Jan 262024
 

Cover Classics takes a closer look at all-cover albums of the past, their genesis, and their legacy.

Sun Ra Second Star to the Right

In 1988, tribute album pioneer Hal Willner released Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films. The likes of Tom Waits, Bonnie Raitt, Sinead O’Connor, Los Lobos, and Ringo Starr all contributed to a record that mostly leaned toward the nightmarish feel of  films like Snow White (1937) and Sleeping Beauty (1959). This was not an album to play for the kids at bedtime.

One cover that stood out was Sun Ra and his Arkestra’s performance of “Pink Elephants On Parade” from Dumbo (1941). Those who knew Sun Ra as a pioneer of free jazz might have expected a drastic reinvention, but what he delivered was a faithful recreation of the original arrangement. This approach was not unusual for the Arkestra: while the group was (and is) famous for their improvised freakouts, they were (and are) equally adept at reverent renditions of standards by Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and others. Sun Ra approached this Disney song as he would any tune from the Great American Songbook.

Stay Awake was released, and everyone involved soon moved on. Everyone, that is, except for Sun Ra, who plunged headlong into a full-on Disney obsession. By February 1989, Ra was ready to premiere a series of concerts billed as “A Salute to Walt Disney,” which lasted nearly three hours and were comprised almost entirely of Disney material. At the first such concert at NYC’s The Bottom Line, for example, the Arkestra mined the Disney songbook for classics like “Chim-Chim Cheree” from Mary Poppins (1964), “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Pinocchio (1940), and “Cruella DeVille” from 101 Dalmations (1961). Wikipedia reports that Sun Ra even performed a concert at Disney World, although details of this event are hard to come by.

These live performances allowed for more improvisation than the studio recording of “Pink Elephants,” but they were still played with respect for the original melodies, and in a spirit of fun that’s often missing from the covers on Stay Awake. While the arrangements themselves are usually very faithful, the fact that these songs are being played by Sun Ra at all gives the performances an extremely surreal vibe.

For years there was no document of Sun Ra’s 1989 “Disney Period” outside of bootlegs. That all changed in 1999 with the release on Leo Records of Second Star to the Right (Salute to Walt Disney), featuring tracks from a show in Ulrichsberg, Austria. This is an audience recording, and someone close to the taper can be heard throughout the show laughing aloud in disbelief at what’s unfolding onstage.
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Nov 242023
 

Cover Classics takes a closer look at all-cover albums of the past, their genesis, and their legacy.

The Pointer Sisters

When we think of The Pointer Sisters–June, Ruth, and Anita, L to R above–we tend to think of their fun, frothy, soul-pop ’80s mega-hits like “He’s So Shy,” “I’m So Excited,” “Jump (For My Love),” and “Automatic” (to name a handful). These deliriously happy 40-year-old (!) songs, with their “roller rink-aerobics class-cruise the strip in a neon pink convertible” vibes, still have the power to kickstart even the most jaded heart.

But those hits don’t tell the whole Pointer Sisters story. You see, in the late ’70s, just before the aforementioned hot fudge sundae of singles was unleashed, The Pointer Sisters released two bona fide, screaming, strutting, sexy ROCK albums in a row. This is the story of those rebellious years when The Pointer Sisters, beloved AM radio sweethearts, went totally FM. Let the fantastical and improbable tale begin…
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Oct 302023
 

Cover Classics takes a closer look at all-cover albums of the past, their genesis, and their legacy.

Songs from the Last Century

I imagine there are more than a few readers for whom George Michael might come under the heading of guilty pleasure. Maybe that’s why it’s taken as long as it has for him to be enrolled, and rightfully, into the Rock & Roll Half Fame. Guilt or no guilt, let’s just pause and admit that he really was one of the most creative interpreters of song we have had, as well as writing a fair old number of quality bangers himself. Yes, some of it may well have been somewhat wispy and ephemeral–most great pop music is–but I defy anyone not to have had a sly, secret bop to “Club Tropicana” in the comfort of their own kitchen.

I could certainly never really admit to loving Wham! at the time, but I sure as hell admired them. Later, as a solo artist, when it seemed Michael was the desire of all our wives and girlfriends, yes, it became a little harder. But, if anything, the quality of his own songs improved exponentially, until it would be only a curmudgeon who could deny his true talent. As his life, and its myriad difficulties, unraveled, that “local color” gave him, in the ridiculous way fame works, a greater credibility, and his untimely death gave even more. Add in the legion stories of his kindness to strangers, and we have all the trappings of a modern legend. Imagine had he lived.

Songs From The Last Century, Michael’s cover album, came out in 1999. He released it at a time when his powers were arguably at his peak, following a run of chart-topping releases, Faith, Listen Without Prejudice (Volume 1) and Older, at least in his homeland. (In the US he had had to be satisfied with numbers 1, 2 and 6, respectively, ultimately very good listings for an artist seen largely as a singles specialist.) By his standards it was a flop, only managing a UK number 2 slot. For some reason, the American market did not take to it all, it getting only as far as a lowly 157, perhaps giving some concern to his management. Not to worry: five years later, Patience returned him to the top spot at home, and 12 in the US.
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Aug 042023
 

Cover Classics takes a closer look at all-cover albums of the past, their genesis, and their legacy.

