We've Got the Seventies Covered

  So, what we have here is songs of the seventies, covered. I mean, in case you couldn't figure that out from the clever title just above. 

  The big joke in the 80s and 90s was to take an incongruous songs and do "punk" covers of them: virtually every punk/alt rock/roots rockabilly/experimental/indie rock band had a cover or two in their pocket. The covers ran the gamut from jokey to sincere, to mark sharp contrasts or deep affinities. Sometimes bands would ditch incongruities and shout out similarities, or even do tributes to favorites: my own 80s/90s band, The Belgian Waffles!, covered God and State, Pere Ubu, Flipper, Crass, Joy Division, the Ramones, and the Flesheaters, among others. These were all meant as tributes, and they were songs that were important to us. I would say the "jokiest" cover we did was of Nancy Sinatra's "Lightning's Girl", though we were all fans of that song as well.

  The Dickies pretty much made a career out of the goofball side of the coin, with covers of "Nights In White Satin", the theme to the Banana Splits ("The Tra La La Song"), and "Paranoid" being much more memorable than their original material. On this playlist, they are represented by their Sabbath cover. Killdozer as well had a reputation for destructo covers (of which they did many, including an entire album called For Ladies Only), though fans of the band are generally at least as interested in their original material. Here they are represented by their ridiculous version of the 75 Jessi Colter country crossover hit, "I'm Not Lisa" . . . and while the absurdity of Michael Gerald's growled vocals are the first thing you notice, it's the sweet guitar work that really closes the deal. On the flip side, covers like Big Black's "Heartbeat" (Wire), the Minutemen's "The Red and the Black" (Blue Oyster Cult), Nirvana's "Man Who Sold the World" (David Bowie), and Galaxy 500's "Isn't It a Pity" (George Harrison) not only shout out their subjects, but show affinities between the bands covered and the bands doing the covers. Metallica in particular is known for their "Garage Days" covers, and that remains my favorite Metallica work, by and large.

  Then there are the more or less contemporary covers, which for reasons not clear to me, tend to get called "versions" instead of "covers". There are three popular versions of Bob Dylan's "If Not For You": Bob's original, George Harrison's version on All Things Must Pass, and Olivia Newton John's 71 version, which had the most chart action. Harrison's cover is included here. Also of note: Gloria Gaynor's 74 disco hit version of the Jackson 5 hit "Never Can Say Goodbye", and Viola Wills's disco (?!) version of Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind".

  There are some brilliant re-interpretations here: Corrine Bailey Rae does a deep, soulful piano & bass cover of Led Zeppelin's "Since I've Been Loving You" (Jimmy Page's slow blues were always a guilty pleasure for me, and I can't tell you how nice it is hearing one of them without having to put up with Robert Plant). The Contortion's ripping no wave funk version of Michael Jackson's "Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough" is legendary. "Damned for All Time", Judas's song from Jesus Christ, Superstar, is a perfect vehicle for David Yow and Scratch Acid's blitz (and honestly not too different from the original). Shockabilly's explosion of T Rex's "Life's a Gas" is similarly faithful and revelatory. Jon  Langford and his Waco Brothers manage to overhaul and improve one of Neil Young's best songs, "Revolution Blues". And there is probably no version of a song more destroyed and at the same time more appropriate than the Butthole Surfer's "American Woman".

  I could go on, but y'all are getting the point by now. My favorite cover here: the Jesus Lizard's Chrome medley. The cover that gets to the very soul of a song, essentially beating the original at its own game: American Music Club's "Goodbye to Love" (Carpenters) and Thou's "Supernaut" (Black Sabbath). The most epic cover: Television's "Knocking on Heaven's Door" (Dylan). The most brutal and disrespectful: The Resident's nightmare fat Elvis rendition of "Burning Love". The worst cover here: The Bongos take a totally "meh" cover of T Rex's "Mambo Sun" and make it intolerable by mispronouncing the word "mambo" all the way through the song. If you follow this playlist, don't be surprised to see that one disappear at some point.

  And finally, what are all y'all's favorite 70s covers? I'm taking suggestions. No more versions by bands already represented - yes, "Sweat Loaf" is brilliant, but "American Woman" is even better, so that's the Butthole Surfers song included - unless you can convince me that they do another cover that is even better, in which case it will replace my choice. Make sure to put it in the comments, and I may well add it to the playlist. Let me know what I have missed!

70s Covers Power Rankings, Original Artist

1. David Bowie
2. Bob Dylan
3. Michael Jackson/Jackson 5
4. Elton John
5. T Rex
6. Black Sabbath
7. Neil Young

The Art of the Seventies Segueway: The Andrea True Connection into Teenage Jesus and the Jerks

  I grew up in the seventies and have spent many an hour reconstructing the musical legacy of my teen years. I started obsessing over music at an early age, listening almost constantly to cross-genre Top 40 radio on WOWO out of Fort Wayne, which spanned the globe with personal favorites from Lynn Anderson's C&W hit "Rose Garden", through the R&B of the Chi Lites "Have You Seen Her", to Melanie's cute little double entendre pop nugget "Brand New Key". Today it is almost unimaginable that all those songs would be played on the same commercial station, or even on the same non-commercial station in the same two hour block (barring, of course, high school radio, the last bastion of giddy mixes before adulthood stomps the creativity out of your radio soul).

  In reconstructing my golden youth, I didn't stop at just what I listened to at the time: all the less mainstream stuff I discovered as the 80's dawned and I escaped the rustbelt shackles of Auto City, IN (take yr pick, they're the same) were integrated as well. First it was mix CDs, then monstrous Spotify playlists (currently trimmed back to thirteen hours total, but I'll start building them back again soon). So, you end up having to figure out a way to have Aerosmith, Elvin Bishop, Can, Stevie Wonder, The Clash, America, Carly Simon, Tom Petty, The Ohio Players, etc., etc., etc., all peacefully coexist together side by side.  The easy way would be to group genres and sub-genres together . . . but that would be too easy. Welcome to the art of the mix.

