Primate Brow Flash

Every time I hear a Daniel Johnston cover, I’m moved almost to tears. I heard a Speeding Motorcycle cover in my car this morning.

in 1978 I was riding my bike to the Hole in the Wall record store next to LiL’ Peach to buy Beach Boys records, but in Atlanta….

That is going on my list of favorite cover songs.
thanks to the crew at Hex message for pointing these out.

I like this one a lot too:

Fresh Air reviewed Patti Smith’s album of cover songs last night and it ended up being a nice rumination on the art of making cover songs and “reinventing the familiar”

Papa Twister inspired this. Instead of posting my favorite cover songs, I’ll just post a list of the best ones, so I can be more objective:

1. “Hurt” by Johnny Cash. There is no competition for the top slot. This one bests the original.
2. “Rowboat” by Johnny Cash. every time I hear this song, I suddenly find myself singing it to a bar full of lonely cowboys.
3. “Superstar” by Sonic Youth. A great cover of a familiar song distills the covering band’s sound.
4. “Little Red Corvette” by the Gear Daddies. This song was totally re-imagined here. Brilliant.
5. “Man who sold the world” as done by Nirvana. This cover is very worshipful of David Bowie, but Kurt Cobain’s voice and phrasing makes it hit deeper somehow.
6. “Living Life” by K. McCartey. Daniel Johnston was a spectacularly bad recording artist and performer. McCartey’s whole album of covers shows how great Johnston’s songwriting was.
7. “Ella Mae”. A Greg Brown song sung by his three daughters.
8. “S.O.S” by The Meat Purveyors. They sound like they’re having so much fun singing this.
9. “Hobo’s Lullabye” By Emmylou Harris
10. “My Revolver” as done by Soul Asylum. I remember running across the dance floor as fast as I could and bonking my head on someone’s vodka bottle. I also remember a guy from Madagascar telling me to calm down. I woke up with bruises all over my body.
11. “Gypsy Rose” as done by the Kennedys. In their album of cover songs, the Kennedys ferret out some great songwriting and apply Maura Kennedy’s beautiful voice. Easy recipe. Three or four songs from the album belong here, including “Raging Eyes” and “Happy Town”

Listening to “A Nod To Bob” from Red House Records, I started retching. It was kind of a post traumatic stress reaction caused by the hours I spent at the Cedar Cultural Center looking for authentic music.

A lot can and has been said about the sick, awful things done to Country/Americana by animatronic monkeys like Shaina Twain and Garth Brooks. That rant is ably provided by Jack Sparks.

This CD made me realize that the folk/non-commercial side of that spectrum is just as sick and empty. The same spirit that moved people to boo Bob Dylan is alive and well on the folk circuit. In a twisted irony, they assembled a bunch of folk musicians to record utterly unimaginative Dylan covers. There are a few enjoyable moments on the CD, but most of the songs are rendered with fawning precision, as if respect can only be shown by exact reproductions of the originals. (except, for some ungodly reason, they felt the need to replace “she” with ‘he’ on any songs where a girl is singing). This, of course, was the big sin of the 60’s folk revival, to try through religious exactitude to capture some imaginary American past. It is almost like Merton’s god as object argument. Bob Dylan blew up the folk revival, blew it to smithereens and these people threw Dylan up on a pedestal in its place. You can hear it in the songs, it’s like listening to a minstrel from the society for creative anachronism picking away at a lute.

The country music association has gone for banality and big white teeth to try and sell pickup trucks. They carefully cropped blues and gospel out of the picture and made a whole genre of perfectly awful music. The folkies have hurt county/americana just as much. They are the girl in second grade who is so good at coloring in the lines and whose desk and arm you had to dry off with a paper towel after coming back from the drinking fountain with a mouthful of water only to start laughing and spray it everywhere. You know that girl?