebleed seating is one perk of seeing a tribute band, but in many cases, the original act has been broken apart by fame, fighting, or death. Fans flock to the best-offer opportunity to hear cherished songs live. Depending on the band, their musical ethos, and the fans that they cultivated, what it means to pay tribute varies. Across differences, Austin’s homage-paying musicians are shaped by the ethereal glitter of stepping into another artist’s shoes in some unexpected and underappreciated ways.
“What we’ve all been [homing] in on for our musical lives is the quest to find these magic moments of shared experience – and they’re live moments,” says Evan Bozarth, bassist for Talking Heads tribute band HeartByrne. “We’re always looking for ways to have more of those moments, and that’s regardless of the music you’re playing. It’s about sharing an experience in the moment with other people.”
Living in Your Own Private Idaho
How a tribute band pays homage depends on the nature of the band and their fans. Hurless feels maintaining a passing resemblance to Petty helps secure the band’s reputation, but not every artist sports a signature look or requires costuming – Oof Fighters play it pretty simple in black band tees. From a playing perspective, audiences would be upset if local Grateful Dead tribute DeadEye strove to imitate every note of their recorded songs instead of embodying the psychedelic jam band’s improvisational attitude. On the other hand, Mock Lobster, the dedicated group pledging loyalty to the B-52s, realizes their earworm-seeking listeners get excited about Easter egg beeps and boops tucked in specific timestamps. They know because they are those highly attuned listeners themselves.
“Fidelity to the source has always been important to me and to us in really everything we do,” says founder and drummer Matt Patterson. After first recruiting David Houston, an Austin tribute band giant who played Paul in longstanding Beatles act the Eggmen, on drums, Patterson was lucky enough to find fans of the group who shared his enthusiasm for details.
Corbin Young grew up hearing his dad imitate Fred Schneider’s musical ad-libs on “Love Shack,” and playing the B-52s’ debut CD in his teenage car.
“I knew that album really, really well. And I loved how in the liner notes they misspelled bongos: B-O-N-G-O-E-S,” he says. Now Young himself is the Schneider mimic onstage, with a startling range of accurate one-liners and a cappella sound effects. He, Jenna Trust, and Maddy Brotherton gleefully recite the sea animal sounds of “Rock Lobster” over the original track, sounding more like the primary vocalists than the recording does, as we take pictures at Coco Coquette wig shop.
“We’re both big mimics,” says Trust.
“Imitators!” Brotherton chimes in. “[We’re] obsessed with accuracy.” She and Trust spend additional rehearsal time going over their precise, syncopated harmonies. Trust has attentively adapted her naturally raspy voice to sing Cindy Wilson’s parts, and Brotherton, a violinist who had never sang professionally before becoming the Kate Pierson of the group, lends her perfect pitch to the band’s melodics.
“I get to indulge my perfectionist streak,” she says gleefully.
Trey Buchanan, a guitarist who grew up listening to the group, fell under B-52s strummer Ricky Wilson’s spell when he started to play their songs, entranced by the challenge of mimicking Wilson’s unique, string-omitting tunings and jangly New Wave tone.
“Every show there’s some new person who’s there who sings every single song, [and] they’re waiting for whatever that little” – he shimmies his fingers, conjuring the distinct riffs and standout notes that characterize the art-pop band. “And then they light up, and that’s always great to see.”
Even these specificity-loving artists have learned to trust their musicianship to communicate the B-52s’ sonic vision and let go of perfection for a moment.
“Sometimes we’re very rigid with getting a super tiny thing [right]. Then sometimes people are like, ‘Well, let’s just be able to do it and enjoy it,’” says Trust.
HeartByrne, the band that gave Mock Lobster their first live performance opportunity – on the exact anniversary of the B-52s and Talking Heads playing at Armadillo World Headquarters, no less – takes a bit of a different approach to reenacting their chosen genre-blending innovators.
“A lot of us come from the jam band world,” bassist Bozarth explains. His bandmate Josh Pearson also plays in a Phish and Grateful Dead tribute band, in addition to both of their own original jam-based projects. “At some point we leaned into our natural propensity to take that angle on things and it ended up working out really well.”
Playing with outfits and stage aesthetics that recall but don’t exactly replicate the art-funk pioneers’ looks, these impressionists have established a working pattern to maintain loyalty to the arrangement while giving themselves room to play.
