The Beatles broke up nearly 40 years ago, but you can see them live at the Keswick Theatre.

Or, at least, you can see their carbon copies.

The Fab Faux, a New York ensemble, is set to perform an exacting re-creation of the 1968 White Album at the Glenside venue. Later, 1964 - The Tribute arrives to impersonate the younger, Ed Sullivan-era Beatles, right down to their Rickenbacker guitars and Vox amplifiers.

If you want both versions of the Beatles in the same concert, you can head to the Mann Center on Saturday or Sunday to see Rain: The Beatles Experience.

It's not just the Beatles who have been cloned. Here, at the start of the summer concert season, ersatz versions of groups such as the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Genesis and even Abba are on tour and selling tickets.

"People like it," said Roy Snyder, president of the Keswick.

The rise of the tribute band is a curious phenomenon that sprang from the tradition of the solitary Elvis impersonator and blossomed into full-blown stage shows. It's not quite nostalgia: Nostalgia is forcing sound from the still-breathing members of the Drifters. It's not exactly commemoration, certainly not elegy.

While the bands may be pretend, the ticket prices are real. The Keswick is charging $37.50 to see Abba the Music, a tribute to the chart-topping Swedish group. That is more than the price of seeing Arlo Guthrie - the real Arlo Guthrie.

"There's definitely a newer, bigger interest," said Judy Alberti, vice president of entertainment at Station Casinos in Las Vegas. "The public is more tuned in to it."

Her venues regularly book bands such as Creeping Death (a tribute band to Metallica), Pyromania (Def Leppard), and Atomic Punks (Van Halen). A favorite is Steel Panther, which imitates Spinal Tap in a performance that's a spoof of a spoof.

Fans say they like being able to see - if they squint - representations of existing bands that rarely tour (such as Guns N' Roses, portrayed by Appetite for Destruction), and to sense the excitement that surrounded groups that long ago disbanded (such as Led Zeppelin, in the form of Get the Led Out).

"People go to hear them to hear great musicians re-create music that resonated in their lives," said Andrew Lavin, a Fab Faux fan who runs A. Lavin Communications in New York.

Next month, the Soft Parade, a Doors tribute, performs at the Sellersville Theater. Also due in July are the Rolling Stones tribute band Satisfaction, Almost Queen, and a Johnny Cash show called Train of Love.

A tribute band that plays larger clubs and theaters can earn a good living, much more than its musicians could make performing their own material, said Randy Alexander of Randex Communications in Marlton, who has handled publicity for bands that imitate Genesis and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

"People pay to see what they're familiar with," he said. "They're not going because they know the [tribute] band, they're going to see 'U2.' "

The competition can be keen. One fan Web site counts 637 tribute bands just for the Beatles.

Some bands concentrate on duplicating the music, while others don period clothes and play vintage instruments to simulate the original performance. The echo can sound a bit hollow. In their time, groups such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones represented rebellion, expressed in everything from the lyrics of their music to the length of their hair. Tribute bands, shorn from the context of the age, can seem safe and sanitized.

When Rain: The Beatles Experience takes the stage - offering a precise, note-by-note replication - no one in the band touts the virtues of LSD or proclaims the Beatles to be bigger than Jesus.

On the other hand, fans and promoters say, these bands allow youngsters to experience some of what they missed and oldsters to reconnect to iconic, vanished groups.

"People get goosebumps," said Rain's Joey Curatolo, who has spent half his life portraying Paul McCartney.

And you know that can't be bad.

Keeping it real

He's never gone to see a tribute band.

To him, When the Music Mattered isn't just the title of a book by Bruce Pollock. It's a description of a time when rock music was political, visceral, and potentially life- and nation-altering.

He grew up in Doylestown, graduated from La Salle University, and studies popular culture as a professor of media studies at Seton Hall University. There are worthwhile bands today, he said. Every age has its innovators. But it's also true, he said, that the music of the last 40 years hasn't approached that of the 1960s.

"There's been this question, 'Where are the new Beatles? Where are the new Stones? Where are the new Doors?' . . . For people who grew up in the '50s and '60s and '70s and saw rock music as transformative, the question is, 'Where has all that gone?' "

One answer may be that the talent pool has thinned. Another may be that the media have become so fragmented that even great bands struggle for attention. There aren't a handful of channels on TV anymore - there are hundreds. That change, along with the advent of the Internet, offers more avenues for exposure, but undermines efforts to capture a mass audience.

"The faux groups are an indication of loss," Sharrett said. "They're not trying to camp it up, but you can't help but see a camp aspect, and want to say, 'Let it go.' Lennon said that, at the end of the Beatles: Let us go - if you want to hear the music, play it."

A long and winding road

In 1976, as a teenager, he walked into a Beatles sound-alike contest and walked out a winner. After that, he appeared as McCartney in the West Coast production of Beatlemania, the Broadway musical, and since 1983 in Rain: The Beatles Experience.

"It's a role, like any other role," he said. "It's fun to do. [McCartney] was my hero, is my hero - him and John Lennon. To be able to do this is an honor. We really do take pride in the music."

It shows. Where some Beatles bands are so-so collections of guys in mop-top wigs, the musicians in Rain have plainly studied the band and the music. Costume and set changes move the show through the Beatles' story.

The Beatles performed live in the United States for only three years, from 1964 to 1966. In concert, they typically played 12 songs, and were on and off the stage in a half-hour. Rain plays a two-hour show that spans the Beatles catalogue.

Curatolo plays bass, guitar and piano, his physical performance accurate down to the familiar McCartney head bob and cloying smile (though he is right-handed, while the Beatle is a lefty). He marvels that Rain fans include not just baby boomers but children.

"I think it could run forever," Curatolo said.

A torrent of tributes

"It draws audiences," he said. A group like 1964 - The Tribute, set to play two nights in February, will probably sell out the 1,600-seat theater.

After shows by bands such as the Musical Box, a Genesis tribute, Snyder will hear hard-core fans discussing whether a certain guitar was the exact model or if the singer adequately re-created a barely noticed growl in the vocal.

"It becomes an experience," he said. "Abba will never tour again, but its music was just so enormously popular internationally. A whole new generation is discovering that."