A quick flip back to the six-song format this week as WIS ends its gloriously sunny van trip around the wonderful coast of Cornwall with a selection of covers.
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First Word
After last week’s PhD thesis on Abba (too much thinking = too many words), I wanted to change the tone of this week’s epistle. And what better way to do this than taking a quick step back into the old format and try to keep the word count down to something reasonable!
We are just back from our first trip to Cornwall and it has really delivered in terms of coastal scenery, obviously helped by an extended period of dry sunny weather – the image at the top of the blog this week is the beautiful Mullion Cove near Lizard Point. We walked on selected lengths of the South West Coast Path, just as the current literary controversy broke – but let’s not get into that. We generally tried to avoid the main tourist spots and, being outside the English school holidays, it wasn’t that busy.
However, on our last Saturday night, the weather broke and we spent our first night of the journey holed up inside the van listening to the rain on the roof. We got some wine open and some tunes on the Sonos and I solved the ‘what to listen to’ conundrum by choosing a random playlist of covers on Spotify. Here are six tunes we listened to on shuffle that evening which caught my ear for one reason or another.
A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall – Eddie Brickell & New Bohemians (1990)
Given the noises on the van roof overhead, this Dylan cover seemed to be the one to choose to open with – and there were no shortage of Dylan covers. I nearly chose the Red Hot Chilli Peppers version of Subterranean Homesick Blues just because it was so bat-shit crazy but maybe it’s for another day. Eddie Brickell & New Bohemians emerged from Dallas in the late 80s and had their greatest mainstream success with their 1988 debut LP Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars, which spawned the excellent single What I Am, a top ten hit in the US and No 31 in the UK. They were never going to surpass this start and so it proved. After their second LP in 1990, Brickell left the band and married Paul Simon in 1992. And while Donkey’s line in Shrek (“celebrity marriages – they never last”) generally holds true, the couple remain together to this day.
The success of the first record got Eddie a role in the 1989 Oliver Stone film Born on the Fourth of July, the second of his Vietnam trilogy. Based on the life of anti-war activist Ron Kovic, it starred Tom Cruise and won Stone the Best Director Oscar that year. Brickell played a folk-singer in the movie and performed A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall which made it on to the soundtrack album, alongside John Williams’ much-admired orchestral score. I recall the movie being a powerful piece of cinema that did well at the box office. And when Brickell’s Dylan cover was released as a single at the same time, I am pretty sure it got a good bit of radio airplay. Checking now, it only got to No83 in the UK and didn’t trouble the Billboard chart in the US at all. However, as the hard rain fell, I quite enjoyed hearing her folk-rock take on the tune, so into the playlist it went.
I Want You (She’s So Heavy) – Umphrey’s McGee (2015)
There was also no shortage of Beatles covers to choose from, but this one jumped out at me at first because of the name of the artist – I was thinking who the hell are Umphrey’s MgGee? And, what’s more, why did they choose such a bloody awful name. Then when I listened to their version of John Lennon’s obsessive ode to Yoko I Want You (She’s So Heavy) from the Fab’s Abbey Road LP, I thought, actually, that’s not half bad. So I dug a little further. [It appears they often shorten their name to UM which I’m going to adopt for this note.] Originating from Indiana but now based in Chicago, UM have been releasing music since 1998 and have a nice touch in self-deprecation. Their debut album was named Greatest Hits Vol III, and its follow-up was wryly titled Local Band Does OK. That they’ve released more live albums than studio recordings suggests a popular touring act who identify their primary influences as The Police, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. In that order.
Their cover comes from their 2018 album The London Session, which was the result of a day they spent recording (mostly) their own songs in Abbey Road studios, where the original version of I Want You was recorded. They keep their version fairly close to the original but sensibly reduce it by two minutes, something George Martin should have done back in 1969 as he watched the Fab Four fall apart in front of him. UM swing the Latin sections slightly more and generally add more instrumental colour to the track – in particular, Billy Preston’s keyboard part is filled out more. And the guitar solo on the (shortened) outro is a welcome addition. However, it’s still got all the key and time signature changes that made the original a long 7m 47s to get through. And there is that terrible name to get over…
You Can’t Always Get What You Want – Hem (2011)
And completing the sixties triptych, this one was the stand-out of the many Stones covers that the shuffled playlist threw at us. The original was famously recorded with the received pronunciation of the London Bach Choir contrasting with Jagger’s affected southern drawl – “You kent always git what you wawnt”. It appeared on the classic 1969 LP Let It Bleed, with producer Jimmy Miller replacing Charlie Watts on the drums – apparently, Watts couldn’t play the groove, which I find really hard to fathom! All I knew of Hem was that they recorded a lovely folky version of Elvis Costello’s The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes which appeared on a various artists, EC covers collection in 2003. So to see them on an album subtitled An Alt-Country Tribute to The Rolling Stones was maybe no surprise.
