With time on his hands between his two weekends of headlining Coachella this year, Green Day‘s Billie Joe Armstrong took to the stage of the considerably smaller venue of Pappy & Harriet’s in Pioneertown, California alongside musicians in Green Day’s orbit to play a set under the name The Coverups. In keeping with their name, the set was made up of nothing but covers. The show took place on April 17th, with Green Day’s Coachella sets coming on April 12th and 19th. Continue reading »
That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.
If Led Zeppelin had made Physical Graffiti a single album rather than a double, “Boogie with Stu” would not have made the final cut. “Filler” is a dismissive term, but that’s what it was. (Of course, one band’s filler is another band’s gem.) The song was just a spontaneous jam, really, recorded in 1971 on an out-of-tune piano as they worked on Led Zeppelin IV. But when Zeppelin suddenly had an extra album-side to complete in 1975, they cleaned up the old recording and tossed the result onto side four, practically as an afterthought.
“Boogie with Stu” is treated like an afterthought, too, in those always-interesting and usually contentious discussions about Zeppelin covering and plagiarizing other artists. Sure, let’s talk “Dazed and Confused” and Jake Holmes, “Whole Lotta Love” and Willie Dixon, “The Lemon Song” and Chester Burnett, and all the other cases. But the discussion rarely gets around to the strange case of “Boogie with Stu” and Ritchie Valens. Or if it does, it’s only as an afterthought yet again.
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Steve Albini died today. In addition to being a musician in his own right, he was a legendary engineer (he refused to be credited as “producer”) who recorded Nirvana’s In Utero, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, and many others. He recorded hundreds of albums, for bands big and small, right up through his passing.
There are a million ways to honor him, but, for now, I thought I’d share some covers that he produced recorded. Not for his own bands like Big Black and Shellac—we may have a separate post devoted to that—but for other people’s.
The first couple covers are iconic, mainstays of “The Best Covers of All Time” type lists. The rest are more obscure. But they all have the Albini touch—which, as he would be the first to point out, was a light one. These lean towards the alt-rock and punk, with some weird-folk excursions, but ultimately as an engineer he worked to help the bands get the sounds they wanted. Including when they wanted to do covers. Continue reading »
Covering the range and power of Robert Plant’s high tenor voice is a challenge for all in Led Zeppelin tribute bands, but many of those who have successfully done so have been women. Ann and Nancy Wilson were in a Zeppelin tribute before they committed their band Heart, and have retained the songs in their repertoire since. Recently on the Howard Stern show they talked about their iconic version of “Stairway to Heaven,” performed for the surviving members of the band and other luminaries at the Kennedy Center in 2012, before moving on to their version of “Going to California.” Continue reading »
Cover Genres takes a look at cover songs in a very specific musical style.
We begin with a bow to Seuras Og and his genre-expansive post earlier this year about banjo covers. We can’t leave the banjo hanging–or getting the last word, either. So: Let us now praise the mandolin.
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Cover Genres takes a look at cover songs in a very specific musical style.
Herewith the last in the unholy triumvirate of banjo, bagpipes, and box. Time now to unwrap the wonders of melodeon, accordion, concertina, bandoneon and all their squeezy family upon your eager ears. Actually (maybe) a primitive precursor of the synthesizer, the squeezebox family started life as a way of letting one player give a more orchestral sound to proceedings, the rich textures replicating the play of a whole bevy of musicians. Indeed, in the same way as the Musician’s Union decried the synthesizer, so too will the equivalent of its day have decried the box, taking work away from honest pipe’n’taborists.
This family of instruments casts, arguably, far wider a net than the two B’s that have preceded it here, banjo and bagpipes, with a right of place across very many cultures and categories. Broadly occupying a space in ethnic roots traditions, this has never stopped appearances crossing over into territories that might be more squeeze-averse. Which to me is the joy.
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