Oct 132023
 
That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

Breeders

The Breeders—that female-fronted alt-rock supergroup forged long before Boygenius came along—are currently on tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of their post-Nevermind, platinum-selling, grunge-pop triumph, Last Splash. They’re also boasting an “original analog edition” of the album which made them a mainstream success in 1993 and which, in 2022, came out #35 in Pitchfork’s Top 150 Records of the 1990s. That means, of course, that they’re giving “Drivin’ On 9” another bask in the sun. The record’s country-tinged anomaly may not have been a single, but it sure turned out to be a deeply loved, radio-friendly classic and a signature Breeders song—their second most popular track on Spotify, in fact, between “Cannonball” and “One Divine Hammer.”

It’s a song, furthermore, that the band continue to wheel out for significant public appearances, recognizing it as a towering presence in their catalog. They performed it in bed for Bedstock 2017 in support of MyMusicRx. They also played it in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame lobby in September 2023, to console a few hundred people when forced to cut short their “Rock Hall Live” outdoor show due to a storm. Kim Deal wrapped her uniquely dirty-pretty voice around it for the thousandth time. Jim Macpherson tapped along on a nearby surface. Kelly Deal broke off her inaudible guitar plucking to play the solos on her phone. And Kim joked that she’s like Stevie Wonder, the whole thing being a funny, intimate, shambolic delight—shared on YouTube—that was nothing short of quintessential Breeders.

But here’s a thing:

  • The Breeders did not write the song. That’s according to @carriebradleyneves1839, who was quick to affix to the Rock Hall YouTube clip: “Words and music by Dom Leone and Ed’s Redeeming Qualities, published by Buck Tempo, copyright 1989.”

And here’s a bigger thing:

  • It’s a cover. That’s contrary to cover-song oracle SecondHandSongs, which notes “Steve Hickoff, Dom Leone” as the writers, but stamps “Original” on the Breeders release of August 30 1993.
From this, it’s certain that the Breeders’ “Drivin’ On 9” belongs to a very different camp to that of the Breeders’ “Happiness is a Warm Gun” or the Breeders’ “Lord of the Thighs.” Few people, to be sure, are aware of Steve Hickoff or Dom Leone in the same way they are the Beatles or Aerosmith, or know who or what Ed’s Redeeming Qualities is. Even fewer are able to credit the Ed’s version of 1989 as the official original. Or credit Ed’s as the first public performers of the song. Indeed, the true status of Ed’s Redeeming Qualities as the original artists as well as writers is seemingly lost in a distant 1980s haze of amateur musicianship and cult followings, where DIY recordings and demo tapes mattered, where ramshackle live shows in a shabby basement club in Boston could easily give birth to a ‘hit’ song, and where the word ‘official’ held very little sway.

So what’s the unofficial story of the perky yet strangely melancholy strummer that the Breeders made famous?
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Nov 182022
 

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

Fifty years ago today, on November 18, 1972, Neil Young fired Danny Whitten. The 29-year-old guitarist had already been dismissed from Crazy Horse due to his drug use. Young gave him another chance to join his touring band, the Stray Gators, as they went out to promote Harvest. When Whitten proved he couldn’t handle that either, Young gave him fifty dollars and a plane ticket back to Los Angeles. That night, he got a phone call: Whitten had died of a drug overdose.

A crushed Young, who had already written “The Needle and the Damage Done” about Whitten, went on to record Tonight’s the Night, a tribute to him and to roadie Bruce Berry. These are some of Young’s strongest works and have all the impact today that they had on first release. But there’s another artistic work related to Whitten that’s arguably greater and longer lasting. And it came from the pen of Danny Whitten himself.
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Oct 282022
 

