Last week when I asked my Facebook friends for a theme to base my day’s record listening on, I got a bunch of great responses. I’ve decided to take a swing at all of them! (In no particular order.
1. Today I am going to do the suggestion “Covers that hop genres.” It’s actually a a little tough, because some of the best such covers are buried in LPs. I don’t usually skip around on LPs, so I’ll likely play a couple whole records to get to the pertinent stuff on them. (I may do a second take on this with only 45s. I got a bunch of themes too!)
2. Detroit
3. Aussie
4.Freedom
5. Stiv (Bators I presume)
Downliners Sect: The Birth of Suave: (LP, Hangman records Hang 42-Up) This record has quite a few covers, like most British Big Beat LPs have. I’m used to and fond of the usual American R&B and Blues covers from the Sect, but the reason I selected this LP is because until recently I didn’t know that the spooky grinder “Glendora” is actually a Perry Como cover! (Thanks to Youtube channel Yesterday’s Papers for that tidbit and many more!) It’s definitely one of those covers that now leaves me perplexed in a “HOW in the world did they get here from THERE sort of ways.
Various Artists: We Do ‘Em Our Way: (LP, Music For Pleasure MFP 50481) Accomplishes what good cover song comps should do: Creates conversation. Good party record. I could probably go ny entire life without hearing the “Sex Pistols” version of “rock around the clock” again and be perfectly happy. It was funny the first few times that I heard it, but now its presence at the beginning of the this comp is an obstacle to listening to the whole record. The sex Pistols “stepping Stone” and Devo’s World Without Love.
Skid Roper & The Whirlin’ Spurs: Trails Plowed Under: (LP, Triple X Records 51013-1)
This is a really great record. I wish that Skid had hung a few more of them together. There’s only one cover on this very country LP, but its a doozy of a genre hopper! Paint It Black, complete with a Kazoo fanfare. You kinda gotta hear it to believe it!
Ray Charles: Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music: (LP, ABC-Paramount T-90468) I think most folks would consider this album the gold standard for genre hopping covers. It’s probably the most favorite, and I do indeed love it…. But… I was struck by an interesting thought on this listen through. Charles’s versions are the ones that actually don’t hold up as well over time. The back up singers and string arrangements sound more than little old fashioned. The relatively stripped down versions hold up better, at least to my ear
Big Daddy: Self Titled: (LP, Rhino Records RNLP-852) OK. This is a novelty album, straight up. The premise is that a Sha-Na-Nesque band was lost on a desert isle for a couple of decades, and when they returned they tried to make the charts once again by performing new music in their old style. Not a bad gimmick. Not a great one either. The idea of doing (at the time) modern hits in a 50s or 60s style was pretty funny to me when I bought this record 30 years ago. Not as funny to my housemates at the time. I’ll stand by the Star Wars theme in Ventures style “Eye of the Tiger” have a certain amount of brilliance to them.
Etta James: Deep In The Night: (LP, Warner Brothers Records BSK 3156)
Basically a cover album, with some more in Etta’s expected wheelhouse than others. Alice Cooper’s only “Women Bleed” shows that in fact any song is in her Wheelhouse. Her version of “Take A Little Piece of My Heart” is pretty amazing too, though you’d expect that given how much Janis Joplin borrowed from other women blues artists. She even almost makes fuckin’ “Take It To The Limit” a credible song.