Thursday 5/16, The Paramount Theater
For many rock musicians, the idea of being in a cover band is about as low as you can sink: You’re running through someone else’s songs over and over, impersonating their look while aping their playing style, and, worst of all, there’s the potential for disappointing audiences so familiar with the music, they’ll immediately recognize if anything is amiss.
So you can only imagine how much higher the stakes are for people performing as The Beatles. This may be doubly true for an outfit that’s so sure of itself that it trademarked the moniker The Fab Four, and has deemed its act The Ultimate Tribute. They better be nothing short of damn good.
All the evidence is in The Fab Four’s favor. What began in 1997 with a quartet of Californians spearheaded by Ron McNeil (John Lennon) and Ardavan Sarraf (Paul McCartney) became big enough to take over Las Vegas, requiring additional cast members to step in to meet the high demand. Since the group got going, more than two dozen men have performed as various members of the musical pride of Liverpool, yet all involved are wholly dedicated to the craft. Sarraf, who is naturally right-handed, learned to play lefty bass to better emulate Macca, and one of the original Ringo drummers actually wore a prosthetic to make up for his own shrimpy schnoz. That’s the kind of commitment we’re getting from this detail-oriented act.
If their impressive instrument endorsement list is anything to go by (as it’s all the big band manufacturers that The Beatles themselves used), it’s clear that they have given incredible amounts of attention to getting all the sounds right as well. Given the large cast, it’s difficult to say exactly how close the individual voices are, but you can be sure they are within striking distance of their idols’ pipes. And with three costume changes at their disposal, they’ll be able to pull off the fresh-off-the-plane early Beatles; the shiny, vivid, orchestral Beatles; and the bearded, bell-bottomed hippie Beatles, too.
Money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you a ticket to ride a wave of nostalgia most of us were either too young for, or too far away to experience ourselves.
Supplied Photo
