7 posts tagged “covers”
Several weeks ago I wrote about Iggy Pop and Peter Murphy sounding nearly the same; just yesterday I discovered the live radio performances that Peter Murphy and Trent Reznor gave during the joint Nine Inch Nails/Bauhaus tour of 2006. Lo and behold, they did an Iggy Pop cover:
And to pile on the coincidences, Trent released a new Nine Inch Nails album today (The Slip), for free!
Item 1: Mrs. Veneer buys Ryuichi Sakamoto's CD of solo piano pieces, BTTB. It's quite beautiful and Sakamoto mostly avoids the New Age clichés that plague so many piano CDs. Some of the pieces are obvious homages to classical works, such as "Opus," which evokes the Gymnopédies of Erik Satie:
Item 2: I learn from Wiel's Time Capsule that Mark Stewart is preparing a new album (his first of new material since 1995!) and tour, and that he has a new video out:
Connection 1: Hey, didn't Mark Stewart include that same Gymnopédie on his 1987 album? Yep, as part of the backing track for "Stranger" (a.k.a. "Stranger Than Love"):Connection 2: I've heard some of those lyrics before: "Somewhere, there is a place for us". They're from "Somewhere," from West Side Story. David Sylvian recorded a version of that for a TIAA-CREF commercial:
Connection 3: Sylvian and Sakamoto's collaborative song "Forbidden Colours," from the movie Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, is perhaps the best-known song by either of them in the US:
Connection 4: Hey, Mark Stewart did two versions of "Forbidden Colours" on that very same album! Here's the dub version:
It's all connected!
I have previously written about my dear friend, the late Mark Harp. Mark's band Null Set brought postpunk to Baltimore; when another band called Null Set, from another city, put out a record, Mark's Null Set changed their name to Cabal. The singer for Null Set and Cabal was Bill Dawson; after Cabal broke up, he teamed up with George Hagegeorge to form Black Pete and play guitar-charged industrial music in the vein of Ministry and Skinny Puppy. They put out one twelve-inch in 1989, recruited an apparently substance-addled young glam-metal dude as their "bassist" (though it was speculated that his real role was to get into fights and thereby gain "cred" for the band), and folded shortly thereafter. I missed my window for getting a copy of the record back then, but thanks to the Internet and GEMM, the window is open again. I found a copy and ordered it (from a dealer with multiple copies), and it arrived yesterday. The A-side is a cover of Mountain's "Mississippi Queen"--
Coincidentally, on the same day, Ministry released their supposedly final album, Cover Up, a collection of covers of classic rock tunes, one of which is... can you guess? That's right, "Mississippi Queen"--
That last part of this version (one of eight they recorded) has the best bass-drum workout since Steam's 1969 hit and perennial stadium favorite "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye"--
I would have loved Cover Up in 1990, perhaps as late as 1995. Maybe if I pretend it's a reissue, or long-suppressed recordings just released from the vault!!!, I'll like it better.
Finally, wouldn't it be funny to refer to Laibach as Audioslav?
Of course everyone knows that "On the Road Again" is a blues standard made famous by Canned Heat in 1968:
But I didn't know that in the 80s; my first encounter with it was on synth band (or what in retrospect is referred to as "minimal wave") Schleimer K's debut album from 1981:
I love the stuttering kick drum in this version, you won't hear that beat anywhere else. Probably. The organ noodling by Dominique Brethes is also nice. What does it say about me that my favorite song on this album turned out to be an old blues cover? Obviously my musical tastes were not as esoteric as I once thought they were. I'm fine with that now, but it was a rather embarrassing bit of self-discovery when I finally heard the Canned Heat song for the first time. (And even that is a cover of sorts, based on a much older song by Floyd Jones, which in turn is based on an even older song. I lack the fortitude to track down the whole provenance.) This Schleimer K album is one of the many I sold during the 90s, thinking I would never listen to it again, so why keep it? Ten years later my life is completely different, and I do want to revisit the music I used to like, and thanks to Mutant Sounds and Phoenix Hairpins I can. And I still like it!
Finally, since every song reminds me of another song, I'll mention that Schleimer K singer Michael Wolfen's offhand, half-spoken vocal style was used extensively by Nik Fiend on Alien Sex Fiend's second (and best) album, Acid Bath. The atmospheric quality and midtempo beat of "Breakdown And Cry (Lay Down and Die...Goodbye) make it a good pairing with "On the Road Again"--
Some other time I'll relate how Alien Sex Fiend almost played in Adelphi, Maryland.
I bought Shawn Lee's new Christmas album (subtitled "Funky Treats from Santa's Bag) under his Ping Pong Orchestra moniker, and as expected it is one groovy treat. Here's his version of "Do You Hear What I Hear," a la Deodato:
And here's a Deodato lagniappe:
Here starts at last my Crooners thread, and I will state right here at the beginning that no songs posted will contain the MMc Factor. In this case MMc stands not for Microsoft Management Console, but Michael McDonald. Just as there are certain flavors I can't stand (wintergreen), and certain smells (whatever the key scent in scented toilet paper is), and certain textures (eggplant), so are there sounds I don't like, and one of them is Michael McDonald's voice. That is the sound I call the MMc Factor. Other singers have it, too, and that has prevented me from liking music that I would have enjoyed otherwise. XTC is a prime example; I have a hard time getting past Andy Partridge's MMc Factor.
So with that out of the way I'll segue from Sheffield into Crooners with a Sheffield crooner, John Stuart. Richard Hawley is currently riding a wave of popularity in the UK as the "Sheffield Sinatra," but in 1987 he played guitar behind velvet-voiced ex-Chakk singer John Stuart on Stuart's only solo single, a cover of Seals and Crofts' "Summer Breeze." You will never hear a lusher version:
(There's that unmistakable Designers Republic graphic style again.)
Rounding out the backing band, billed as The Heavenly Music Corporation, are Dee Boyle (drums, also from Chakk), Darrell de Silva (sax), Jon Quarmby (keyboards), Justin Bennett (percussion), and Heather Allen (backing vocals), with production by Rob Gordon.
Alas, that was all from The Heavenly Music Corporation as such. Stuart would go on to be a member of the Lovebirds (with Hawley) and Magic Bullets. He now lives in Barcelona and continues making lovely music as one-half of Forgetting, and on his own as, once again, The Heavenly Music Corporation. (Hooray again for MySpace!)
After my favorite movie production number, I thought I would share my favorite musical production from a televised awards program. Watching the MTV awards show in 1994 with my friend Brian (a.k.a. Tumbleweed), we could not contain our glee at the performance of "Sweet Home Alabama" by the Leningrad Cowboys with the Russian Red Army Choir:
Okay, I don't know if that clip is from the same show that I saw, but it's the only one I can use. The Leningrad Cowboys are actually a Finnish band with a schtick, the schtick being that they are Russian rustics (hence the long, pointy shoes) interpreting rock'n'roll (hence the enormous, pointed pompadours) via Russian folk idioms. Their first feature film, Leningrad Cowboys Go America (from 1989), is a rather amusing journey through musical America, but if you don't like the schtick, you won't like the movie. Apparently they have been quite successful over the years, judging by the wealth of clips on YouTube showing them performing in huge outdoor venues. Their version of Uriah Heep's "Easy Livin'" is my favorite Uriah Heep cover ever, and probably would be even if it weren't the only Uriah Heep cover I've ever heard:
Dig that Fat Elvis suit with a hubcap for a belt buckle!