“There’s parts of these songs that people have this nostalgia for that you want to keep in there,” Bozarth says. “It becomes pretty obvious which parts you want to stay true to, and then which parts are a little more open for interpretation.”
While they know some fans are waiting for a memorable synth line or drum fill and they’re happy to oblige, it feels in keeping with the spirit of the vanguard to embrace the extended groove sections of some songs and play around with the composition.
“We gave ourselves permission to do that because David Byrne is never stopping and never staying still,” says Bozarth. The group attended one of Byrne’s recent Bass Hall concerts, reveling in his reinterpretations of classic Talking Heads tunes both as fans and as musicians. “He’s one of those few artists that has been able to take his music and play his old hits, but always [be] updating them.”
If the enthusiastic dancing and singing along from the crowds is any indication, I’d say HeartByrne’s fans agree.“It’s so much fun to play this music that you can see the excitement emanating from the stage of how much fun we have doing it with each other. And the audience picks up on that. It’s this big love fest that happens,” Bozarth says.
Going Through Changes
With few exceptions, all the tribute-paying musicians I spoke with also write their own music or play in original groups – or have at other points in their life. For Turk, being Oof Fighters’ frontman became a welcome way to keep music in his life as he balances raising a family and running his music education nonprofit Beat 4 Beat after a decade of touring and recording in original projects. Petty look-alike Hurless is planning to release his first original album since he started the Damn Torpedoes in the next year. When these songwriters and composers step back into the studio, a bit of their idol sneaks in the back door.
“Once you go so deep and you really live and breathe the songs and study what they’re doing, it’s inevitable that it’s going to kind of seep into your personality overall,” says HeartByrne synth and keyboard player Dustin Bozarth, Evan’s brother. Puzzling out Worrell’s particular tones and methods has made a lasting impression on him. “He had a really unique way of playing and style and melody and that has been a constant source of learning and inspiration,” he says.
His bass-slapping brother sees his relationship to original band member Tina Weymouth like a pedal of the mind, a learned tone he can tap in and out of. “I can pick up on why that was cool in that context, and I can choose to incorporate that into my version of it, or I can lean a little more into my own tendencies,” he says.
Double identities, for them, remain something of a superpower. Other groups aren’t sure they’re quite so lucky. There are certain occupational hazards, like when the guy you’ve been personifying onstage publicly apologizes for cheating on his wife (again).
“I don’t love that,” Turk sighs, admitting that the band took a bit of a break after Grohl broke the news.
Then there’s the bigger challenge of balancing tribute rehearsal with time for original work and satiating creeping doubts about whether your personal project could ever be as big as the storied acts you inhabit. Even more questions are at play if you never intended to be a tribute band in the first place.
Renowned Latin funk outfit Brownout stumbled into the cover universe while playing a residency in 2013, during a slow spell for the musicians’ other projects, Money Chicha and Grammy-winning Grupo Fantasma. The bandmates decided to theme each night around a different band or genre, always delivered with their own twist, signified by warping the titles to include the word “brown.” They played the soundtrack to Black Caesar by James Brown, but called it “Brown Caesar”; they did a B-boy night dubbed “Brownout II: Electric Boogaloo.” But Brown Sabbath, a tribute, of course, to Black Sabbath, clicked immediately with the band and gathered the largest crowd.
“One of the things that really was surprising, in a way, was how easy it was to adapt,” says guitarist Beto Martinez. “It’s pretty funky to begin with.” Their manager, picking up on the success of the live performance, suggested that they record a full-length album of covers.
“We went into the studio and recorded that first album with not too many expectations behind it,” he explains. That initial residency performance was just the beginning: “It was something that struck a nerve and people really went nuts for [it], so we ended up touring it.”
Alex Marrero, who’d joined the inaugural gig to sing “War Pigs,” “The Wizard,” and two other hits, was absorbed into the outfit, tapping into a louder vocal register than he was used to.
“It was like you’re putting on this musical costume,” he says. “And it was a treatment.”