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

Rascal Flatts

When Rascal Flatts announced its plan to part ways after a farewell tour, it was the end of an era. An era when I awaited each spring album drop to bring me the next soundtrack to my summer. An era when my car actually had a CD drive, and it was only a question of which Rascal Flatts album was playing during each sunny drive (but let’s be real, it was probably Feels Like Today). An era when I was the girl in the front row singing (well, not quite front) and when my dad provided the wheels to bring me to the Still Feels Good concert (thanks, Dad!). The times of cellphones in the air and the crowds out there; no worries of germs in sight. I was jealous of my brother, who had tickets to the farewell tour, but then felt no relief when the tour was cancelled due to the COVID pandemic. Out, not with an encore, but with silence – the complete opposite of the feeling you might have felt listening to Rascal Flatts team up with Journey to sing “Don’t Stop Believing”.

Even with all of my experience fan-girling over Rascal Flatts (and being someone pretty invested in the world of cover songs), I did not know that two of the band’s mega-hits were covers in a long line of covers before them. How could I not know that every time “Bless the Broken Road” was played at a wedding, I was hearing a reimagining of the song, and that every time I belted out “What Hurts the Most” in times of angst that those were not the original words of Jay, Joe, and Gary?

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Jun 102022
 

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

Comedian Marc Maron made a funny mistake on a recent episode of his “WTF” podcast. Two founders of the Doobie Brothers were his guests. Although Maron is fanatical about music and is a musician in his own right, his tone throughout the interview seemed to reveal that he finds the Doobie Brothers faintly ridiculous. (He’s more of an Iggy Pop and Patti Smith guy.) Sure, Maron could recall a few of the Doobies album titles, and he shared a memory of singing along with “Black Water” in a school bus at age 11, but every American of Maron’s generation remembers singing that song in a school bus.

After the interview, Maron improvised a medley of iconic Doobie Brothers moments. He sang some choruses he only partly remembered, and he vocally mimicked a few of the band’s signature guitar riffs. Partway through he sang “give me the beat boys, free my soul, I wanna get lost in your rock and roll and drift away,” an iconic ’70s line if ever there was one.

That’s the mistake that got me thinking about the song “Drift Away.” That’s the song Maron was remembering, but it’s one which the Doobie Brothers never recorded. Soul singer Dobie Gray recorded the hit in 1973.
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Dec 042021
 

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

I Fought the Law

In 1978, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones flew to San Francisco to record overdubs for the Clash’s second album, Give ’em Enough Rope. There, they heard the Bobby Fuller Four song “I Fought the Law” for the first time, on the studio jukebox. By the time they came back to England, they had heard it enough times to memorize it. They recorded the song and released in on an EP in the spring of 1979. Later that year it came out as a single in America, the Clash’s first. It appeared on their first American album as well, a rejiggered version of their UK debut two years before.

The story of a prisoner taking an oh-well attitude toward the turn his life took, “I Fought the Law” struck a chord with the Clash’s fans. It was a signature cover, both for the band and the song. And many many DJs who introduced this aggressive shrug of a song called it a cover of the top-ten hit by the Bobby Fuller Four.

Which it was.

But it wasn’t.
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Nov 122021
 

 That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

Elvis Presley was finally convinced to get back, in true Beatles fashion, on “Burning Love,” the song he released as a single in August 1972. It was high time he reclaimed his throne as the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, considering his recent dearth of hits in the US, and an audience seemingly weary of his ballads, his gospel numbers, and, ultimately, his “American Trilogy.” On “Burning Love,” he was able to reconnect with his incendiary late-’50s incarnation, to the point of ad-libbing a slice of his 1959 rocker, “A Big Hunk o’ Love.” In the 1972 song, he found the ingredients to catapult him back to the upper reaches of the Billboard Hot 100. (He was joined there by Chuck Berry and Ricky Nelson, the first time all three had been in the top ten in fourteen years.)

What is less well known is that Presley achieved exactly the kind of resurgence with “Burning Love” that Arthur Alexander hoped for when he released it as a single six months earlier. What is also little known, therefore, is that Presley’s version is a cover. By a matter of months.
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