BETWEEN THE BEATLES COVERS

"We Can Work It Out" / Stevie Wonder

And now for something completely different...

It's one thing to cover a Beatles song if their records were the soundtrack of your childhood, the inspiration that made you decide to become a musician. But Stevie Wonder was their peer, more or less; with his first album released in 1962, he was already a Motown star when the Beatles first hit the scene. So why cover a Beatles hit?

Granted, Motowners were probably as eager to ride the tail of the Beatles phenomenon as anybody. If it helped them escape the confines of the soul charts and tap into a crossover market, all the better. Given that the Beatles themselves were influenced by American R&B, repaying the favor was only natural, and Beatles songs really did lend themselves to being soul-ified. (Check out Marvin Gaye's "Yesterday" or Gladys Knight's "Let It Be".)

But this wasn't just a filler track for Stevie; it was track two on his 1970 album Signed, Sealed, Delivered  and he released it as a single in 1971, which hit #13 on the Billboard charts and earned him a Grammy nomination. At a time when Stevie was intent on proving his chops as a songwriter and producer, he still invested this much in a cover song. You have to think there was something about this song that really spoke to him.

Well, duh -- there's something about this song that really speaks to me too.

But then what does Stevie do?  He steers the song straight into Funkytown. He kicks up the tempo, leads off with a sassy keyboard intro, scats the lyrics, and takes that McCartney syncopation to a whole new level. Listen to how he punctuates the line endings, with a bah-dum-pah guitar lick straight out of the Jackson Five. That fed-up John Lennon bridge, the thinly veiled threat about "Life is very short / And there's no time / For fussing and fighting"?  Stevie drops the spooky waltzing harpsichord entirely and sings this with straightforward peacemaking intentions.

While McCartney was pleading with his girlfriend, Stevie sails along on a wave of optimism and confidence.  Sure, we can work it out!  Suddenly this song is no longer about a romantic relationship -- it's about blacks and whites finding a common ground. He adds a musical break full of sweet yearning harmonica, coaxing all sorts of mellow sounds out of that lonesome blues instrument -- it sounds downright Burt Bacharach. Whenever Stevie returns to his harmonica prodigy roots, you have to know it's a good thing.

It took another ten years for Stevie and Paul to finally collaborate, and then the product was the cringe-worthy "Ebony and Ivory." They both should have known better. I prefer to pretend that never happened, and turn up "We Can Work It Out" one more time. 

WEDNESDAY SHUFFLE

An eclectic bunch of tunes for the end of summer [sigh] . . . .

1. "When I Live My Dream" / David Bowie
From David Bowie (1967)
Before he was Ziggy Stardust, Bowie's first album featured a quirky mix of songs like this Anthony Newley knock-off. (Pizzicato strings! A triangle!) Insurance, just in case the rock-and-roll thing didn't pan out, you know...

2. "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" / The Walker Brothers
From Portrait (1966)
A trio from California, none of them really brothers, who found success by moving to the UK in 1965 -- payback for the British Invasion, I guess. Their first hit was Bacharach & David's "Make It Easy On Yourself" (remember the Jerry Butler version?); this single got a little more airplay in the States and cracked the top 20. I love how they copied that Righteous Brothers white-soul sound perfectly, all echo and back-up choirs and manly harmonies. "The sun ain't gonna shine anymore / The moon ain't gonna rise in the skies / The tears are always clouding your eyes" -- tear those heart-strings!

3. "You're Telling Me" / Alan Price
From Between Today and Yesterday (1974)
After O Lucky Man!, where could Alan Price go? Well, it took him a while -- the record company rejected his first try, Savaloy Dip (a long-lost album, until my friend Tony discovered a carton of 8-track tapes in a record warehouse's dumpster). But undaunted, Price bounced back with this masterpiece LP, perhaps best known for the UK hit "Jarrow Song." This song is the highlight of side 2, the "today" side, where Price finally unleashes the brooding, bluesy organ riffs we've been waiting for. "My friends all tell me, 'you should be happy, / You have more than many others in this town.' / But I can see now, just what they mean now, / They're my friends until my money lets them down." Yup, that's the cynical Alan Price we know and love.

