42 posts tagged “covers”
UK funk trio the Baker Brothers (Dan Baker, Rich Baker, and non-brother Chris Pedley) are generally a little too close to smooth jazz/disco for me (too much hi-hat, not enough snare), but "Aargh, Aargh-Aargh" would fit right in on my virtual mixtape of Badass Instrumentals:
The Baker Brothers' latest album is Avid Sounds, a collection of covers of 70s funk and soul classics performed with assorted guest vocalists. I especially like their version of "Fly Like An Eagle"; I thought the Neville Brothers had realized that song's fullest funky potential, but I think the Baker Brothers have surpassed them:
I could write about the just-deceased Jim Carroll, or the Beatles remasters, or New Model Army's imminent US tour, but I won't, because tonight I want to present one of my favorite musical novelty groups, The Promenaders. Their sole album was recorded as a busking session on Brighton Beach in 1981 (and one track at an "Exclusive Brighton Discotheque"). Loxhawn Rondeaux, Stuart Barefoot, Steve Topp, and company zip through an eclectic selection of oldies (including some really old oldies) on saxophone, euphonium, one-string violin, cello, and percussion, concluding with their great ethnomusical experiment, a medley of "(Won't You Play A) Simple Melody", "Tibetan Promenade", and "Nellie The Elephant":
The Tibetan section never fails to crack me up.
If those names seem suspect, it is because they are pseudonyms for merry musical anarchists Lol Coxhill, Steve Beresford, and David Toop; The Promenaders can be seen as a forerunner of Coxhill's Melody Four project.
And now for something completely different: a trip into my vinyl vault! John Fred and his Playboy Band had been together, off and on, for over ten years by the time their song "Judy In Disguise (with Glasses)" (my one and only karaoke experience) rocketed to #1 in 1967. While the song is always described as a parody of the Beatles' "Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds", I think it's more accurate to say that the song's title is a parody of the Beatles' song's title; that's where the similarities end. Still, John Fred remained in the shadow of the Fab Four; despite having a crack Lousiana R&B band behind him, his songwriting always leaned towards Beatlesque pop. This holds true on his last album for a major label, 1970's Love My Soul (with a largely reconstituted Playboy Band). The leadoff track, "The Big Show", is an intro song in the manner of "Magical Mystery Tour" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", and even links the Playboys to the Beatles with the lyrics, "While Judy in disguise, her glasses hide her eyes, is walking hand in hand with the leader of some lonely hearts club band" (cue trumpets):
(Oddly, "The Big Show" was not written by John Fred but by Robin Hood Brians, owner of the Tyler, Texas, studio where the album was recorded, and two co-writers. Amazingly, Brians and his studio are still around.) And then, when the Playboys stretch out into a real southern groove, it's on... a cover of a Beatles song!
It seems like just a few months ago I went on a funk jag, but looking back at the deep funk tags on the blog I see it was in the fall of 2007. Then my interest got sucked into other genres for nearly two years. Last night I started catching up on the new releases I missed, and there are a lot of them; most of the premiere deep funk bands put out an album this year (with the notable exception of Speedometer). The songs that made the biggest impression on first listen are the covers, and while they are not necessarily the best tracks on the albums, they are all worth sharing. I'll start off with one that goes right in the "unlikely covers" category: Australian trio Cookin' On 3 Burners doing a funked-up version of Gary Numan's "Cars":
As an addendum to yesterday's post of C Cat Trance's cover of The Tymes' "Hypnotized", here is the other cover from their first EP, the Chairmen of the Board's "Dangling On a String". CCT added a hard edge to "Hypnotized", but they change the tenor of "Dangling" entirely, transforming a rather average uptempo Motownesque number into a charging locomotive of desperation with angry outbursts of sax:
(This version included on the 1988 CD release of Play Masenko Combo restores about three minutes that were excised from the original EP with an abrupt fadeout.)
