Feature Archives - Page 2 of 239

Rarely Covered: Simple Minds

Posted by Mike Tobyn at 9:00 am No Responses »

Nov 132024

Rarely Covered looks at who’s mining the darkest, dustiest corners of iconic catalogs.

Simple Minds has existed for close to 50 years, featuring schoolboy friends Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill, still the nucleus of the lineup. You have heard their music. At least one of their songs, anyway. In the US they are considered One Hit Wonders (even though “Alive and Kicking” hit #3). Here at Cover Me we have had not one feature on “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” but two, along with the occasional standalone mashup version. Nevertheless, it is atypical of their work. And when I say “work,” I mean that Simple Minds were the most commercially successful Scottish Band of the ’80s, and a version of the band records and continues to fill UK and European arenas each year.

Those decades of effort have had many important stages. It is not worth pretending that punk act Johnny and the Self-Abusers had such a glorious future, but once the band evolved into the electronic, Krautrock-flavored field, their sound began to take its mature form, in the albums Real to Real Cacophony and Empires and Dance, and the song “I Travel.” A switch of record labels led to a stream of single and album successes, hits across the world (but not yet the US). Their classic albums Sparkle in the Rain and Street Fighting Years endure as classics. They developed different, innovative, sounds and hit records with legendary producers like Trevor Horn and Jimmy Iovine. With occasional breaks they have remained active ever since. They have embraced many sounds and line-ups. Fully 23 of their albums have been hits in the UK, 5 reaching number 1. Their live act remains a strength to this day; they toured extensively, pre-COVID, across the world, with big tours in the US, periodically strengthened by refugees from other Scottish rock bands around Kerr and Burchill. The breadth and vigor of their work is remarkable.
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One Great Cover: UK Subs’ “Sabre Dance”

Posted by Mike Tobyn at 10:00 am No Responses »

Nov 082024

One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.

Punk paradigms provoke panic. Whether it is parents worried that their young people who do unnatural things with their hair may do more natural things if left alone together, politicians who fear anything they can’t readily control, or prog musicians who feel that someone is about to eat their lunch, there have always been reasons for fearing the new art form from the ’70s. Of course, none of these paradigms really hold true. Punk youngsters had no greater rate of teenage pregnancy than any other group of horny young people, and often proved to be good parents, and prog musicians have continued to thrive for the last few years, despite the efforts of the Sex Pistols and New York Dolls. Punks are inherently “anti-establishment,” but the remarkable thing about “The Establishment” is that no one can agree on who it is, so rebelling against it has no universal means and meaning.

Mexican-British (a much smaller demographic than Mexican-American) David Perez may be a nephew of original Joker Cesar Romero, or maybe he is not! Born in 1944 he didn’t find his true calling, as a hardcore punk now going by Charlie Harper, until 1976. He has embraced it as a member of the UK Subs ever since, combining skills with admirable industry. However, by the time he formed the band, in response to seeing The Damned, he was no longer a teenage tearaway, but a married man with experience of the world, and a history of playing in a range of R&B bands. He assembled a band that knew more than three chords, could turn his hand to harmonica and had assimilated a range of influences from the ’50s and ’60s, as well as the ’70s. He still includes songs by Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie in his sets, putting his politics alongside his music. We might guess who his “establishment” is. His band’s only previous appearance on these pages was to be included in a Nirvana cover feature, indicating a wish to stay current.
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Cover Me Q&A: What’s your favorite cover of a traditional song?

Posted by Staff at 12:00 pm 7 Responses »

Nov 062024

Welcome to Cover Me Q&A, where we take your questions about cover songs and answer them to the best of our ability.

Here at Cover Me Q&A, we’ll be taking questions about cover songs and giving as many different answers as we can. This will give us a chance to hold forth on covers we might not otherwise get to talk about, to give Cover Me readers a chance to learn more about individual staffers’ tastes and writing styles, and to provide an opportunity for some back-and-forth, as we’ll be taking requests (learn how to do so at feature’s end).

