The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Under the Covers
January 1999
It’s a little more than a year ago in the Crocodile Cafe in Seattle, and the Crust Brothers have stepped up for their set in support of the Washington Wilderness Coalition. Since this isn't a real group with its own material—it's the Seattle-based Montana-expatriate trio Silkworm plus Pavement singer Steve Malkmus—the four guys turn themselves into a cover band. Most gigs like this are lost in memory; the Crust Brothers have left behind a record of the event called Marquee Mark (Telemomo), a tiny footnote that contains a giant story.
Cover bands—or any performer covering someone else's record live or on disc—play what they themselves love, what they think people want to hear, what bit of familiar sound will somehow translate new material. Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power, lets a cover work in just that way on her recent Moon Pix (Matador): She follows an old Bob Dylan recording of the ancient Appalachian ballad "Moonshiner." Marshall's version is clean but weird: "I've been a moonshiner / For seventeen long years," she sings, sounding at once absolutely convincing and not a day over seventeen herself. Both qualities will draw you back to the song even if the rest of the album floats right past you, as it did me at first, but the perfect balance of the tune serves as a counterweight to the drifting, unclear patterns of Marshall's own compositions.
Still, in the moments that take the act into its own realm of folly and glory, covering a song is a matter of what a performer thinks he can get away with, what she thinks she can get past people. I think it's this factor that accounts for the great cover triumphs, the milestones—top of the pops being Bryan Ferry's first solo album, the 1973 These Foolish Things, where he applied his Foppish-Dracula-with-a-Heart-of-Gold persona to, among other foreign objects, Leslie Gore's "It's My Party" and Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." Some Ferry fans got away with thinking it was all, you know, camp; what Ferry got past them, while still maintaining his supercool Roxy Music pose, was that he meant every word.
Back at the Crocodile, it's hard to figure where the Crust Brothers' set list came from: Five of the first six numbers are covers of songs from Dylan's 1967 so-called basement tapes, and it seems like a gesture of pure laziness until you realize that inside the breakneck sloppiness there are people trying out new arrangements, fooling with the given rhythms no less than with the audience. In the face of a crowd-call for Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird," they open with the obscure Basement lament "Goin' to Acapulco." "We're going to Acapulco, now," someone, maybe Silkworm bassist Tim Midgett, says. "You're all invited. Born to choogle," he adds, because they kick the number off with riffs from Creedence Clearwater Revival's premier "chooglin"' number, "Born on the Bayou." That's what happens when you start to play with covers. Every song becomes an opportunity to join the Grand Continuum of Rock 'n' Roll History, to indulge in its deepest satisfactions, and to trash it—"No, it's not true," says a voice from the stage. "we're not doing any fucking Wallflowers songs tonight"—while offering it your heart.
The band rips up "Goin' to Acapulco" from the inside out. For Dylan, the song was a slow drift down the Styx, the sun baking the drugs right into your heart; here the tune is rushed, syncopated, with a rough, keening vocal. The person singing is completely different from the person telling his story in the Dylan version: He's desperate, but he still believes. It's as if the Crust Brothers never heard Dylan's version in the first place. For this night, anyway, the song is theirs—and so is "Million Dollar Bash." So is "Lo and Behold." So is "Tuesday's Gone,” a Lynyrd Skynyrd number played near the end of the set when once again someone calls out for "Free Bird." ("Close," says a band member, “‘Free Bird’ is close. But no cigar.’”) So is "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," which, while the Crust Brothers are inside it, can sound like the best version of the song ever played.
You can hear the same dynamic—the reach that turns the desire to play someone else's song into the possession of it, and then release the song from the ability of any one person to possess it—in any of your favorite covers. It may be the most fun pop list you can make. Today mine includes Cyndi Lauper's unforgiving 1984 remake of the Brains 1979 "Money Changes Everything,” one of the great punk records, first sung by Tom Gray of the Brains in the voice of a victim, then taken over and sung by Lauper in the voice of pure cruelty, of necessity; Big Sandy’s 1998 Dedicated to You, a swirling, sexy, academically precise celebration of mid-'50s L.A. doo-wop; and, as always, forever, the Beatles' "Money,” where Barrett Strong's furious original, the first real Motown record, a true classic, was crumpled up and left behind like a used piece of Kleenex.
Probably the most notable cover of the last few years has been Puff Daddy's "I'll Be Missing You," his revision of the Police's "Every Breath You Take," which he made into an elegy for the Notorious B.I.G. It could be that he put the whole cover game together in that one record: what he loved, what people might want to hear, what he could get past them—or even what might, when a singer takes up someone else's song, get past the singer. Here the song was familiar, a hook in itself, an almost sure route to crossover airplay. One can presume that just like millions of other people, Puff Daddy was caught up by the graceful melody and the threatening words from the day "Every Breath You Take" first appeared on the air in 1983. But as for what the singer or the song might have got away with? As the listener remembered that Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were plainly stalked to their deaths—followed, set up, gunned down, first one and then the other—the old song, originally sung from the point of view of a stalker, reemerged in the new record like an uninvited guest, unless it was Puff Daddy himself who invited him in. You couldn't tell—the more you listened the less you could tell. And by then the song no more belonged to anyone than do the dead.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, January 1999
"Foppish-Dracula-with-a-Heart-of-Gold." Nice.
As a former busker myself, I enjoyed being in cover bands: Sons of Hattie Carroll and later, The Lonesome Whippoorwills, the first inspired by the Dylan song The Lonesome Death Of...and the latter, an homage to Hank Williams' I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry. You see, to be halfway proficient at music (or writing) one must have a lotta lonesome time! But to do songs, either famous or obscure, by the greats, is an honor, I feel and brings one closer to the music you love.