BETWEEN THE BEATLES COVERS

"Fixing a Hole" /
The Wood Brothers

Wow, thanks for all the recommendations on Facebook -- evidently I have tapped into a rich vein of  music here. That I Am Sam soundtrack alone is chockful of Beatley gems.

So why wait?  Let's get cracking....

Now as you may recall, I'm a dedicated evangelist for the Wood Brothers, rock guitarist Oliver and jazz bassist Chris, who slip into this Americana mode like a pair of worn slippers whenever they get together. What started out in 2005 as a side project has grown into something enduring -- their fourth studio album, Muse, comes out in October -- and I love their quirky bluegrass-and-jazz-tinged roots rock.  This is from their 2009 album Up Above My Head, a collection of cover songs, though they've been known to include a cover song or two on their other albums as well.

The Sgt. Pepper's original "Fixing a Hole" is Paul McCartney Psychedelia Lite, neither druggy nor draggy -- sure, the lyrics free-associate, but Paul's trademark song-and-dance flair won't be denied. The phantasmagoric harmonies on "Where it will go . . . " are kept tethered by Ringo's steady soft-shoe drumbeat, and the verse's sinous melody and offbeat syncopations switch in the chorus to punchy rhythms and tic-like repetitions -- "And it really doesn't matter  / If I'm wrong I'm right / Where I belong I'm right / Where I belong."

He may want to let his mind wander, but he's still testy about the naysayers and critics. It all crests on a single yammering high note: "See the people standing there / Who disagree and never win / And wonder why they don't get in my door" (poor Paul, all those intrusive fans outside his St. John's Wood house), before swooping wearily back down to the next verse. I've always imagined that Paul wrote this song while doing household repairs, or at least thinking that the house needed repairs, before deciding instead to screw it all and just smoke a joint. Oh, and maybe write a song, which was after all his real job.

Of course I love this song -- of course -- but ultimately it is bound up in the particulars of the era, and the historical impact of Sgt. Pepper's, and the ongoing Lennon-McCartney dialectic. So when a cover version cuts the song free and lets it breathe again, it's a welcome breath of fresh air. 

As you'd expect, Oliver and Chris Wood take this song instead for a walk down a country road. The tempo's slowed down to a genial amble, the guitar's unplugged for a lazy strum, and the bass is plucking softly behind. No drums, no harpsichord intro; even the instrumental break is simply a free-form jazz ramble on the bass. Oliver's appealing creaky vocal adds to the loose-limbed charm of this song, as does the low-fi production quality. (The video of them singing this in a stairwell fits perfectly.)  It respects the original, and yet brings something new to the table.

What I love is how Oliver changes things up, scatting the melody a bit, and syncopating McCartney's syncopation even further. He makes us listen to the melody like it's something new, makes us hear words that weren't emphasized in the original. Suddenly I hear the first verse differently:  "I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in / And stops my mind from wondering where it will go." He adds minor-key intervals, turning McCartney's mysterious hints (I mean drugs, wink wink) into a what-can-you-do sigh of modern melancholy. Instead of Macca's doubled vocals, the Woods give us close brother harmonies that really hit the gritty discords, wringing them out, making us wait deliciously for the chord finally to resolve. He slides around on the chorus, straying from the one-note phrases, as if shrugging his shoulders -- he's not bugged so much by those silly disagreeing people. That lovely long pause before "I'm taking the time for a number of things"? He really does take the time.

This cover version isn't psychedelic at all, nor does it try to be. After all, 40 years after Sgt. Pepper, getting high is no longer a coded secret, an act of defiance, a willful escape from the status quo -- it IS the status quo. The Wood Brothers aren't tripping, they're on vacation, and that makes this old song new again. Isn't that what we want from a cover?

BETWEEN THE BEATLES COVERS

"Nowhere Man" / Paul Westerberg

A really good cover of a really great song is a rare and wonderful thing, and there's nothing harder than covering a Beatles song. Considering that almost your entire audience already knows the original, you've got to walk a tricky line. On the one hand, if you merely imitate the original, why even bother to record it? But on the other hand, the original was done so right, if you change it too much, you're committing sacrilege.