Today’s question comes from staff member Tom McDonald:

What’s your favorite cover of a traditional song?

In Memoriam: Phil Lesh

Posted by Curtis Zimmermann at 10:00 am No Responses »

Nov 012024

In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.

It seems only fitting that a band known as the Grateful Dead would have so many songs about death. In fact, whenever a member of the Dead universe passes, there’s no shortage of songs to pay tribute to the one newly departed.

Such was the case with the passing of Phil Lesh on October 25, 2024. In the hours and days afterwards, many bands took to the stage with heartfelt tributes to the Dead’s bass player. Perhaps most notable was the jamband Phish, who, that same night, performed a cover of “Box of Rain,” a song co-written by Lesh and Robert Hunter.

The song holds the distinction of being the last track the Grateful Dead ever performed live before the passing of Jerry Garcia. Lesh added it to the band’s July 9, 1995 setlist at Soldier’s Field because he felt the song “Black Muddy River,” another song about death, was too melancholy to end the show and the tour on.

While Lesh will first and foremost always be remembered for his time in the Dead as one of the most innovative rock n’ roll bass players of all time, it’s what he did in the 29 years after Jerry’s passing that might be his greatest legacy.

Lesh kept the spirit of the Dead’s music alive by playing and collaborating with multiple generations of musicians. He helped ensure that not only would the Dead’s music live on, but that there would be many great musicians to play the music in the band’s open-ended style.

“I continue to seek out multiple musical partners, in a quest for that elusive chemistry that comes and goes as it wishes,” Lesh wrote in his 2005 memoir. “Sometimes ‘it’ happens onstage, or sometimes in rehearsal, but it always leaves me breathless and wonder-struck.”

One Great Cover: Tricky’s “Black Steel”

Posted by Adam Mason at 12:00 pm No Responses »

Oct 252024

One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.

I got a letter from the government the other day
I opened and read it. It said they were suckers
They wanted me for their army or whatever
Picture me giving a damn, I said never.

Public Enemy, “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” 1988

Tricky was doing what no one else was doing musically in 1994, as he was pretty much most other years. His audacity (or complete naivete) as an artist knew no bounds, being largely how he got female vocalist Martina Topley-Bird to sing Chuck D’s none-more-Chuck D rap lyrics from Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” over an exhilarating rock-dance backing. Which she did in her uniquely seductive tones, bringing melody and wispiness to words that once seemed inseparable from the hip-hop frontman’s testosterone-pumped New York baritone, so renowned for emanating righteous anger in the face of injustice and prejudice.

It was consequently hard to know what the oft-called “trip-hop pioneer” from Bristol UK had, in fact, delivered in the track he simply called “Black Steel” – but there was no doubt it made for one of the most original and exciting singles of the times. No doubt too that it made, in an unprecedented way, for one great cover.
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Review: Andrew Bird & Madison Cunningham’s ‘Cunningham Bird’

Posted by Seuras Og at 2:30 pm No Responses »

Oct 242024

If you don’t recall the story, Fleetwood Mac were down on their luck, reduced to the trio of Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and his wife, Christine. Fleetwood was looking for a good studio, and the folks at Sound City Studios showed him what they could do by playing him Buckingham Nicks. The ever-resourceful Fleetwood took a leap of faith and asked Buckingham to join the band. Not without my girlfriend, he said. The deal was struck, and the band subsequently became huge, with more people associating Fleetwood Mac with their breezy AOR Californicana than the blues band of the decade before.

You can make the case that Buckingham Nicks provided a lodestone for the whole next few decades, and not just for Buckingham and Nicks. So why is it not a worldwide household item? Astonishingly, there has never been any official release of Buckingham Nicks on CD. A relative failure in its original vinyl iteration, only under-the-counter bootlegs, often incorporating additional outtakes, have ever been released in the format, despite high demand. Buckingham himself has asked for this repeatedly, but no go, for reasons uncertain.

This is where Andrew Bird and Madison Cunningham come in. Continue reading »