When Taylor Morden moved from Portland to Washington, D.C., about 7½ years ago, he was struck by the burgeoning cover band and tribute act scene in the city’s clubs and bars.

“As a person who played in original bands for years and years and years, I moved there and saw the potential,” Morden said. “I started playing in a couple cover bands, and all of a sudden, everybody in the crowd knows all the words to all the songs, and it’s more fun, even though it’s maybe less artistically fulfilling.”

One of those groups Morden played in was a Weezer tribute act, which ended up staging a few full-album performances of the band’s ’90s classics “Weezer” (1994, aka “The Blue Album”) and “Pinkerton” (1996) between 2012 and 2014.

When Morden moved to Bend 2½ years ago after five years in D.C., he began casting about for a new musical project. At age 36, Morden wasn’t looking to “start from scratch with an original band,” he said. After generating little interest with a Craigslist ad for a ’90s cover band, Morden revisited his favorite band, Weezer, and Weez-It was born.

Morden and Weez-It aren’t alone in Central Oregon. Cover or “party” bands have a strong foothold on Central Oregon’s club scene, as they do in most cities with a live music scene. But a number of tribute acts — which pay homage to a specific band, group of bands or genre of music, rather than performing a wide swath of cover songs from all genres — have cropped up on the local scene in the last few years.

Money might be the most obvious reason for an original musician to switch to playing in a tribute band. Singer-songwriter Derek Michael Marc, best known locally for his original music, started his five-piece Eric Clapton tribute band After Midnight about 1½ years ago in an effort to grow his shows both financially and musically. Before that, he’d noticed other musicians, many of them his friends, having success with tribute bands.

“A lot of performers, either they’re gone or they’re not touring anymore, and so people are still looking to get connected with that music,” Marc said. “If you find a band that’s good at covering whatever artists, it can be a really great experience for people. So they’ve really been latching onto it, and we’ve been having some pretty decent success with our Clapton tribute band. Ticket sales — people are paying 25, 30 bucks a head to come see tribute bands. It’s a good avenue right now.”

After Midnight hasn’t played much locally because Marc has focused on the touring circuit, playing theaters and casinos in Washington, Idaho and Oregon. That’s another reason Marc, a full-time musician, formed the band: “It allows growth beyond just playing clubs,” he said. The financial rewards are much greater than in the clubs, too, with the band pulling in $1,800 per show (on the low end of the spectrum) as opposed to the $300 to $500 per night Marc says he makes playing original music.

Passion projects

But beyond that, Marc is a big fan of Clapton. After Midnight covers all aspects of Clapton’s career, including Cream, Derek and the Dominos, solo material and his collaborations with Steve Winwood and B.B. King.

“I’ve been told (many) times over how my playing and singing relates to him,” Marc said.

Most of Bend’s current crop of tribute acts similarly started because of a love for the music. Local Beatles cover band JuJu Eyeball started in 2015 after its three members first played together as part of KPOV’s annual Beatles sing-along fundraiser in 2014. At the time, guitarist Paul Eddy and drummer Karl Lindgren played together in country-rock band Long Tall Eddy; bassist Dan Larsson sat in with the group at the KPOV show.

“I always wanted to do a Beatles cover band for many years, but the issue has always been trying to find people that could sing it,” Eddy, a self-described “Beatles nut,” said. “… The breakthrough for sure was meeting Dan, because he can sing so high, and he can scream, and he loves to rock out. He just opened the door to all that material that I couldn’t reach, I couldn’t sing on.”

Morden has a personal connection to Weezer. In 2008, Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo launched “Let’s Write a Sawng,” a series of YouTube videos in which he wrote a song in collaboration with viewers. Morden, living in Portland at the time, discovered the project in its latter stages, recorded a version of the nascent song, titled “Turning Up the Radio,” in his home studio, and uploaded it to YouTube.

“I woke up the next day, logged onto my computer and pulled up YouTube, and there was this video of Rivers Cuomo saying, ‘Who’s this new guy? Who’s this Taylor?’” Morden said.

When Weezer encountered difficulties recording the song for its 2010 rarities album “Death to False Metal,” Cuomo contacted Morden.

“He sent me their stems — so their drum track, bass track, guitar track, vocal track — and said, ‘Redo all of it and use this as a guide. This is the tempo we want,’” Morden said. “So I had his lead vocal in there, and then I redid everything else with my drummer at the time. … And they ended up keeping everything (we played) except the bass and drums.”

