A few months ago, music journalist Jason Schneider released the book That Gun in Your Hand: The Strange Saga of ‘Hey Joe’ and Popular Music’s History of Violence. It’s a fascinating read—but don’t take our word for it. None other than Lenny Kaye, who in addition to playing on an iconic version of “Hey Joe” (it was the Patti Smith Group’s first single!), is a music journalist himself. He wrote in the book’s foreword, “In these pages, Jason Schneider has traced Joe’s lineage through its many mise-en-scenes, not only the bare bones of the song but the inner complexities and contradictions that each artist brings to it, subject and subjective.”
As part of the book, Schneider listened to, naturally, a lot of different versions of “Hey Joe.” Since I assume we all know the Hendrix version (and if not, here’s a deep dive on it), we asked Schneider to tell us about some lesser-known covers he loves.
Buy ‘That Gun in Your Hand’ at Asterism Books (U.S.) or Anvil Press (everywhere else) or wherever books are sold.
Billy Roberts (1965)
One of my motivations to write That Gun In Your Hand was to uncover the mystery of who [copyright holder] Billy Roberts was. That mystery stemmed from the fact that Roberts didn’t officially record “Hey Joe” himself, partly because he remained committed to the oral folk tradition, and partly because he didn’t want Third Story Music, the publisher with whom he ultimately struck a lopsided deal, to earn additional royalties from his efforts.
However, a few demos that Roberts made of “Hey Joe” are floating around, with his best rendition captured on a stunningly intimate tape he made at the home of Doug Gyseman during a trip to Vancouver in March 1965 to play a coffeehouse called The Ark. Gyseman was a budding recording enthusiast, and within a few years had opened a professional facility, R&D Studio, which became best known for allowing Led Zeppelin to drop in one day in 1969 while on tour and lay down the opening and closing sections of “Bring It On Home.”
Lee Moses (1971)
Someone turned me on to Lee Moses’s version of “Hey Joe” about 20 years ago when his 1971 album Time and Place was first reissued. Although Wilson Pickett had recorded a monumental “Hey Joe” the previous year with the Muscle Shoals Swampers, the Atlanta-based Moses crafted an entirely different soulful interpretation with the help of his primary collaborators, guitarists Hermon Hitson and Freddie Terrell, who lay down a sultry groove with duelling wah-wahs.
It provides the foundation upon which Moses takes the spotlight, opening with a recitation wherein he inserts himself into the story as a witness to Joe’s crime. As these words segue into the song proper, Moses’s performance gradually intensifies until the horn section arrives at the four-minute mark and pushes Moses to unleash primordial screams and hollers. Although the performance reveals Moses’s main weakness as a vocalist, a lack of subtlety, his “Hey Joe” is a riveting glimpse of soul’s evolution outside of the familiar locales of Memphis and Detroit.
Spirit (1975)
I focused on Spirit’s “Hey Joe” in a chapter alongside Roy Buchanan’s version—which I also dearly love—as a way of exploring Jimi Hendrix’s legacy as a guitarist following his death in 1970. But it grew into telling the story of Randy California, whose life would make a truly compelling film. As a teenager in New York, he introduced himself to pre-fame Hendrix during the summer of 1966 and immediately became a member of Hendrix’s coterie trying to get him established as a solo artist after years backing others.
That brief time spent playing with Hendrix would soon provide the impetus for Spirit, once Randy moved back home to L.A. and formed the band with drummer Ed Cassidy—also his stepfather. Although Spirit’s early work is rightly praised for its originality, Hendrix’s ghost always seemed to haunt Randy and, some might suggest, led him to develop an inferiority complex. By the time they made what would become the album Spirit of ’76, it seemed a last-ditch attempt for Randy to prove to everyone, as well as himself, what he was capable of doing. He channelled all of that into “Hey Joe” with stunning results.
Nick Cave (1986 & 1990)
After years of being a longtime fringe Nick Cave fan, it wasn’t until writing the book that I attained a deeper understanding of how he crafted his uniquely violent vision of America through early folk and blues, and the fire-and-brimstone religious practices often associated with the music. All of that seemed to congeal on the 1986 album with the Bad Seeds, Kicking Against The Pricks, a wide-ranging covers collection that included “Hey Joe” alongside the likes of “Long Black Veil,” “Muddy Water” and John Lee Hooker’s “I’m Gonna Kill That Woman.”
“Hey Joe” rarely appeared in his repertoire after that, but when Cave was invited to appear on the criminally short-lived NBC show Night Music in 1990, he turned to “Hey Joe” as a way to establish a common language with the esteemed musicians he was asked to perform with, among them bassist Charlie Haden, harmonica player Toots Thielemans, and the show’s host, saxophonist David Sanborn. Although Cave’s body language suggested he was fully conscious of being out of his element, he and the group managed to deliver a version of “Hey Joe” that contained all the brooding intensity associated with the Bad Seeds, but in a sophisticated manner that Cave would further develop from that point on.
Willy DeVille (1994)
My first knowledge of music outside of my parents’ record collection was probably hearing the sounds of New York in the late ’70s coming out of my AM radio—Blondie, Talking Heads, you know the rest. But hearing Mink DeVille was something entirely different, and didn’t really affect me until much later when I could connect the dots of their music back to classic Brill Building songwriters. Lead singer Willy DeVille was something else too, and his street hustler persona became the living embodiment of New York City in my still-developing brain long before I actually got to see it with my own eyes.
As a solo artist later, DeVille was free to take more chances, an approach that ultimately won him a much larger audience in Europe than in North America. While it was hardly surprising to notice that DeVille cut “Hey Joe” for his 1994 album Backstreets of Desire, in typical fashion he brought the song back to its source, Billy Roberts’s original arrangement that had been the basis for the countless versions recorded in L.A. from 1965-66. However, DeVille’s twist was to record it with mariachi band Los Camperos de Nati Cano, giving the song an entirely different L.A. flavour, and providing yet another example of how malleable “Hey Joe” has always been, and will undoubtedly continue to be.
Buy That Gun in Your Hand: The Strange Saga of ‘Hey Joe’ and Popular Music’s History of Violence at Asterism Books (U.S.) or Anvil Press (everywhere else) or wherever books are sold.