A treatment, the two musicians clarify, because, unlike many clear-cut tribute projects, Brownout never pretended to set aside their own musical stylings to become Brown Sabbath. Their renditions are a fusion of metal and Latin sensibilities, full of horns, furious percussion segments, and unapologetically funky breakdowns. They dubbed the treatment “Brownout presents Brown Sabbath” in a concerted effort to tell fans that they weren’t becoming a full-time tribute group, they were just playing one onstage. Not everyone picked up on the distinction. Metalheads started heckling the group when they booked shows as Brownout and didn’t play any Black Sabbath songs. Seeing the enthusiasm and traction the idea was gaining, even the Brownout members themselves stopped to consider whether they should go full send as a tribute band.
“We never felt like we didn’t give it its chance because we definitely put the work in,” Martinez insists. Ultimately, though, they had to take the costume off.
“After a while, you’re not playing your own music and you never set out to be in a tribute or cover band and it’s just kind of like, okay – it ran its course,” Marrero says.
It wasn’t so easy creating the distance between the two groups that its members had always seen. Brownout stopped playing Brown Sabbath songs, resolving to let the hype cool in order to regain their reputation as an original band.
Still, they had fun while it lasted. Without the years spent cosplaying as a sort-of-metal band, Marrero may have never joined the group on vocals and he certainly wouldn’t have gotten to experiment with the metal star life, planning costume changes and wailing on the mic. The magic couldn’t pull them in completely, but it dazzled the hardworking musicians for a time, even leading them to perform for Ozzy Osbourne on his reality TV show, Ozzy and Jack’s World Detour. When the long-haired iconoclast passed away in July 2025, Brownout brought Brown Sabbath back to the stage for the first time in five years, rollicking with the same zeal they bring to every performance.
Martinez recalls insisting, before their first-ever Brown Sabbath performance, that the guitar riffs and attitude stay as close to the original rendition as possible.
“We can change whatever we want, we can add the horns, we can make [it] funk, we can have these breakdowns, we can do whatever – but the guitars still need to kick ass,” Martinez recalls. It was personal for him, as a guitarist who grew up rocking out to Black Sabbath and other metal bands but ultimately gravitated toward playing in bigger outfits with groovier sounds.“That was a childhood dream: to be able to now play this music and be able to be that guitarist, to play those iconic riffs with no apologies, not afraid to be too loud or too up front.”
This Is Not My Beautiful House
At the end of the day, we all want to be a guitar hero. Musician or no, we all harbor a secret dream, no matter how small, of being embraced by a crowd of screaming fans. These tribute acts get a semblance of that experience onstage, accompanied by the express permission to be over-the-top, to shred or dance or earnestly croon with all the backing of decades of fame.
“Being a B-52s, specifically, tribute band, there’s so much room to let your soul be the weirdo that you are and have fun with it,” Trust says, adjusting her brown beehive wig. “There’s something I get from playing in an original band, but this satisfaction of musically cosplaying is something for me. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a deep, creative thing.”
This sentiment reverberates in the little smiles that dance across musicians’ faces as they animatedly discuss performing in character and drawing on the energy of their predecessors. Hopping onstage is vulnerable, no matter how thick the makeup or how tall the wig, but when playing into the character facilitates connection, and lots of cheering, it’s easier to embrace your wildest performance fantasies.
“It’s fun in that it feels like a shared experience,” says keyboardist Dustin Bozarth. “HeartByrne is a hybrid where we get to have our personal expression, because we want to inject that life into the performance and be authentic to ourselves, but we try not to ever forget that we’re piggybacking on the work that was Talking Heads and David Byrne and that means a lot to a lot of people.”
“You’ve already got your wellspring of material to draw from. But here’s the catch: You’ve still got to be good,” says Houston. In response to this publication cutting the Best Cover/Tribute category from our Austin Music Awards, the multi-instrumentalist created the first-ever Austin Tribute Band Community Awards, honoring the dedicated musicians who keep the live energy of iconic bands alive and accessible.
Though some look down their noses at tribute bands and cover groups, mistaking their dedication to interpretation for a lack of authenticity, the simple fact remains that musicians are mortal. Particular ways of playing and performing that have fostered extensive YouTube catalogs and live tapings still flicker to life onstage in the hands of these acts, where they unite devoted, intergenerational fan bases with fervor and fellowship the way only a live performance can.
“One of my visions of myself is almost like an antique glassblower, or someone who makes some kind of special weird furniture,” says Buchanan, who has proudly stripped strings from his guitars to master Ricky Wilson’s unmistakable, experimental strumming style. “You honor the tradition of this band.”
This article appears in December 26 • 2025.