Enter the name of any song on YouTube and you’ll likely find covers aplenty. Most will be pale recreations of the original source material. Even fewer will add anything new or insightful along the way. Instead, what you’ll find are fans playing songs they love: affectionate but, as an artistic endeavor, pointless. The best covers will offer something new. They’ll add something to the song’s language, changing it’s tone and personality, even it’s face and body—hence the “reassignment surgery.” Doing it well is a tall order and that’s why the good ones are such a rarity. As I said here, a good cover will even make you hear the lyrics in a new way—adding more subtext to the original. Some Cover Champions of Note:
Jeff Buckley, Hallelujah
Janis Joplin, Me and Bobby Magee
David Bowie, Wild Is the Wind
Johnny Cash, Hurt
Earth, Wind, and Fire, Got to Get You Into My Life
Talking Heads, Take Me to the River
Bryan Ferry, A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall
Jimi Hendrix, All Along the Watchtower
Nina Simone, I Put a Spell on You, especiallythis, and just about anything else she’s done
And this: two Dutch teens wring depths of emotion from Creep you never knew was there, while betraying the emotion with grinning faces
And Cover Losers: Mostly everyone and everything else. Another add for the Champion List: This diamondfrom the Moulin Rouge! movie soundtrack.
The album was No Talking, Just Head (1996). The band was the Talking Heads without figurehead David Byrne. In his place would be a roster of luminary guest vocalists also contributing to the material, including lyrics. At the time of its release, the album was met with considerable skepticism. The result was immediately dismissed by critics and fans alike: sales tanked. I’m going to guess that, like me, most never bothered to listen to it. I still wouldn’t have had it not been for drummer Chris Frantz’s recent interview in Rolling Stone to push his recently published memoir, Remain in Love. In it, he mentions the album. It turns out, the album wasn’t the turd we were led to believe it was. Like this one with Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano: By 1984, at the Talking Heads’ commercial peak, at Byrne’s insistence, the band stopped touring. By the later years the band’s music had become less collaborative and Byrne would eventually leave the enterprise behind by 1991. I’ve heard it said that bassist Tina Weymouth had been wanting to get Byrne out for some time and hoped to replace him with guitarist/vocalist Adrian Belew. If you don’t know, Belew had toured with Talking Heads in both 1980 and 1981 and also played on the Tom Tom Club’s 1981 debut album—a Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz side project that would go on to do very well. (Belew would join King Crimson in 1981.) XTC’s Andy Partridge also makes a contribution.
Lettuce is a six-man squad churned out of the famous Boston Berklee School of Music that plays funk in the tradition of Dennis Coffey and the Detroit Guitar Band, Tower of Power, and the large ensemble sound version of Prince—guitars rhythming unassumingly and unashamedly out front. With a debut that dropped in 1991, Lettuce—like Fishbone—maybe hoary enough to be second or third-generation old skool. The sound is intricate and deep, swerving into the middle-of-the-road lane at times, but overall worthy bearers of the standard, whichever direction it goes.
Seratones, Gotta to Get to Know Ya (2019):
Shreveport, LA’s Seratones have been compared to Alabama Shakes but I don’t hear it. They’re both white rhythm sections fronted by black women but that’s where the resemblance ends—though, I’ll confess to know embarrassingly little about the Shakes (the name put me off). The Shakes are rootsier and the ’Tones are punkier but otherwise, it’s a useless comparison. I prefer Seratones. As far as this tune goes, the opening shrieked whoos alone ought to be enough to bring you in. Passed that, it’s all hard candy funk and butt-shuffling melody to follow. In another age, it’s the kind of territory Ike and Tina might’ve inhabited.
Cory Wong, Cosmic Sans (2017):
The wah-wah and Stratocaster groove here drops like nuclear fallout. The chorus goes a just slightly north of schmaltzy but the thumb-heavy bass thump counterbalances. Altogether, it’s a smoker.
Fishbone,So Many Millions (1991):
Nineteen ninety-one seems so old skool now but the cascade of analog layers bring the Funkadelic like no one else—save peak Funkadelic. The drummer drives the herd like a border collie but what follows in its wake is nothing less than reckless joy.
Curtis Harding, Dream Girl (2017):
Harding’s sound is syringed deep from the gravy of the classic early 60s period but he also provides plenty of young blood to go with it. Territorially, he’s not far afield from what Amy Winehouse was doing though his affections and affectations can tip more toward the garage than Winehouse’s big production sound would’ve. This is a groove you and your parents can listen to together.
She played the same Greenwich Village folk clubs that Dylan did when he was coming up. They’d even play together on occasion. Of her, Dylan would say: “Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it.” Folkie Fred Neil (he wrote Everybody’s Talking from the movie Midnight Cowboy) said: “The greatest female singer I’ve ever heard.” Tim Hardin (he wrote Reason to Believe which both Dalton recorded and Rod Stewart made famous) said: “She’s an incredible broad.” Billboard magazine called her “spellbinding.” Dalton didn’t care much for the Billie Holiday comparison. She loved the music but hated the business. Her recording sessions were reportedly difficult and she didn’t do many. Many of her songs were recorded in a single take. Her style was soft and slow and restrained and her voice was perforated with pain. She was twice divorced and the mother of two children by 21 and, according to her daughter, had lost her bottom incisors breaking up a fight between two boyfriends. Her managers didn’t know what to do with her. After her last album in 1971 didn’t sell, she quit music, worked as a domestic and lived out her days in a trailer in Woodstock, New York. “I like being alone,” she said. Her small but loyal cult of fans included Nick Cave, Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and Lacy J. Dalton (no relation). They’ve all cited her influence. She also struggled with drugs and alcohol. (She may’ve been wrong about that being alone.) In 1993 she’d walk out on her rehab and died soon after of an AIDS-related illness. Fred Neil: “Her voice is so unique, to describe it would take a poet. All I can say is she sure can sing the shit out of the blues.” Read more here.