Badlands

Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska confounded a lot of people when he released it in 1982. Probably still does, especially among recently converted followers. I mean, how do you explain it someone who’s yet to hear it? I tried in my book Heart of Darkness: Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, writing this:

Nebraska is raw, primitive, ancient, otherworldly, spiritual, nihilistic, heartbreaking, horrifying and a whole bunch of other things that come to you like apparitions whenever you enter its province (ideally under cover of darkness)….And like the great films and the great novels, it holds up well. It holds up well because it still has something to teach us about ourselves and the world we live in, and maybe even the world beyond this one.

Just as Springsteen was inspired by Woody Guthrie and Flannery O’Connor and Night of the Hunter and Suicide and Terrence Malick and Martin Scorsese on Nebraska, so too has Nebraska become a touchstone for artists of myriad forms – Bruised Orange theatre company’s The Nebraska Project, Tennessee Jones’ short story collection Deliver Me from Nowhere, and Sean Penn’s directorial debut The Indian Runner, based on the song “Highway Patrolman.”

And then there is, of course, the tribute album, Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, helmed by producer and filmmaker Jim Sampas.
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Mar 082023
 

Cover Classics takes a closer look at all-cover albums of the past, their genesis, and their legacy.

The Church With One Bell
By 1998, John Martyn had lost the teen-idol good looks and the equally angelic voice of his debut recordings. He’d been through a few bumps along the way as well, distressingly, walking proof of what happens when you don’t “just say no.” Let’s just say his appetite for a self-destructive intake was prodigious; when his website describes him as a “maverick,” often you can paraphrase that into “drunken bum.” The irony is, at the time of his demise in 2009, he was several months sober and about to embark on new work. I have difficulty when character is allowed to impact on appreciation, with individuals being disappeared on account their attitudes. After all, across the centuries of artistic endeavor, to paraphrase Ian Dury, “there ain’t half been some clever bastards,” with the emphasis on the latter word as other than a term of affection or illegitimacy. Sure, there is a line to be drawn, but, I ain’t drawing it here.

Most folk know only the early stuff, with “May You Never” the frontrunner amongst the songs known to civilians, even if only from the versions of others, like Eric Clapton or Rod Stewart. I freely confess it was only as he became more ragged and less reliable that I took to him, and to his later work. In fact, it wasn’t until the Glasgow Walker album that I plucked up enough interest to fully engage, any residual folk singer in him long since buried. Now he planted his feet very much more in a smoky jazz club dive ambience, where his superlatively slurred delivery matched the swirls of brass, often embracing elements of the then-new trip-hop movement.

It was around about this time that he put out The Church With One Bell, his only collection of covers, sourced across an enormous range of styles and influences. How often would Portishead and Billie Holiday find themselves as bedfellows? His 20th studio release, it was actually put together in 1998, so two years ahead Glasgow Walker, and was made with long term associates Spencer Cozens (keyboards), John Giblin (bass) and Arran Ahmun (percussion). Remarkably, or not, depending on your opinions as to whether the sometime murkiness of sound is deliberate or not, it took barely a week to conceive, choose and put together. And the church on the cover? Martyn’s. The deal was, apparently, that his fee was the purchase, for him, of the same church as pictured, along with its solitary bell, as he liked the look of it. Fair enough?! Whether the company recouped is left unsaid, the record only attaining a peak position of 51 on the chart of the day. Irrespective, it has remained a core favorite amongst his following and deserves a place in this ongoing series.
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Nov 012022
 

In Defense takes a second look at a much maligned cover artist or album and asks, “Was it really as bad as all that?”

Duran Duran Thank You

With Duran Duran about to be indicted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, what better time to re-examine Thank You, their eighth full-length offering, released in 1995 to a blaze of apathy. To be fair, it didn’t actually fare that badly in the charts, reaching the top 20 in both the UK and the US. The singles did less well, failing to make any stateside impression and only one of them bruising, just, their homeland top 20. The critics gave Thank You a fairly uniform hammering, with the legacy casting a long shadow over the rest of their career: Q magazine, in 2006, called it the worst record of all time, having had 11 years to make that considered opinion. At the time Rolling Stone described many of the selections as “stunningly wrong headed.” Ouch.

Today we’re thinking it about time this much derided potpourri of styles and statements had a good seeing to, via the retrospectroscope. I fully confess I had never listened to Thank You until researching this piece. So I got me a copy sent through, all of £3 plus p&p, which currently equates to about $3. Money well spent? Well, you know, actually, yes, it isn’t half as bad as I had been led to believe, and some of the tracks are really rather good. Of course, it is dated, but, by imagining myself back all those 27 years, I find myself heartily disagreeing with those snarky scribes from Q.

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