Patrick Robbins lives in Maine, where he moves through life with the secure knowledge that, as Penn Jillette said, "In all of art, it's the singer, not the song," On Wednesdays he goes shopping, and has buttered scones for tea. He is the author of the novel The Warmer.
Some covers are more equal than others. Good, Better, Best looks at three covers and decides who takes home the gold, the silver, and the bronze.
As booty call songs go, INXS’s “Need You Tonight” is as hot, sweaty, and ’80s as it gets. Never rhyming once, Michael Hutchence seduces with words, breaths, and dance moves that I guarantee young men practiced in front of their MTV screens. Meanwhile, the rest of the band matches him with a groove that shows no mercy and no signs of stopping, even as it stops (twice!) before song’s end.
Can a song that’s fast approaching its 40th birthday still sound fresh? Absolutely yes – and it doesn’t need people covering it to sound that way. But as it so happens, people do cover it, and not infrequently. Most of the cover artists keep That Riff, so as to keep relentlessness as one of the song’s eternal perks. But some went further with it. Here are a few of them.
That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.
Hank Ballard and the Midnighters have a solid claim to shaping rock ‘n’ roll music; their song “Work With Me Annie” was a number one R&B hit in 1954. The bawdy lyrics (“Annie, please don’t cheat / Give me all my meat”) led to the song being banned on many radio stations, and a disgusted Dick Clark refused to play it on American Bandstand. But the people who heard it loved it so much that when one DJ joked that there was a sequel called “Annie Had a Baby,” orders poured in for it. The Midnighters obliged with a by-the-numbers song with that title, which went on to sell a million copies and spawned more answer records – “Annie Get Your Yo-Yo,” “Annie Pulled a Humbug” (“That’s not MY kid!”), and “Annie Kicked the Bucket,” to name just a few.
But that was 1954. By 1958, the hits had dried up, and Federal Records dropped the group. Ballard began shopping for a new label, using as bait a demo of a song he wrote called “The Twist.” There are multiple stories for what inspired it – teenagers dancing in Tampa, the Midnighters goofing around onstage. Whatever the inspiration, it led to Ballard writing it up in 20 minutes.
Ballard knew “The Twist” was a potential smash hit. When King Records (Federal Records’ parent company) exercised their option to pick the Midnighters up, Ballard tried to convince Syd Nathan, King’s president, to put it out as the A-side of a single. But Nathan disagreed, and stuck it on the B-side of “Teardrops on Your Letter” — written, in an unbelievable coincidence, by Henry Glover, King’s vice president. “Teardrops” did well enough, but an undeterred Ballard pushed “The Twist” in concert, getting a positive response throughout the South.
“We were doing the Twist for approximately two years before it caught on,” Ballard would say later. When the Midnighters played in Baltimore’s Royal Theatre, some of the kids who attended took it to TV. The Buddy Deane Show, later immortalized in the John Waters movie Hairspray, was a local teen dance program which was at one time the most popular local show in the United States. Deane, blown away by the zeal the kids had for the song, got in touch with his rival Dick Clark. “They’re dancin’ and not even touchin’!” he said.
Clark, remembering Ballard’s risqué songs of the past, wasn’t interested, but a persistent Deane sent Clark a copy. Clark listened to it, liked what he heard, but still thought it too suggestive. He needed a more wholesome artist to put it across to the masses, and he knew just who to ask… Philadelphia’s own Danny and the Juniors. But when the band that brought us “At the Hop” didn’t come up with anything, Clark had another idea. Continue reading »
Some covers are more equal than others. Good, Better, Best looks at three covers and decides who takes home the gold, the silver, and the bronze.
After all, the whole idea of art is bringing order out of chaos. It’s the organization of material and that really is what making a puzzle is. – Stephen Sondheim
More than once, Stephen Sondheim said, “I have a puzzle mind.” He loved cryptic crossword puzzles, designing a few dozen for New York magazine in the late ’60s. He used to run murder-mystery games, and cowrote (with Anthony Perkins) a movie about one that turned real, 1973’s The Last of Sheila. (That was a big influence on the Knives Out movie Glass Onion, in which Sondheim has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo.) And he thought of his songs as puzzles, where he was given clues and worked toward solving them. “Send In the Clowns,” from his 1973 production of A Little Night Music, may well have been his greatest solution.