  When I first started doing radio in the mid 80's, I usually did exactly that, trying to make my sets and shows as coherent and digestible as possible . . . that was the way it was done. So, while I always played a pretty broad variety of stuff on the air, I made sure to pack it in a way that wouldn't catch the listener off guard. After a little while, though, that got a little boring, so I tried more creative segues on a show I called "The Thrill Night Review". In a nutshell, TTNR was dedicated to taking all the disparate elements of what I liked and fitting them all into the same folder.  I tried to push it even further on a show called "The Western Lands", and continued it on Bloomington's WFHB and a show called "Melody Unasked For" from '94 to '97, when I finally left town for good.

  Applying for the slot on WFHB came with the usual somewhat tiresome programming audition hurdles that small indie radio stations throw at you; fortunately, the program director ran interference for me, and I got the slot. Without him, my programming proposal of playing "whatever I feel, whenever I feel it" probably wouldn't have flown (CONCEPTS, that's what they are looking for).

  Anyway, that's a bit heavy on the back story, but it goes to what I want to do with mixes . . . which, while far from unheard of (the art of the mixtape is part of John Cusack's intolerable mewling in the truly awful High Fidelity), is not the way things generally are done. Think of some of your favorite movie soundtracks and you start to get the idea: sometimes you ride the wave, running one song into another like some dusk to dawn EDM mix, other times you mix it up against the grain and hope you can drag your listener with you. The real trick, when you are riding against that grain, is to manage to recontextualize each piece with the piece that follows it, to hit your listener with a jolt of recognition and surprise that always accompanies any musical epiphany.

  There are a few segues I pulled off that I really still wish I had on tape*. "The Western Lands" (an Egyptian Book of the Dead by way of William Burroughs reference; it was meant to invoke the in-between) was my most aggressively experimental lab. One of the things I tried a lot was extremely long cross fades: for instance, I may play an Ayler trio cut of one of his ESP records and mix in a Greek bouzouki record for a solid four minutes, making it sound like there was a bouzouki player in Ayler's band, only to have the recognition hit when Ayler stops and the bouzouki plays on. Or you can get a couple fairly minimal orchestral pieces in the same (or complimentary) keys and run an extremely long crossfade between the two. In one extreme case, I had played Metal Machine Music in its entirety, but while playing side one I recorded it, while playing side two I played back the recording of side one at the same time and recorded that, while playing side three I mixed in the recording of sides one and two, etc. The slight sound degradation and synch issues on the tape playbacks made it sound really interesting. Another fun thing to do was try to connect two very marginally related pieces in a way that makes total sense: take a Borbetomagus cut, the longer the better, and let it rage in its full glory. As it ends in shower of burning embers and feedback ghosts, up comes the tinkling piano intro of Coleman Hawkins's "Body and Soul". The piano is audible, but almost incomprehensible in its incongruity . . . and then, with the saxophone, the first thread appears: it is, after all, the same instrument that drives Borbetomagus, albeit in a very different form. Or is it that different? The screaming rage of Borbetomagus highlights the emotional urgency of Hawkins's tenor, especially the gruff gospel-tinged overblowing later in the song, while the transcendent melodicism of his line draws out the improbably melodic moments in Borbetomagus.  In the end, everything to connect one piece to another is fair game, and the less esoteric the better . . . always rely on sound, emotions, textures, visions.

  So back to the damn seventies compilations. On disc VIII, which was done years and years ago, the middle of the program runs thusly: America "Tin Man" to Albert Hammond "It Never Rains in Southern California" to Starland Vocal Band "Afternoon Delight" to Andrea True Connection "More More More" to Teenage Jesus and the Jerks "Burning Rubber" to Richard Hell and the Voidoids "Blank Generation" to The Saints "(I'm) Stranded"**.  A quick survey of that list shows two waves being surfed out, breaking right between the Andrea True Connection and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Now, connecting those two is a bit, ah, esoteric. The one connection is that both of the female leads are also actresses who have appeared in sexually explicit films, but that connection is pretty tenuous: porn actress Andrea True serves up an archetypal paean to coke-fueled seventies erotica, Lunch responds with a transgressive sexuality that counters virtually everything that disco driven seventies porn asserts . . . the contrast is the connection. But that doesn't really work, does it? And lord knows there is no musical or emotional commonality between the two.

  Moral of the story: sometimes you just throw shit together whether it works or not. I still laugh whenever I play that disc and Lydia Lunch smacks me upside the head after the vacuous sex disco. I suppose there is a level of profundity in both, and if I tried hard enough I could articulate it. Truth is, I don't like either song.

_______________

*  One of my favorites I do have on tape, but I can't really take credit for it because it was so obvious: The Residents have a song called "Beyond the Valley of A Day in the Life", which starts with the big crescendo at the end of The Beatles "A Day in the Life", and then runs Beatles tape loops as the huge piano chord at the end of the song fades out very (very, very, very!) slowly (it was looped, natch). The Residents cut was about six minutes long, if memory serves. So, the obvious thing to do: play "A Day in the Life", and at the break right before the final piano chord, cut in The Residents, whose song starts with a sample of that very piano chord. And then, of course, play it off like it is an unreleased Beatles take.  I have never gotten that many phone calls while doing a radio show.
** To be clear, inclusion is not an endorsement of any given song. I will let the dear reader draw their own conclusions.