Hem hail from Brooklyn, New York and adopt a number of traditional instruments in their music – think glockenspiel, accordion, mandolin etc etc. They are no stranger to a de-constructed cover and their version of the Stones classic is just that – no big choir, just stripped back vocals from singer Sally Ellyson with everything taken at a slower pace. There is some gorgeous pedal steel playing and the strings on the outro float beautifully towards and long slow fade. Just terrific.
The Chauffeur – Deftones (2011)
It was the name of the band that attracted me to this one. I’ve managed to get through to this point in my life being unaware of American nu-metal band Deftones – probably due to living under my own wee rock. But when we arrived at the Eden Project to marvel at what you can do with an abandoned china clay pit, we discovered they run a series of concerts there over the summer and I noticed the last band to have played there was Deftones. Then, London bus-like, we tune into RadMac last Saturday morning and they play a track by Deftones. And then this pops up on a playlist!
When I began listening, the tune was intriguing too. I knew that I knew the song well, but I just couldn’t place it at first. And then it hit me – Duran Duran! The Chauffeur was on the Rio album, which you couldn’t get away from in 1982 as it was on everywhere you went. The LP sold in bucket-loads, eventually spending a whopping 110 weeks in the album chart. In this scribe’s view, The Chaffeur was the song that stood out, coming last on the record and sounding a lot different to the polished New Romantic pop of the rest of the material. Based on a …erm… poem that Simon le Bon had written before he joined the many Taylors in the band, the sparse, moody synth arrangement was written and played entirely by Nick Rhodes. Deftones recreate the synth lines with guitars and have decency to wait until about three minutes in before stomping on the distortion pedal.
Season of the Witch – Lana Del Ray (2019)
Another one where I knew the tune but couldn’t place it at first. After wracking my brains, I had to resort to t’internet to tell me that it was Season of the Witch by Scottish folk troubadour Donovan and appeared on his 1966 LP Sunshine Superman which was a US No11 album, no less. When legal hassles delayed its release in the UK to the following year, it struggled for attention but still made No25. The Maryhill lad began his career writing and performing influenced by Dylan and Woodie Guthrie but, by 1966, he was moving into more psychedelic pop music. Season of the Witch was recorded in California where Donovan was looking for a more rock-orientated sound and chose some local club musicians to give him that groove. One review said “the languid and trippy lyrics and music project a dark foreboding atmosphere, a sort of sinister tale of paranoia and the paranormal”.
So it’s maybe no surprise that director André Øvredal and producer Guillermo del Toro used Donavon’s song extensively in their 2019 supernatural horror movie Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark. Not my kind of movie but I understand that del Toro was a great admirer of Lana Del Ray’s work and asked her to undertake a cover of the song to use in the closing credits and in the promo-material. Her interpretation features breathy vocals with the echo turned up and stripped back instrumentation, but it still manages to maintain the sinister nature of the original.
New York – Cat Power (2008)
The final and shortest tune is a track taken from American singer-songwriter Cat Power’s 2008 covers album Jukebox. This is the second of three covers collections she has released over her thirty year recording career – and that’s not counting her song-for-song ‘re-creation’ of Dylan’s 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert, which came out in 2023. I really like her work and enjoy the way she takes other people’s songs and puts a personal stamp on them. Had I not already included a Dylan cover above, I might have playlisted her terrific version of Stuck Inside of Mobile, which I urge you to have a listen to.
But I’ve gone for her unusual take on a song that everybody knows. As well as shortening the song to only 2 minutes, she abbreviates the title to just the singular New York. Liza Minelli and, more famously, Frank Sinatra adopted the double-barrelled version for their big band versions, taken from Martin Scorsese’s 1977 movie title. It was the theme tune after all, written by John Kander and Fred Ebb. Adopting a kinda lazy lounge blues groove and shifting the emphasis on the melody line, Ebb’s overly familiar lyric gets re-born by Power’s emotive vocal and it really jumps out at you. “These vagabond shoes are longin’ to stray” is a great line and deserves to be heard like this.
Last Word
Well, that was all pretty straightforward to put together, probably as the six tunes fell into my lap. Maybe the old format has some life left in it yet. We shall see…
The master playlist gets a six song boost this week and can be found in the usual place.
AR
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