4. "He's Evil" / The Kinks
From Preservation Act 2 (1974)
Another favorite album from 1974 -- totally different, of course, with Ray Davies leading the Kinks deep into campy musical theater. Dig the finger-wagging back-up choir in this snappy character sketch of dastardly Mr. Flash, the villain of this dystopian fable. Over and over, building to the finish, "He's evil (he's evil) / He's evil (he's evil) / He's evil, he's evil, he's evil." Get the picture? Yes, we see.

5. "What Good Am I Without You?" / Kim Weston & Marvin Gaye
From Take Two (1966)
Classic Motown duet -- what a groove these two hit together. . . .

6. "Am I Wrong" / Keb' Mo'
From Keb' Mo (1994)
Just Keb' and his steel guitar, with handclaps and a few grunts providing snappy percussion -- and it's divine. How can he be wrong, falling in love with her, when her other man was out there cheatin' and lyin' and steppin' all over her? Sexiest line: "Just want to make a home for you, baby / And all of your children too."

7. "You Are What You Love" / Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins
From Rabbit Fur Coat (2005)
Jenny's spunky, tuneful first solo album, her breakaway from Rilo Kiley, was so good. . . .what's happened since?

8. "Ain't That Loving You" / Sir Douglas Quintet
From Soul Jam (2000 -- compilation)
South Side Chicago blues, filtered through Texas. You may know this old chestnut by Deadric Malone -- alias Houston black record producer Don Robey -- from the Grateful Dead's version, or Buddy Guy's. (Elvis Presley's was a different song -- man, this stuff gets confusing.) But man oh man, did Doug Sahm have a great voice -- I could listen to him sing the Yellow Pages and I'd be happy.

9. "These Roads Don't Move" / Jay Farrar & Benjamin Gibbard
From Big Sur (2009)
Wonder what Kerouac would've thought of Jay and Ben turning his prose into Americana music?

10. "What Is Wrong, What Is Right?" / Herman's Hermits
From Very Best of Herman's Hermits (compilation)
This 1966 B-side proves that there was more to Herman's Hermits than the teen fan mags ever let us know -- just as I always suspected!

"Yesterday" / Marvin Gaye

Usually, Beatles covers are disappointing things to me -- the Beatles did those songs up right the first time, and they just can't be topped. True, I'm not very objective on this subject. Those were the songs I lived on throughout my formative musical years; every riff and drumbeat and vocal flutter is engraved on my heart.

Occasionally, however, I'm forced to make an exception--and this is one of them. I found it on an CD called Motown Meets the Beatles, most of which is just as embarrassing as you'd expect. Did the world really need to hear the Supremes murder "A Hard Day's Night," or Smokey Robinson over-emote his way through "And I Love Her"? But there are a couple revelations on there -- like when Gladys Knight frees the gospel that was always lurking inside "Let It Be," and Stevie Wonder takes "We Can Work It Out" all the way to Funkytown and back. Delicious.

The one that really surprised me, though, is this Marvin Gaye rendition of "Yesterday." Now you know I'm a tough audience for "Yesterday" -- my memory of watching Paul McCartney sit on a stool with an acoustic guitar and croon that on the Ed Sullivan Show is . . . ummmm . . . excuse me, what was I saying? Oh, yes. Well, Paulie stole my heart forever with that song, which was (little known fact) written just for me. It's OUR SONG, and nobody else is supposed to touch it. And yet here comes Marvin Gaye, whose outsized talent I've never quite been able to process, and he dug right down into that lovely little folk-rock ballad and re-invented it as a quintessential soul song. And you know what? It works.

First off, he slows down the tempo, gives it some slinky syncopation, and underlays it with a supremely laidback twangy guitar line. Suddenly there's room to slip in interstices of regret between the phrases -- I can just picture Marvin pausing to shake his head, bite his lip, still trying to sort out why today isn't the same as yesterday. At first his voice floats lightly over the lyrics -- " Yesterday / All my troubles seem so far away" -- it still hasn't sunk in. But by verse two, he's flinging his voice ahead of the tempo, and embellishing Paul's simple sincere lyrics: "Suddenly, people, / I ain't half the man I used to be, no, / There's a heavy, heavy shadow hanging over me-e / Yesterday came all too suddenly."