Still, a few artists have turned the trick, and as a lifelong Fab Four fanatic, when I find a memorable Beatles cover, I snatch it up right away.  I'm always on the hunt for these, so if you're got a favorite, please let me know about it. 

I would never have expected a great Beatles cover from alt-rock pioneer Paul Westerberg, even though I am secretly a fan of his post-Replacements acoustic stuff. (I came to the game late -- Westerberg's solo music was actually my intro to the Replacements, not the other way around.)  Yet as soon as I heard this song -- you'll find it on his best-of album Besterberg or the soundtrack of the movie I Am Sam -- it revolutionized how I hear this song.

John Lennon claimed that "Nowhere Man" came to him like magic at dawn, after hours of desperately trying to crank out a song for the Rubber Soul album, keenly aware no doubt that Paul McCartney had already tossed off several beauties. (Ah, the fruits of that rivalry....) Back in the early days, songs came so easily to John and Paul, they could scribble a new tune in half an hour during a recording break. Writer's block must have terrified John, like a portent that the jig was up, that he would finally be exposed as the fraud he always secretly thought he really was.

And then, out of the blue came this sublime little folk song, aching with loneliness and existential despair. For once, John abandoned his usual clever puns and snarky commentaries and laid his orphaned soul bare. Though the song claims to observe and address the Nowhere Man, John is of course himself the Nowhere Man, a lost soul behind the mask of his biting wit, and he takes himself wistfully to task for "making all his nowhere plans for nobody." The world may be at his command, but he doesn't trust that one bit.

In the Rubber Soul version, however (which by the way we Americans only got on Yesterday . . . And Today), John has a little help from his friends, who chime in harmonies and la-la-lala's on the chorus. There's a gently rocking tempo, Ringo's chipper drumbeat, and George's twangy guitar break to counteract the song's melancholy. When we first heard it we knew it was a sad-dish song, in the same way that "I'll Follow the Sun" and "Things We Said Today" were sad-dish songs. But the Beatles were a pop group, for chrissake.  Producer George Martin was not about to let them go full-on depressive.

But Paul Westerberg?  Sitting in his basement studio in Minneapolis, making his own handmade solo recordings?  Nobody was around to stop him from scuba diving to the heart of melancholy -- and this cover brilliantly adds a new dimension to Lennon's song as a result.

It's just him and his guitar, the tempo dialed down, the guitar gently picking instead of strumming. Even Westerberg's creaky, scratchy voice is an asset to this track. He sounds like an ordinary guy, observing the Nowhere Man from a distance, awed by the fact that "isn't he a bit like you and me." He's critical, but hesitantly so -- "He's as blind as he can be / Just sees what he wants to see / Nowhere man, can you see me at all?" And oh, he wants the Nowhere Man to see him -- he wants Lennon to know he's there, even though the guy is dead by now, mowed down because of his own celebrity. There's an elegiac quality here that Lennon could never have put into this song. It bears a weight of history; it is transformative.

 And yet in the third verse PW can step up to the plate and counsel the guru: "Nowhere Man, don't worry / Take your time, don't hurry / Leave it all, till somebody else / Lends you a hand." You can't tell me that this guy doesn't feel at least a tiny bit the same burden of carrying on a legacy. I love how he falters behind the beat, tentative, testing the waters. The fade-and-repeat ending drifts into a subtle rendition of "Taps" -- nuance, nuance, nuance.

A cover that transforms the original? Turn me on, dead man.          

"Opportunity" /
Elvis Costello and the Attractions

Like Elvis Costello -- a.k.a. Declan MacManus -- I was too was "born in the middle of the second big baby boom," and as soon as he sings that opening lyric he has me. 

This sublime 1980 album, Get Happy,  was conceived as Elvis' tribute to the Stax sound, and he gets pretty close, with Steve Nieve doing his best Booker T on the organ and Bruce Thomas doing a pretty fair Donald "Duck" Dunn on the bass. But like a lot of Elvis's music-geek tributes, it's a slightly self-conscious bit of homage, and the references are solidly 1950s U.K.  But does that bother me?  Oh no it does not.  That makes me like it even more.