Black Dog (Jones, Page, Plant),Franck Tortiller—Orchestre National de Jazz(2009)
Appropos of nothing but black: The Angriest Dog in the World by David Lynch
Led Zeppelin’s Black Dog (1971) was built on a dynamic of a call and response between singer and band—its format of start and stop a cappella verses was said to be inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s Oh Well(1969). According to Zep biographer Dave Lewis, the title references a nameless black labrador wandering around the studio at the time the band was recording. Otherwise, the dog had nothing to do with anything. The term black dog itself is often used as a metaphor for melancholy or depression. About half way in, after Robert Plant’s requisite rounds of salacious plaints, the song goes darker: Didn't take too long ‘fore I found out/What people mean by down and out The riff was devised by John Paul Jones. It would also be his first compositional contribution to the band (it was originally written on the back of a train ticket). The phrase was based on a reworking of a Muddy Waters riff. Its angular sound comes from its three measures of 3/4 (the first measure pausing a beat and a half before starting) and ending on a measure of 5/4. Drummer John Bonham ignores all of that and plays a straight 4/4 throughout. On the turnaround—a quirky 9/8—Bonzo accents with a cymbal crash that somehow smears it all together neatly. Jonesie thought the fraudulent beat was the necessary element that brought it all together: It managed to reach the Top 15 (U.S) singles chart. Those who’ve analyzed Zep’s rhythms and tempos know that they defy quantizing—i.e., while it sounds good, mathematically they’re a beautiful mess. The songs breathe. Hearing that riff described through horns gives it a kind of stitched together polka feel. The song comes from an album of Zeppelin covers by French vibraphonist and bandleader Franck Tortiller.
Summertime: A song, I’d argue, that’s one of the sexiest to ever scrape a chord and float on drawn breath. For the inspired listener, the song’s traditionally sultry and languid journey into the earhole can drip straight to nipple and flap, thicken the pipe, and dry the mouth ever so. With a libation or two, what panty or zipper could resist the urge to drop? Summertime does all of this with an old fashioned and naïve grace and subtlety AKA as metaphor and double entendre. More contemporary expressions perfer the direct (like Cupcakke). While I can appreciate the brevity and laser focus of directness, there’s an argument to be made when the brain is left to do some of the work itself. The best art—be it an advertising headline, jokes, a plot device, entendre, etc.—always has layers. So, when the lyricist refers to fish and cotton as a stand-in for horny, the effect goes much deeper. Add to that, the song’s glistening descriptions of a world popping out all over with fecundity and a turgid impatience: It’s a boojie and banger universe where there just may be something for every body—but you’d better act now, it’s a limited-time offer: Summertime/And the livin’ is easy/Fish are jumpin’/And the cotton is high Oh, your daddy’s rich/And your ma is good lookin’/So hush, little baby/Don't you cry One of these mornings/You’re going to rise up singing/Then you'll spread your wings/And you'll take the sky/But ’til that morning/There’s a’nothing can harm you/With daddy and mammy standing by A word about the source material: For those who don’t know, Summertime was from the operetta Porgy and Bess—with a libretto based on a 1925 novel by Dubose Howard. It’d be easy to dismiss the material as more white appropriation of black culture but the work’s immortality, and the only reason we’ve any interest in this anachronistic work now, is wholly due to the career-peaking tunes of George Gershwin and lyrics by his older brother Ira. Just to note: Howard received praise for presenting black culture without condescension—no small achievement in the 1920s, a time when minstrelsy still wasn’t even a corpse yet. (Shirley Temple did it in 1935.) Howard had gotten props from no less than poet Langston Hughes.
Back to the song: Despite my argument for the song’s potent swirl of aphrodisia, Billy Stewart’s 1966 rendition has none of that. His has way too much bounce and agitation, way too much Las Vegas showroom in the arrangement for much sexy: This version is for standing up and moving, not laying down. But what Billy Stewart does do is freebase the tune with a hyper-exuberance that’s like blue crystal meth onto the song’s original edible vibe of cannabis passion potion—a feel the original composers had clearly intended. Between his violent alveolar tongue trill that starts the song, and his ululating vocal run that ends it, in between we have four minutes of pure high impact aerobic joy. Early in his career, Elton John was in a band that had opened for Stewart. On Elvis Costello’s television show Spectacle he told a story of a night when an audience member had foolishly thrown something at the 300+ pound singer as he was singing. Stewart dropped his hulk off the stage and chased down the evening’s anarchist. It is that very same kind of intense spunk that’s all over this song. That spunk will force exhilaration into your earhole by the fistful.
Take 5 (Paul Desmond), 1959: The Dave Brubeck Quartet
The brilliant guitarist Marc Ribot and his Ceramic Dog rhythm section take a sonic ball-peen hammer to this otherwise dusty and overly patinated American standard. Ribot’s fingers leave little of the original. Instead, he treats the tune like a textbook, leaving his highlights, notes, and doodles all over the pages. The original rhythm remains, if less recognizable, and the melody gets battered and deep-fried like a county fair Twinkie. By the time he gets into deep space with it, what’s left kind of skips off towards Neptune. As a pilot, Ribot has never navigated anywhere straight, but if you’re prepared, the trip will be extraordinary.
