The real future of the Canadian music industry is already gone

Canadian Music Week, the industry conference concurrent with the public Canadian Music Fest, will again pack many conference rooms at the Fairmont Royal York with satin-jacketed 20th century refugees wondering what comes next. For the live music business, though, the future involves a trend that few of those executives seem too willing to admit exists: the big-ticket legitimization of the tribute act.  While collective media enthusiasm is feigned for a few hundred indie bands slogging it out, all of that practice, practice, practice won’t lead to playing Massey Hall — especially when they’re up against shows like Queen — It’s A Kinda Magic, reaching that stage on March 19. (Coincidentally, the same night, an orchestral Music of Queen show is booked at Casino Rama.) This production from Australia, starring Craig Pesco as Freddie Mercury, prominently touts an endorsement from the late Queen singer’s 12-year personal assistant, Peter Freestone: “It’s wonderful to see the poses, and arm and hand movements again.” He has seen the future of rock and roll and its name is necrophilia.

Consider a press release from Fallsview Casino, headlined by the latest incarnation of Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band, since they will be rehearsing there for a week leading up to the tour launch on June 24 and 25. But given how it’s booked at Fallsview for an entire week at the start of the month, chances are there will be bigger box office for Man In the Mirror, a touring tribute to Michael Jackson starring Anthony Walker, whose tickets are one-fourth the cost of Ringo — the promotional video promises all the gothic histrionics you could want from a burly MJ soundalike of indeterminate race. Moreover, the Beatles tribute show Rain — which has been going in one form or another since starting as a Disneyland rip-off of Broadway’s Beatlemania in 1979 — has become a proven enough draw to merit three weeks in July at the Canon Theatre. So, while this year’s Canadian Music Industry and Broadcast Industry Hall of Fame inductees Platinum Blonde are being honoured for a legacy that obscures their original billing as an early-’80s cover band that specialized in The Police, it increasingly looks like the last thriving segment of the old-school music industry will be these kind of imitations of everything that existed before.