Despite the relentlessly perky syncopation and all those chipper organ fills, is this a paranoid little song or what? The chorus, yanking anxiously back and forth between two notes, sums it up: "They shop around / Follow you without a sound / Whatever you do now / Don't turn around." A child of the Cold War, Elvis has that paranoia down stone cold, and I realize listening to this song that I too still kinda conduct my life under this assumption.  Because why not?

And poor Elvis -- all he wants is a little love. In verse one, he's "looking for a little girl, / I wonder where she's gone." After all, in Austerity England, it's his civic duty to procreate: "Big money for families having more than one."  Give the kid a break -- he's just operating as expected.

This being fairly Early Elvis, however, there's no way his Love Object is going to be anything but a ballbusting vampire.  "She was sitting pretty on a velvet cushion / But her bedroom eyes were like a button she was pushing."  Watch out, Elvis!

And soon enough, in the bridge, we get the obligatory love-as-battlefield metaphor: "I'm in the foxhole / I'm down in the trench." Excuse me, but only a kid who grew up in the shadow of a World War would leap so easily to that terminology.  And yet, he's enough of a postwar generation to admit "I'd be a hero, but I can't stand the stench." You'd be surprised at how often those lines jump to mind for me.   Trust me, they fit a lot of situations.

Later verses lose sight of the theme, as Elvis can't resist following a trail of puns and up-ended cliches -- "The Fitness Institute was full of General Motormen" (cross reference the "physical jerks" of "Living in Paradise" on This Year's Model). Still, isn't this why we love Early Elvis? Here comes one of my favorite Elvis lines, for reasons I cannot explain: "The chairman of this boredom is a compliment collector / I'd like to be his funeral director." Countless times these lines have gotten me through boring meetings where I smile and make nice, while in my heart of hearts I know perfectly well that I am NOT a stooge of the Corporation. Herein lies the value of rock and roll.

Is this a major song? No it is not. Is it even a major Elvis Costello song?  No it is not.  But the minute I hear it I am transported, not just to 1980 but to some weird out-of-time dimension where Elvis Costello and I are on the same bizarre wavelength.

This is a song woven deep into my musical DNA, for reasons I cannot even begin to analyze. And when it comes up on my shuffle?  The world falls away, and it's just me and my pal Declan, being paranoid together to a Memphis beat.

"I Still Believe" / Frank Turner

Thanks to Margot for the recommend. Because that's how we do it, old school -- face to face, hand to hand --- I heard this guy and I think you'd like it -- and we value those hand-offs above all.

My first-time listen to Frank Turner's 2011 album England Keep My Bones, I knew this track was the one to blog about. Because really, isn't that what we're about in this neck of the woods? The transformative power of a rock and roll song?

Frank Turner is English -- check. A folk/punk singer/songwriter -- check. I know that sounds like another iteration of the divine Robyn  Hitchcock, but Turner is a lot more earnest and feisty. He may have gone to Eton with Prince William (congrats to the royal dad) but he's a lot  more like Billy Bragg, and Margot, I hope you're taking notes, because I'd really love to turn you on to Billy Bragg and there's only so many hours in a day.

England Keep My Bones is a deeply English album, with place names and turns of phrase that might baffle some American listeners. (But hey, I'm a Kinks fan -- the Englisher the better.) An essential part of that Englishness is the old-school folk sound on several tracks, which is apparently a departure for Turner, who started out in a post-hardcore band called Million Dead. So there was some strategic value in this lead-off single, "I Still Believe," which reassured Turner fans that he has not turned his back on rocking out. Quite the contrary. As he exuberantly declaims in the refrain, "Now who'd have thought that after all, that something as simple as rock and roll could save us all?"

What more do we need?

Screw the ironic po-mo -- Turner's not afraid to forge a bond with his listeners, not afraid to tell you straight out where he stands. He's practically grabbing you by the lapels, addressing bystanders from his soapbox: "Friends, Romans, and countrymen!" (I like a man who's not afraid of a Shakespearean reference.) He's the town crier, over and over again calling out "Hear ye, hear ye!" "Come ye, come ye!"

Yet it's hard to believe this guy comes from the loud, fast, bass-heavy world of hardcore; dig the playful skipping tempo, and the yearning quality of his chord changes. 

