I was sitting in my car and listening to Nights With Alice Cooper at one point tonight, and he played a bit he had recorded earlier, wherein he was talking with Jack Blades, one of those quasi-iconic rockers mostly known for having been involved with a one-hit wonder band (in the case of Blades, he was in Night Ranger when they recorded “Sister Christian”) and who has existed on the fringes of rock music ever since.
Over the years, he has worked with Tommy Shaw, whose zenith with Styx occurred at roughly the same time as, or perhaps a bit before, that of Blades, on a collaboration album and in an early-90s band called Damn Yankees. Blades and Shaw are set to release, in February, their second collaboration album, called Influence, a record of songs by other bands that Blades and Shaw have recorded, apparently to let the world know about some of the music they came up on.
One of the songs that Alice Cooper mentioned from the Shaw/Blades record is “The Sound Of Silence,” recorded originally by Simon & Garfunkel. Upon hearing that this song had been recorded by Tommy Shaw and Jack Blades, I decided that the time had finally come to kill myself. I cannot possibly listen to Tommy Shaw and Jack Blades sing “The Sound Of Silence” and still allow myself to live.
Which is sort of odd...because I actually like “Sister Christian.” I also like a couple of Styx songs; and I really liked Damn Yankees. I landed on the popular music scene between when Styx and Night Ranger were popular and when Shaw and Blades formed Damn Yankees with guitar legend Ted Nugent - though I landed much closer to Damn Yankees than I did to Styx and Night Ranger.
But then, that kind of music has always provoked strong feelings in me. Sometimes I hear songs done by bands other than the one who recorded the song, and I just want to...well, kill myself. Other times, I hear those kinds of songs, and I just laugh (like when Limp Bizkit did George Michael’s “Faith” and dropped an F-bomb in the middle of it). And then there are times when the new version is even better than the original version, although I think this happens less often than the new version sucks ass.
Jason Maier once called me a purist because I cringed when I heard the Dave Matthews Band doing a version of “All Along The Watchtower.” I am and I am not. Hearing Dave Matthews sing “Watchtower” is cringe-worthy. Then again, I can’t stand Dave Matthews or his band. I heard this song a couple of years ago when Jason and I were still working for Another Major Competitor in the movie theatre business.
It was 39 years ago when the album John Wesley Harding was released. This was the album on which first appeared the song called “All Along The Watchtower,” and the album was recorded by Bob Dylan...39 years ago. I was not alive 39 years ago. My parents had not yet married 39 years ago.
(Oddly, though, there was a dumb Texan in the Oval Office 39 years ago - one who escalated, against popular opinion, an unwinnable ground war in Asia.)
I shudder to think what a poll of one hundred random Americans would return to the question of who sang “All Along The Watchtower” - although I suppose it would depend on how you phrased the question and the age of the people you asked. Dylan wrote the song, but the best known version is the one done by Jimi Hendrix - and this is the best example of a song that was done better by the person who covered it.
The second best example is probably the song “Take It Easy.” Poll one hundred Americans about that song, and probably everyone would say the Eagles. But it would, again, depend on how you phrased the question. If you asked who wrote the song, and asked it of people my age or older, the more musically informed of them would say Jackson Browne, which is correct. He wrote the song, and recorded it, but did not have a hit with it. Then he let his pal Glenn Frey take a run at it - and Frey gave it his own unique twist, by extending the word “easy” into a long sing-song, and thereby turned an anonymous Jackson Browne song into one of the best-known songs the Eagles ever recorded. It remains Frey’s signature Eagles song - and was one of two songs the band played when they were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame (the only time that every man who had ever been an Eagle, and there have been seven of them over the years, played together on stage). The other song they played was “Hotel California.”
Things don’t always turn out as well when someone records someone else’s song, though. Madonna butchered - literally, by cutting a couple of verses - probably the best folk-rock song of all time, Don McLean’s “American Pie,” when she “recorded” that song for the soundtrack of The Next Best Thing.
This also isn’t the first time that Simon & Garfunkel have been re-recorded. The Lemonheads did a version of “Mrs. Robinson” that sounds like they want to be the Byrds even though they are not; and the Bangles (seriously) recorded “Hazy Shade Of Winter” and managed not to mangle it, but they made it heavy with electricity, whereas Simon & Garfunkel made it heavy with implication and vocalization.
Sometimes the results are mixed. Bob Dylan has a song called “Make You Feel My Love,” on his amazing Time Out Of Mind album - a song that was later done by both Garth Brooks and Billy Joel. It’s easily the least impressive song on that Dylan album, though, and neither Brooks nor Joel really did anything to make it any better.
Then there is Billy Joel’s song “Shameless,” which appears on his mostly forgettable second-to-last rock album Storm Front. Billy Joel sounds like he’s forcing the song out of himself - but when Garth Brooks covered it on Ropin’ The Wind, he knocked it down, made it electrifying, and put more soul into it than Billy Joel could have done if he had recorded it on The Stranger rather than Storm Front.
Hell, bands sometimes even cover themselves. Whitesnake did it on Slip Of The Tongue when they re-recorded “Fool For Your Loving,” and Chicago did it on XVIII when they re-recorded “25 Or 6 To 4.” (Part of the reason for that may have been to take a shot at Peter Cetera, the best known singer Chicago ever had, and who left the band between XVII and XVIII. He sang lead on the original “25 Or 6 To 4,” and the band may or may not have wanted to prove how good newcomer Jason Scheff was - he was the one who sang the lead on the newer version.)
You’ve got the good and the bad. I’m probably more sensitive on the Tommy Shaw/Jack Blades cover of “The Sound Of Silence” than I am on other covers because it’s a song I grew up with and have grown to love over the years - especially since I learned what a happy accident it was, and how it might well have been that happy accident that helped launch Simon & Garfunkel to superstardom instead of anonymity.
The song almost never became a hit. The version they recorded originally was all acoustic, but it never played well. For the album version, an electric guitar track was substituted for the original acoustic track. The song and album both became hits, and Simon & Garfunkel shot almost instantly from relative anonymity to superstardom.
I can’t even stomach the idea of listening to Tommy Shaw and Jack Blades sing this song - yet there are many covers out there that are far better than the original material. Is it the iconic nature of a song that makes it uncoverable? I honestly don’t know. Hell, the world may never know.
(I apologize to anyone who set themselves to reading this post with the hope that eventually I would get around to the point. I am afraid that I have failed to include one here. What I fear that I have done is to loosely collect random observations with the hope that something central would emerge. That seems not to have happened. Sometimes what I do here is try to spur discussion. It does not always work as well I hope it will.)
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