Medium Medium were responsible for what may be the definitive postpunk single, "Hungry, So Angry". Two of their members, Rees Lewis and Nigel Kingston Stone, left the band to form C Cat Trance, a band I hold in such esteem that to even begin to write about them is an overwhelming proposition. They hit upon the perfect combination of rock, funk, skronk, and Middle Eastern music, and while many rock bands who try to incorporate world music into their sound end up with watering down both genres, C Cat Trance kept a sharp edge through the course of several albums and singles. So while I'm still thinking about postpunk bands covering R&B songs, I present C Cat Trance's version of "Hypnotized" from their first EP, a song that I found out just tonight, after 26 years of searching, was originally by The Tymes on their 1976 album Tymes Up. Thank you Google, Discogs, and DISMARC!
More C Cat Trance to come.
Maybe the idea of having Joy Division cover an R&B hit was not so far-fetched after all. It has occurred to me since my July 26 post that JD's fellow Mancunians A Certain Ratio turned out a decent cover of Banbarra's "Shack Up". (Banbarra were from Washington, DC, and I grew up just outside DC, but I never heard their original "Shack Up" until recently, oddly enough. I was nine years old at the time of its release in 1975 and was not yet attuned to anything outside the national Top 40. Shame on me.) Postpunk fellow travellers Siouxsie and the Banshees' version of Ben E. King's "Supernatural Thing" was pretty smokin' as well.
During his rock-and-roll days Paul McCartney's brother Mike adopted the last name McGear, under which name he was a member of the bands The Scaffold and Grimms. He kept the name for his solo albums as well, the second of which, McGear (1974), was produced by brother Paul who also played on all the tracks, as did the other members of Wings. It is essentially a Wings album with a guest lead vocalist. McGear is of interest to me for the inclusion of a Roxy Music cover, "Sea Breezes":
It's just not the same without the electric piano leitmotif of the original, or Manzanera's noisy guitar freakout, or with the choppy rhythm of the middle session replaced with a cheesy "reggae" beat; and of course no Roxy cover can match Bryan Ferry's unique vocals. But still, Paul McCartney playing Roxy Music is a novelty worth sharing. And it's one of many little revelations contained in Jonathan Rigby's exhaustive Roxy history Both Ends Burning.
That seems to be what he is aiming for with his Woven Hand project, variously described as "Gothic Americana" or "Dark Country." His cover of Bill Withers' secular "Ain't No Sunshine" is pretty comepelling:
Hearing Bryan Ferry's "You Go To My Head" always makes me want to hear "Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart"; they both have a sinuous dreaminess that makes them go together well. I first heard SGHOMH on Marc Almond's The Stars We Are in 1988:
And that's the only version I knew until last week, when I started looking into the song's origins. Here is its concise history per Wikipedia:
Originally recorded by David and Jonathan, and then Gene Pitney in 1967, the song reached #5 on the UK singles chart but failed to chart in the USA. The song was subsequently covered by a number of other acts including Cilla Black, Terry Reid and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on their 1986 album of covers Kicking Against the Pricks.
I'd never listened to Gene Pitney before, but YouTube has a vintage TV performance of SGHOMH, and wow, what a voice! He sounds like a cross between Roy Orbison Davy Jones (that's what I meant to write!) and Robin Gibb:
Pitney had a long and successful career (yet another musical avenue for me to explore), and was on a UK tour when he died of heart failure in 2006. But getting back to the 80s, here's where it gets interesting: for Almond's single release of SGHOMH, it was turned into a duet with Gene Pitney; fueled by another TV performance, it went to Number One!
"Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart" was actually written, and originally recorded by, British folk duo David and Jonathan, a.k.a. Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway. You may be familiar with some of the other songs they penned: "I'd Like to Teach the World To Sing"; the Hollies' "Long Cool Woman (in a Black Dress)" (which I thought was by Creedence for the longest time); "Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again"; and "My Baby Loves Lovin'", to name a few. In fact, in just twelve days they are being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (along with Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; and I'll just stop there.) The completist in my wants to post David and Jonathan's original version, but the best I can do is the 30-second sample from the online music stores:
Of the other covers of SGHOMH, the only one worth featuring here is Nick Cave's (of course):
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