He name-checks  all the usual suspects -- Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny (Cash? Ray?), and "all the saints"  -- but he's no Don McLean; he insists that "anybody could take the stage."  (I particularly enjoy verse two's list of the various places a working musician fetches up -- "soulless corporate circus tops . . . the toilet circuit . . bars and bunker squats . . . ") It's the base elements -- "Guitars and drums and desperate poetry" -- that really matter.

And why does it matter?  Because rock and roll "has the power to raise a temple and tear it down." There's a 60s flashback for you, and it's invigorating to hear it.

I saw FT on one of the latenight talk shows -- oh please don't ask me which one -- and I loved his raw energy, his conviction. And yet he's dialing it back to another era, to the time when rock and roll was still controversial and fresh and new. What's not to love about that?

"The Winner Takes It All" / ABBA

What -- she's gone for six weeks and then she comes back to write about ABBA?

But you see, while I was gone I went to Sweden, and what was the first thing I heard as I entered baggage claim at the Stockholm airport?  Agnetha's and Frida's voices, blending in their inimitable way, belting out "Take a Chance on Me." Was that perfect or what?

After all, ABBA is Sweden's greatest gift to the world, right up there with Volvo, Ikea, and Pippi Longstocking. So why not pipe it into the concourse just so you know you're really in Sweden?  Okay, so it was being played for a specific purpose: to promote the new ABBA Museum that just opened on Djurgarden. But hey, it worked -- I dragged my family to see the exhibit as soon as possible.

The museum was slick and entertaining, just like ABBA, and I suspect that my kids didn't come away as converts to the ABBA sound. They grew up in the post-punk indie era; how could they possibly hear how fresh ABBA's sound was when they first hit the scene? But it struck me anew, and seeing it in Stockholm really brought home what an achievement it was for a foursome from Sweden to take the world by storm back in 1974, winning the Eurovision Song Contest with their breakout hit "Waterloo."

Don't you dig those costumes?  In 1974, Eurovision contestants were still appearing in dirndls and lederhosen; the sequins and fringes and tight satin pants blew all that away. One of the coolest things about the ABBA museum was the room full of their stage costumes.  And it wasn't just the girls, either; Benny and Bjorn styled around in jumpsuits and capes that would put Liberace to shame. Frida in particular was hugely interested in how they looked on stage. They didn't dance much, and they didn't have the kind of pyrotechnics that today's headliners are expected to have. But for 1974, they were cutting-edge.

It's not like I haven't written about ABBA before -- you may remember my fondness for "Dancing Queen" and "Knowing Me Knowing You." Both of those tracks came from the only ABBA album I actually owned, Arrival, which also included the somewhat darker "Money Money Money" -- a song that was as close to social commentary as these Swedes ever went. (It also featured Frida's throaty contralto instead of Agnetha on lead vocal, if you're keeping score.)  Considering that Frida later married a German prince and is now living with a British viscount, I'd say she knows something about the topic of marrying money. 

But over the years, the ABBA song I keep coming back to is "The Winner Takes It All."  A later track, it appeared on 1980's Super Trouper, which was released after half of the group -- Bjorn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Faltskog -- had filed for divorce. (Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Benny Andersson were still hanging in there, but they would divorce in 1981.) Bjorn was the band's lyricist, and though he denies that this song was written about their divorce, I'm not buying it. The pain of splitting from a life partner runs through every bar of this song. And you can't tell me that Agnetha's delivery doesn't reflect some genuine heartbreak.

Wistful resignation runs through this song -- "I don't want to talk / About the things we've gone through / Though it's hurting me / Now it's history." Later on, she sings fatalistically, "The gods may throw the dice / Their minds as cold as ice." The pain hasn't gone away yet, but they've both accepted the reality of the end.

Or have they?  Gone are the bright bouncy syncopation, the cheerful pop hooks; this song swells with movie-music arpeggios and yearning chord shifts. Looking back on the past, she feels blindsided: "I was in your arms / Thinking I belonged there / I figured it made sense / Building me a fence." And just for good measure -- a twist of the knife -- she carries this on in the next couplet, "Building me a home / Thinking I'd be strong there." I trusted you, buddy, and look where it's left me.

