Episode #314: Covers

Welcome to The Next Track, a podcast about how people listen to music today. I'm Doug Adams. And I'm Kirk McElhern. We self-produced The Next Track podcast and want to keep it ad-free, so we rely on contributions from listeners for support. You can help us by making a regular donation via Patreon. Visit patreon.com slash the next track. And thanks.

So my next track picks this week, I'm going to mention up front because it's what inspired me with the idea for today's... topic okay fine as often it's music i listen to in the kitchen that i look on apple music to find something and i fell on the What is the exact name? It is Road Trips, Volume 3, Number 3 by the Grateful Dead. It is 51570 at the Fillmore East.

So the Road Trip series is something they released after Dick's Picks. Dick's Picks were always full shows and Road Trips were not. If you bought the Road Trips- When the bonus disc was available, you would have gotten all of the songs from 5.1570, except for one, plus a bunch of songs from 5.1470. But because it wasn't, because they didn't have all the songs, they released it as road trips. Anyway.

It's an extraordinary concert. It's the Grateful Dead, and new writers of the Purple Sage were also playing, and they were doing some acoustic songs and some of these acoustic electrics. So Jerry's playing acoustic guitar, and Bob's playing electric and stuff. Wonderful concert. And one of the highlights of this is a 27 minute and 45 second performance of Turn On Your Love Light with Pigpen singing. Now, this was the Grateful Dead's original hit, of course.

You kind of can't fit it on a single, so it didn't get much radio play. But listening to Pigpen, how he controlled the audience, taking this song that starts out as Two and a Half Minutes by Bobby Bland, and... turning it into this rap where he's talking to the audience. And the way the Grateful Dead arranged the song, it's really interesting to compare the similarities.

with Bobby Bland. So like the second verse of Bobby Bland's song is just the drums in the background, and the dead did that too. But at the end, he's got horns coming in. And that gives it a really interesting, according to Wikipedia, I don't know who said this. The brass arrangement upped the excitement ante with the groove picking up momentum as the horns and percussion talked to each other.

And it's just 27 minutes and 45 seconds of the Grateful Dead, like primal Grateful Dead and Pigpen. And you got to listen to it. So that's my next track pick. And that's leading us to talk about covers, because I was thinking about... The Grateful Dead. The song The Grateful Dead played the most live. I know you don't know what it is, but do you want to guess?

No, I don't want to guess. It's me and my uncle. I was going to guess that. Damn. I was going to say it's going to be one of them cowboy songs. It was. In fact, there were a number of cowboy songs that were covers. Me and my uncle, El Paso, Sing Me Back Home.

There were a couple of others. I'm just going to tell you what my daughter says about the Grateful Dead. She says, if people want to hear the real cowboy music, go listen to the real cowboys. It's totally understandable, but Bob Weir had a way with these cowboy songs. Yeah, he has a nice voice for that.

Other covers The Dead did include two Gary Davis songs, Death Don't Have No Mercy and Samson and Delilah. Yeah, but they also did Dancing in the Street too, which is Motown. They did Dancing in the Street. Yeah, it's Motown. So it's interesting that The Dead did a lot of covers.

covers, and a lot of bands do a lot of covers, but what interested me more here is the covers that are more famous than the originals. All right. Can I tell you where covers comes from? Please do. All right. We all know there was a time when there wasn't recorded audio music. People, when they wanted to hear music, had to play it themselves or listen to other people play it. And the way they found out about new songs is they bought sheet music.

The sheet music industry is the beginning of the music industry. True. Now, everybody plays music. In fact, I said to you one time, I said, you mean if I play me and my uncle on a guitar at home, that means I'm covering it? And you said, yeah. Yeah. So I said, so every song I have ever played, if I didn't write it myself, which is rare, is a cover. So I'm a cover artist. Okay. That's interesting. That's an interesting perspective. Now.

Like I said, everybody played music. Chinese people played music. Black people played music. White people played music. Northern white people played music. Southern white people played music. They'd market the sheet music to different types of people. So, for instance, if in the North you had a song about, let's say, a rose bush, on the cover...

Of the sheet music, you would have maybe a nice white lady picking roses. But that didn't fly when you wanted to sell it to black people. So you printed a new cover.

And the printing terminology for that is covering it. Did you cover it? It's covered. You did a new cover for it. And you marketed that to a different kind of people. So, same song, but kind of done differently for two different... marketing groups later on when it came to recording songs same thing same terminology if they had a hit with a black group they'd cover it with a white group and vice versa. If a song was a hit with a white group, they would cover it using a black artist.

And the term cover has stuck ever since. Okay. Another thing to throw in is that a lot of music is written and not published as sheet music and circulates between publishers and artists. And the publisher's trying to find artists who want to perform and record it. So, for example, the earliest studio recordings by Bob Dylan were released 10, 15 years ago as the Whitmark Demos.

It's like an hour of demos he did for this publisher. I believe the publisher was named Whitmark or the head of the company, whatever. And these were recordings he made so that these demos could be given to other musicians. to perform the songs, because the money in the music industry has always been in publishing. In most cases, you don't want to be the performer. You want to be the writer. Your income is there for a long time.