To begin with, Sondheim had to write for Glynis Johns, who had what Sondheim described as “a nice little silvery voice” and whom a less generous critic called “that cousin of bullfrogs.” He structured the song with Johns’ limits in mind – lots of space to breathe, short phrases, words ending in consonants so there would be little sustain. He gave it a very pretty melody, so a performer could sing the song or act it. He imbued the lyrics with rueful loss for missed opportunities that would strike the heart of any listener. And, like all the songs in A Little Night Music, he set it to waltz time.
“Send In the Clowns” became the unqualified hit of the show, thanks in no small part to Johns’ delivery of it. In The Book of Musicals, Arthur Jackson wrote, “Her odd little non-singing voice added the true heartbreak quality called for in the context of the story.” It remains a smash onstage – Judi Dench’s rendition approaches legendary. But it was out of the story’s context that “Send In the Clowns” truly began to soar, as artists fell over themselves rushing to cover it. Sondheim’s songs were often bound to the show by being plot-specific, but this was one song that made the leap from stages to studios and back again with unusual flair.
Seuras Og’s post found three quality covers from the more than half a thousand released versions out there. Without taking anything away from those excellent selections, I would like to add three more. Continue reading »
Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.
Johnette Napolitano knew she had something good, but she wasn’t ready to finish it. She had a boyfriend, Wall of Voodoo guitarist Marc Moreland, whose alcoholism made their relationship a trying one. She and her band, Concrete Blonde, had recorded a rough demo and “right away everybody reacted to it,” she later said. “There weren’t any lyrics, but there was something about the music that everybody really reacted to.”
The song was going to have lyrics, though – and they were going to be about Moreland. “I knew what I wanted to say, but I wasn’t looking forward to saying it,” Napolitano said. The music was ready, and the producer kept pushing her for the lyrics. She put him off and put him off until she had no other songs left to record. Finally, in the back of a cab on the way to the studio, she set down the words to “Joey,” which would become the band’s biggest hit.
“I was flooded with mail after ‘Joey,'” Napolitano said, “about everybody who had known that story, lost a buddy, or had a relationship with an alcoholic. It was a big lesson – the closer you get to the truth or are vulnerable with it and express it, the more universal it is.”
Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!
Usually an artist’s popularity wanes after fifty years go by. But nothing about Steely Dan counts as usual. Even in the seventies, their impossibly smooth sound, their obscure yet hyperliterate lyrics, and their focus on the studio in lieu of performing made them stick out like sore thumbs. But Walter Becker, Donald Fagen, and company du jour knew what they wanted, and now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, it turns out to be what people want, need, can’t get enough of. The book Quantum Criminals, portraying the characters in Steely Dan songs with words and paint, was a critical smash, and Rolling Stone just published a listicle ranking every Steely Dan song.
Katy Lied, released fifty years ago this month, saw Becker and Fagen giving up their road-tested bandmates in favor of the best studio musicians money could buy, including twenty-year-old drummer Jeff Porcaro and not-much-older Michael McDonald, whose Doobie Brother days had yet to come. It saw the band getting a little cooler, a little warmer, a little jazzier. Like every Steely Dan album (at least, every one from Steely Dan Mark I), it has champions who say it’s the best thing they ever did. In 1987 Rolling Stone named it to their list of the best 100 albums of the past 20 years, the sole Steely Dan album on that roster. (This, after calling it “exemplarily well-crafted and uncommonly intelligent schlock” in their review twelve years earlier.)
Steely Dan’s unique combination of iconoclasm and tasty licks make them a band that covering artists tend to approach tentatively, if at all. How many other bands see tribute artists be so eager to throw out the lyrics and take their best instrumental whack at it? You’ll find more than one instrumental in this Katy Lied cover collection, along with live covers and one cover that’s a tribute to another band altogether.
They Say It’s Your Birthday celebrates an artist’s special day with covers of his or her songs. Let someone else do the work for a while. Happy birthday!
Aaron Neville is 84 years old today and definitively retired. In a 2023 interview he explained that “my asthma doesn’t let me hold the notes like I used to. Like Linda [Ronstadt, also retired against her will by illness] says, I don’t want to cheat the fans. For them to be looking for this and not getting it. I tell them I’ve got a lot of records already recorded so they can still listen to my voice.”
Well, thank heaven for that. That voice – that creamy, silky, fluttery, angelic, blessed instrument – spent more than half a century bringing listeners peace, soul, and inspiration. Neville called it the God in him touching the God in the listener, and he has touched so many in so many different ways. He knew his way around funk music – as one of the Neville Brothers, how could he not? – but it was on the ballads that he truly soared. Continue reading »
