One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.
“Well it’s story time again,” says a young Tom Waits to a live audience in July, 1975. So begins his intro to “Big Joe and Phantom 309,” Red Sovine’s country hit from 1967. But his listeners were already involved in a story that night: they were collectively pretending to be in “Raphael’s Silver Cloud Lounge,” a seedy LA nightclub.
In truth, they were seated in The Record Plant, the illustrious Los Angeles recording studio. Waits had moved studio equipment aside, dragged in a few tables and chairs, set up a makeshift bar, and invited some friends over for a show. The opening act was a strip-tease. With the correct vibe established, Waits recorded his third album that night, Nighthawks at the Diner. And it included his first departure from original material with “Phantom 309.”
In Waits’ introduction, he says that Red Sovine wrote the song. But the composer credit actually goes solely to Tommy Faile.
Faile had a long and colorful showbiz career, but he knew nothing like the success of Woodrow Wilson (“Red”) Sovine. Sovine is no household name either, but he had several big hits on the country charts in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. He also established a curious niche of his own in 1965: songs about truckers, spoken rather than sung. An interesting marriage of content and form.
Sovine’s timing was perfect: the long-haul trucking industry was in a period of explosive growth by the mid-60s. The Interstate Highway System (established in 1956) paved the way for trucks to replace railroads as the nation’s freight transportation method of choice. The independent trucker emerged as a rural American icon, romanticized as a model of self-reliance and manly “git ‘er done” grit. Sovine’s truckers tended to have remarkably kind hearts under that grit, as with Big Joe.
Although Sovine’s “Phantom 309” didn’t hit the very top of the charts, it did chart twice. The second time was due to a 1975 re-issue. The re-issue must have been a response to the mid-70s pop culture mania for truckers and their citizens band (CB) radios. The trucker craze peaked with the novelty song “Convoy” by C. W. McCall, which topped country charts and pop music charts in early 1976. Hollywood followed suit with a few 18-wheeler-themed feature films (“Smokey and the Bandit,” for one). Who knows what Tommy Faile made of these fads, but he probably enjoyed the royalty checks.
If you heard Sovine’s single first, the Waits rendition was likely to strike you as too slow; it’s nearly twice the length of the original. If you first heard the Waits version, you might find the original too quick, too pat, and a bit corny. (Sovine’s version was made for commercial AM radio, after all.)
It’s not that Waits embellished the tale and made it run long; in fact it’s surprising how faithfully he sticks to the original script. It was the leisurely pace set by double-bassist Jim Hughart. Waits made space for Hughart’s sensitive playing, a highlight of the piece. One thing about all the great Tom Waits spoken narrative tracks, from “Frank’s Wild Years” to “9th and Hennepin” to “What’s He Building,” is that the accompanying music is noteworthy in and of itself.
If the Waits version is more musically satisfying, that’s to be expected: Sovine was a commercial artist in a conservative culture and he stayed in his lane. Waits is …something else. Where Sovine/Faile’s rhyming couplets feel trite, Waits subverts the rhyme scheme with ad-libs and dramatic pauses; the rhymes are there but slipped into off-beats. His delivery is entirely theatrical, a telling rather than a canned recitation.
The strange thing is, the Waits version feels more convincing than Sovine’s original. It’s subjective, obviously, but despite all of Waits’ poses, ruses, and affectations–the Beatnik shtick, the make-believe of Raphael’s Silver Cloud Lounge–and despite his caution about it being story time again, Waits’ tale rings exactly true. The persona he inhabits really would thumb a ride in the rain at a lonely crossroads, and he would bond with a gruff old trucker over Viceroys and stories. Waits would be that nighthawk at the diner boasting that he’d just met Big Joe. And the guy behind the counter in the truck stop café would pour him coffee on the house, would in turn tell him an even longer tale, that would go on to become a story within the longer story the hitchhiker would tell all the rest of his days. The story about Big Joe and Phantom 309.
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