Self-pity? You bet. But it unleashes a falsetto wail on the bridge: "Oh-oh-oh why-y did she have to go? I don't know / I say I don't know, the little girl wouldn't say / I must, I must have said something wrong / Now I long, long, long for yesterday . . ." And in the same vein, on the third verse, he's writhing with pain, "Now I nee-eed, I need a place to hide away." I certainly believe him. This was given the full Motown Important Song treatment, with swelling strings and xylophones, but it never gets overdone, and the passion in Marvin's exquisite supple voice more than lives up to the production values.

Now, I'm not saying it's better than the McCartney version -- that would be sacrilege. But the point of being a great songwriter should be that your songs stand on their own, that other artists can find different depths in them. (Look at how many fantastic Kinks covers are out there, for example.) I guess the Beatles just cast too long a shadow over their songs, even the minor ones. It's hard for other artists to ignore that definitive Beatle rendition and make it their own. But Marvin Gaye was never short of confidence -- he must have known he had the voice to pull this one off. And oh, what a glorious thing it is.

Yesterday sample

"What Good Am I Without You" / Marvin Gaye & Kim Weston

MOTOWN #5

In April 1984, when I heard Marvin Gaye had been shot by his father in the heat of an argument, I bet I hadn't thought about him for seven or eight years. But as soon as I began to, I realized I had to mourn at least three different Marvin Gayes. "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" is in some ways THE classic Motown track; his jazz-drenched 1970 hits "What's Going On" and "Mercy Mercy Me" shattered the Motown mold by actually being -- gasp! -- about something besides romantic love; then he practically invented the heavy-breathing song with "Let's Get It On" and "Sexual Healing," blatantly sexual tracks that mortified the teenage me when they first came out. (And now, of course, I love them...)

But the thing about Marvin Gaye I never focused on until recently was that so many of his hits were duets. Gaye was Berry Gordy's brother-in-law (talk about convenient), and I'm guessing that when his first few solo singles failed to chart, Berry looked for a way to hoist brother-in-law Marvin to bigger success. The solution? An album of duets with Motown's reigning girl star Mary Wells. Gaye's silky voice blended incredibly well with female vocals, and considering that he had come up through doo-wop, harmonizing was no doubt second nature to him.

Eventually he'd pair up, to enormous success, with Tammi Terrell and even cut a few tracks with Diana Ross, when she was the queen of Motown. (It's nice to be the girlfriend of the king.) In the mid-60s, though, Marvin Gaye's partner was Kim Weston, a Motown regular who never really got the success she deserved. Even stacked up against chart-topping Marvin&Tammi duets like "Precious Love" and "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," I'd have to say my favorite Marvin Gaye duet is this laid-back syncopated number with Kim.

The honky-tonk piano plinking away behind the vocals gives it a touch of roadhouse sloppiness that draws me in right away; I can almost picture a tiny bare stage with two singers leaning into the same microphone stand to blend their voices on those jazzy wo-oh-ohs. The horn section, the back-up ooohs, the drumming, are all kept back in the mix so you can focus on the voices, both Weston and Gaye playing with notes and rhythm as if they are actually live singers and not studio-polished automatons.

Duets only work when the two singers are in the same groove, and I really feel like Kim and Marvin are both having exactly the same amount of fun here, getting a kick out of each other's stylizings. Like many Motown lyrics, this one picks a single concept and runs it through several variations -- in this case objects that need something else to complete them (sounds like a category from The $25,000 Pyramid, doesn't it?). "What good is a telephone if there's no one to call?" "What good is a wedding if no one says 'I do?'" "What good is a doctor if he can't cure the pain?" "What good is the heavens without the stars above?" et cetera et cetera.

Kim takes the first verse, Marvin takes the second, and they do a call-and-answer on the third verse, but at the end of every verse, on the line "What good am I baby, without you" they get to improvise for a measure or two, and man, what they do with it makes this song sizzle -- Marvin pulls a gritty edge into his voice, and Kim drops down a chromatic scale that's so languid and elegant, it's like she's channeling Ella Fitzgerald.
This is one of those songs where finger-snapping is more or less compulsory (Marvin Gaye was also a drummer, after all).

I loved Marvin Gaye the social activist and Marvin Gaye the heavy-breather, but this other Marvin, the swinging jazz singer, may be my favorite Marvin of all. And now I'm curious to dig up some more Kim Weston numbers, too. Marvin I always knew about...but Kim...