In the third verse, the Other Woman enters the picture. (Ah, betrayal and jealousy rear their ugly heads.) "But tell me does she kiss / The way I used to kiss you? / Does it feel the same / When she calls your name?"  I love how Agnetha softens her voice for this verse, drops into that intimate register to summon a memory of pillow talk. That's got to evoke a twinge of regret.

And in the last verse, she makes sure he knows how selfless she's being -- "I don't want to talk / If it makes you feel sad . . . I apologize / If it makes you feel bad." Wait -- he left you for another woman, and you're apologizing to him?  I've always been torn by this verse, wanting her to stand up for herself, and yet totally getting how wrecked she is -- "Seeing me so tense / No self-confidence." I love how she lags behind the beat, singing those lyrics almost woodenly, numbly.

The refrain reiterates that the man is the winner, walking away with everything, and the woman is the loser. (Bjorn and Agnetha insist that neither of them was the loser in their divorce; this is just a song, people.) Still, I have to wonder. If Bjorn was the winner, how did he write a song with such insight into Agnetha's pain?  I can only imagine how it felt to hear her sing it over and over again, at concert after concert. So who's the winner in the end?

"I'm Not Like Everybody Else" / Dave Davies

I can't BELIEVE I haven't written before about this most iconic Kinks song.  It's been colonizing my earwaves ever since Monday night, when I was thrilled to see Dave Davies play his first US solo show in ten years at the City Winery. Okay, so he's not quite the unbridled raver anymore that he was in his prime -- but which of us is?

And despite the public feuding between the Davies brothers, Dave didn't try to distance himself from his Kinksian past -- he charged lustily into the classics like "You Really Got Me," "Till the End of the Day," and "All Day and All of the Night," among others. "Death of a Clown," of course, the song Ray wrote for Dave (to be honest, Dave probably co-wrote it, not that Ray would ever give him credit). I still remember Dave snarling at Ray when he was introduced as "Dave 'Death of a Clown' Davies" -- who but a brother could turn your solo hit into an insult?

Ray also says he wrote "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" for Dave, often introducing it at shows by saying -- fondly, in fact -- "You know, Dave really is not like everybody else."  Kinks fans have adopted this as their mantra, proudly asserting their misfit status, and we often use it to describe Ray as well.  But watching Dave sing it the other night brought home to me that he is the original rebel that the song celebrates.

Written somewhere at the end of 1965, recorded in February 1966, and released as the B-side of "Sunny Afternoon" (June 1966 in the UK, July in the US), "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" started off as a young man's howl of dissent, with lines like "I won't take all that they hand me down," "I'm not gonna take it all lying down," and "I don't want to live my life like everybody else." (Live, as I recall, the Davies brothers both throw in lines like "I don't want to get a job like everybody else" as well.) Fist pumping in the air, Kinks fans love to sing along on the defiant call-and-response refrains, trading shouts of "Like everybody else" with Dave (or Ray, whichever you're watching).

The song's a little more complex than that, of course. It dials down to a surprisingly tender second verse: "But darling, you know that I love you true, / Do anything that you want me to, / Confess all my sins like you want me to," until he reluctantly pushes back: "But there's one thing that I will say to you."  (Ominous retard, beat, beat,  then kick it out!) "I'm not like everybody else, I'm not like everybody else..."

Those pesky women, always trying to tame a wild man!  In the last verse, he's even more willful, rejecting her efforts to get him to settle down, stop all his running around, et cetera.  It's a brilliant sleight of hand, a love song that's at the same time a cry for freedom.  Compare this to the one-note snottiness of the Rolling Stones' "Get Off My Cloud" (not a bad song on its own terms, but still) -- the emotional depth of this one is light-years beyond.

Of course, we fans love to sing it out lustily, and we love the Davies brothers for continuing to keep it in their set lists.  The young man's howl of defiance is now an older man's rage against the dying of the light -- and you know, it's even more moving in that context.  Dave Davies was nearly sidelined forever by a stroke in 2004, but he taught himself to walk, talk, sing, and play the guitar all over again. He's back, and he's still busting out of the bonds of convention.  God save Dave Davies.

"Sunny Afternoon" / The Kinks

By chance it IS a sunny day today, although a little chilly for May. Still, that's not why this song popped into my head and will not be budged.