Mash it up

A few local bands have taken the “mashup” tribute route, focusing on a group of closely related bands or a particular era or genre of music. East Coast transplant and guitarist Rod DeGeorge launched his Guitar Gods Review project earlier this year after also noticing a number of musicians finding more financial success going the tribute route. However, he didn’t see himself dressing in a particular role or focusing on just one band.

“As I present the stuff, it’s more of, this is what a guitar player may sound like who is influenced by all these people,” he said. “Because a lot of the songs, when we do cover a song, it may go into an extended jam, and that’s me improvising. … So it’s more like a celebration and a tip of the hat or a tribute to them, but not a reincarnation of them.”

He started out with Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Van Halen, three touchstones in his own playing. But he’s looked beyond the obvious guitar heroes, too: The trio plays a Fleetwood Mac song, and DeGeorge has plans to include songs by Prince, Rage Against the Machine, Black Sabbath and other riff-heavy groups.

“I want it to be a show that people who just enjoy guitar-driven rock will be going from one song to the other — ‘Oh, oh, that’s a cool song, that’s a cool song,’” DeGeorge said. “To me, what got me into music in the beginning was the songs, songwriting.”

Watkins Glen, which pays tribute to classic rock and jam-band acts The Allman Brothers Band, The Grateful Dead, Little Feat and The Band, was started by local promoter and musician Gabe Johnson and keyboardist Evan Read-Mullins late last year. Again, passion played a key role: Johnson was inspired by family stories of the legendary July 1973 concert in Watkins Glen, New York, featuring The Grateful Dead, The Band and The Allman Brothers Band, while Read-Mullins played in a tribute to those same three acts, Dead Brothers Band, in Tacoma, Washington.

Because of the jam-heavy nature of the four bands Watkins Glen covers, the six-piece group is less tied down to creating letter-perfect versions of studio recordings than a band such as Weez-It. Often the band will weave in different elements from historic live performances of the songs, or change arrangements on the fly.

“The reason why people love these bands is not only are they tight, but they also do crazy stuff, and there might be a train wreck,” Read-Mullins said. “We’re not like a wax museum tribute band by any stretch of the imagination. … What we’re going for is to try to find out our sound, and having these bands unify us as a band. Then we grow and emerge as our own thing — the Watkins Glen sound — which is exciting and challenging and why we go to practice.”

That’s not so uncommon, either: JuJu Eyeball has thought about adding original material to its sets as well, Larsson said. Local quartet Streetlight Moon successfully made the transition from Led Zeppelin tribute act to original group this year with its full-length album “To the Moon and Back.” The band still gets in on the tribute game every now and then — it will perform at a Tom Petty tribute and benefit for hurricane relief in Puerto Rico at Volcanic Theatre Pub on Saturday (see Page 4).

“We kind of looked at it like going to the gym for music — we needed to tone up a bit,” guitarist Andrew Cooper said. “… We decided on (playing) ‘Led Zeppelin II’ (front to back). That was our first gig, and a way to kind of test the waters and see if anybody likes this music anymore — if it still had a draw.”

Eddy and Larsson consider JuJu Eyeball to be more of a Beatles cover band than a tribute, per se: The musicians don’t wear costumes beyond suits and ties, and with only three members, no one is playing a specific role. The focus is on the trio’s stripped-down takes on classic Beatles songs, with everything from guitar-driven rockers “Twist and Shout” and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” to meticulously orchestrated pieces such as “All You Need is Love” getting the treatment.

“Paul’s got a master’s degree in music composition, and all of us have been involved in recording, choir,” Larsson said. “… There’s a lot of detail that we’re able to pull off because we pay attention to those details.”

For Morden, Weez-It is more about the performance and song selection, since Weezer itself is still touring and releasing 
albums.

In the future, he hopes to include “Turning Up the Radio,” which Weezer does not play.

Tribute acts continue to open musical doors for Morden: His still-running D.C. band Party Like It’s, which records ska versions of modern pop songs, is one of the finalists in the YouTube series Best.Cover.Ever, hosted by Ludacris (the band’s episode premieres on the Best.Cover.Ever YouTube channel Monday).

“People either love it or hate it,” Morden said. “… I played in bands and you’d open for a famous band — you’d get the people in the audience just staring you down, like, ‘This is stupid, ahh, when is Everclear starting? I hate you guys.’ And you don’t get that with this because you light up a big ‘W’ and you say, ‘Hey, we’re a Weezer tribute band.’ People who don’t want to see that leave.”

“If you find a band that’s good at covering whatever artists, it can be a really great experience for people.”— Singer-songwriter 
Derek Michael Marc