Sympathy for the doubles

Like a Rolling Stone

The Strange Life of a Tribute Band

Steven Kurutz

Broadway Books: 216 pp., $23.95

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FOR Glen Carroll, a typical workday involves taking the stage in white football pants, blue kneepads, dance shoes and a cape made from American and British flags. Carroll, a slim, shaggy-haired rogue in his late 40s, is the lead singer of Sticky Fingers, a New York/New Jersey-based band that bills itself as "the leading international Rolling Stones tribute show." His performance is rather like seeing Mick Jagger circa the Stones' 1981 Tattoo You U.S. tour, only Carroll likes to climb behind the drums for a drunken jam at the end of the night.

For decades, Sticky Fingers' main competition on the East Coast music circuit has been the Blushing Brides, a Canadian Stones tribute band fronted by the powerfully built Maurice Raymond, who in his younger days was known for athletic performances that included swinging from nightclub chandeliers. Sticky Fingers strives for some degree of sonic and visual verisimilitude in their shows (Kevin Gleeson, the group's Keith Richards, dons a homemade hairpiece hung with coins and small animal bones, approximating the rhythm guitarist's current matted hairdo).

Blushing Brides musicians are openly disdainful of such "clone band" antics. Taking its musical cues from an infamously raw 1973 Stones concert bootleg recording known as "Bedspring Symphony," the Canadian band prides itself on sounding tighter and tougher than the Stones -- a distinction lead singer Raymond often points out belligerently between songs, threatening to "body-slam" Jagger if he ever shows his weathered face at a Brides gig.

Welcome to the strange world of tribute bands, where musicians can attain a small degree of fame (and occasionally a decent living) by playing another artist's songs note for note, night after night. Journalist Steven Kurutz dissects this phenomenon in "Like a Rolling Stone," tracing it to the surprise success of the 1977 Broadway musical revue "Beatlemania." It has since expanded (or, depending on your point of view, metastasized) to include imitators of nearly every major pop and rock act of the last four decades.