It began a few days when, someone asked me to list my top ten favorite Kinks songs. I realized that "Sunny Afternoon" is perhaps their only genuinely big hit (#2 in the UK, #14 in the US) that still makes the list for me, no matter how much it's overplayed. Then today, posting This Day In Kinks History on the Kinks fan forum, I discovered that today is the anniversary of the day, 47 years ago, when the Kinks went into Pye Records Studio #2 to record this song.

Or rather, re-record it -- in 1966 Ray Davies was just beginning to become the studio perfectionist who would later hold up their classic album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society for months, eventually releasing it by chance on the same day as the Beatles' White Album. Ah, the history of the Kinks is full of such disastrous decisions.

But in the case of "Sunny Afternoon," Ray knew what he was doing. He brought in session keyboard whiz Nicky Hopkins to add some plinky good-time sounds, played on a Hohner Melodica. Those iconic pub-sing-along backing vocals were dubbed in by Ray, Dave, and Ray's wife Rasa. "'Sunny Afternoon' was made very quickly, in the morning," Ray recalled in a Rolling Stone interview. "It was one of our most atmospheric sessions. . . . Pete [Quaife] went off and started playing funny little classical things on the bass, more like a lead guitar, and Nicky Hopkins was playing 'Liza'. . . .Little things like that helped us get in the feeling of the song."
   
At the time, Ray recalled, he was listening almost obsessively to two other artists -- Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan (now there's an odd couple for you).  I can hear Sinatra's impact in the campy croon Ray puts on; Dylan probably accounts for the sly satire on Britain's Wilson-era tax policies.  (George Harrison's "Taxman" was written the same year.) But as always, the whole is so much more than the sum of all these parts. And the minute that great bass line begins -- two notes plopped wearily on each step of a descending minor scale -- I'm hooked.

Just watch the Kinks cavorting in the snow. But, wait -- I thought this was supposed to be a sunny afternoon? Well, the song was a summer hit, but the Kinks didn't make this video until the following February, for a Belgian TV show. The contrast just underlines the delightful irony of this song.

"The tax man's taken all my dough / And left me in my stately home..." Beneath the satire, of course, Ray Davies was as always working out his personal issues. In 1966, Ray was up to his eyeballs in lawsuits to recover withheld royalties from music publishers and former managers; no wonder he felt a stab of sympathy for the property-rich, cash-poor singer of "Sunny Afternoon." And if that felt like a betrayal of his working-class roots, even more need to work out his anxieties in satire.

No wonder Ray had suffered a nervous breakdown only two months earlier, which explains the wail of "Save me save me save me from this squeeee--eeze" in the bridge. Nothing like turning your own  existential despair into comedy. And in the second bridge, he changes it to "Help me help me help me sail awaa-aay" -- the trademark Kinksian longing for escape. When conflicts and pressures pile up, introvert geniuses like Ray Davies often long just to run away.

I suspect there's another autobiographical hint in verse two: "My girlfriend's run off with my car / And gone back to her ma and pa / Telling tales of drunkenness and cruelty"?  It would be seven more years before Rasa Davies would finally move out, taking their two daughters, but there's already probably a sting of truth to this detail. I picture Rasa in the studio, listening to Ray deliver those lines with a mocking flutter in his voice, and wince on her behalf.

So here we've got a song about lazing on a sunny afternoon, living a life of luxury -- it should be a mellow blissed-out song. Instead, it's built on a minor-key bass riff, with jerky rhythms and ping-ponging melodic intervals. This guy is at the end of his rope, moaning and miserable. In a way, this is the comic bookend of "Shangri-La" -- now that he's found his paradise, his reward for working so hard, why the hell is he unhappier than ever?   

And then here's the genius part. Ray Davies managed to pack all of that psychological complexity in this song -- and STILL made it one of the most delicious singalongs ever. The tongue-in-cheek humor, the bouncy arrangement, and the cheery harmonies turn it all into tailor-made for hoisting a pint. The Kinks may be dancing in the snow, the tax exile weeping in his beer, but all I want to do is croon along with a grin on my face.  Give Ray Davies life's lemons, and he'll turn them into the most delicious lemonade ever.