So this means that early Bob Dylan was bending himself toward the music industry at the same time that he was playing in these clubs in Greenwich Village, trying to... stake out some way to not just make money, but to make a name for himself. Was that his managers? Was that his management's? This was in 1962, so I don't think he had management at that time. I'd have to look this up. I think it was the guy who had the record store.

in the basement in Greenwich Village who suggested, the one who did the folk, I don't remember the whole story, but I don't think it was when he had his other manager, I forget his name. In 1962, that would have been still the era where the composer was king and the artist was merely a person who played music. In fact, I would say that the folk music... era in that late 50s early 60s

created the singer-songwriter. Because before that, you were Doris Day. You were a singer of songs. You didn't write them. You just performed them. Well, but also covered old songs. and folk songs. Standards and things like that. Yeah, of course. And these folk song magazines that were published back then had...

sheet music in them of a number of songs, some of which were traditional and some of which were new, that people would publish in the magazine to make a name for themselves. Oh, right, right.

So anyway, the idea of the cover, I think, is really interesting. The fact that someone can perform a song that is immensely more popular than the original. And if you think about Bob Dylan's Hey Mr. Tambourine Band, I believe it was recorded by 10 different artists. before Dylan released it, notably by The Birds, which was the most popular. You think of All Along the Watchtower. It was performed by Jimi Hendrix in an extraordinary version.

Bob Dylan released it on, what was it? The Ballad of Billy the Kid, that sort of movie soundtrack album, which didn't sell well. And the song itself is shorter. It feels like it's written for a movie to be just like two minutes long. It does sound like Bob Dylan, though.

I'll give you that. I like the Bob Dylan version because it sounds so much like that core Bob Dylan sound that I like. I just want to go through some of these songs that were really popular and maybe discuss some of the artists who recorded them. that for some reason, maybe they just weren't artists who wrote music. For instance, Girls Just Want to Have Fun by Cindy Lauper was written by Robert Hazard.

Don't know who he was. Never heard. The lyrics were changed with his permission to create the popular version we know now. I know Robert Hazard. He writes songs and he performs them. But he's not as well known as Cyndi Lauper, that's for sure. Who wrote Respect that Aretha Franklin made so far? Otis Redding? Yeah.

Doesn't it sound like an Otis Redding song, though, in some ways? He does a great version of it. If you've ever heard it, it's really, really good. It's as good as that. But the fact that Aretha sings it, it turns it into an anthem for women. Right, exactly. It has a totally different meaning. Wes Presley did tons of covers because he was that sort of artist. Hound Dog. Well, he was the conduit for black music getting into white culture. Who wrote Hound Dog.

Uh, mother, auntie, cousin, whatever am I, mother, Maybel. You're almost there. Big Mama Thornton. Big Mama Thornton, that's it, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And she was famous. She had a good career. But that's a blues song. Anybody could have written Hound Dog. Probably anybody did, and she just took credit for it. And so that's the thing. Blues songs were notorious. Blues songs were often covered.

Not the word. Look at the songs that the Rolling Stones did. They did Robert Johnson songs on Exile on Main Street, et cetera. I didn't realize that Twist and Shout was not a Beatles song. The Isley Brothers. The Isley Brothers, right? No. I'm pretty sure it's the Isley Brothers. My list doesn't actually say, but I didn't know that it wasn't.

I know that they did a bunch of covers early on, just like the Rolling Stones' first couple of albums are mostly covers. Artists didn't write their own songs. They did covers. Well, but even if they wrote their own songs later... Back in this period, Beatles and Stones, they did a lot of covers. Yeah.

I found it interesting when this song became so popular, Ike and Tina Turner doing Proud Mary, because this was an extremely popular song by Quedence Creelwater Revival. Right. I think a lot of people were surprised that they took... a song, a swampy rock song like that and turned it into ba-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Well, almost a Motown R&B. Yeah, yeah. Ballad, yeah.

But it's easy to do. It's not difficult. That's what I mean. It's not a complex song. It's fun to take a song. When I was in college, the big thing to do was to take any song and make it a reggae song. We'll get to that in a minute. It was so easy to do. Yeah.

Jeff Buckley's biggest hit was Hallelujah. I think when he recorded that, Leonard Cohen wasn't that well-known. He's always been a sort of... Outsider? Not outsider, a sort of connoisseur type musician. Well, okay, yeah. He was never very popular, and Jeff Buckley is...

version of that is quite haunting, I would say. I don't really like Leonard Cohen that much, and I don't think he sings this song very well, but he was quite successful with that. And of course, since then, everyone's recorded Hallelujah. So the next one is the opposite of regifying a song. It's The Clash and I Fought the Law. Oh, yeah. And that was originally a rockabilly song.

that they turned into, you know, total punk. And of course they did things like Pressure Drop, that was a reggae song that they covered. The Clash, I actually have this playlist in my music thing of Clash's reggae songs because there were so many. Also, I should say here, before The Clash, Joe Strummer's band, The 101ers, did strictly rockabilly.

That's what they played. So Joe Strummer introduced rockabilly into that punk. I've mentioned this before. During the... the time the pre-formation of the clash rockabilly was experiencing a thing in england and there was a lot of this pub rock stuff dr feelgood People like that, you know, that was a really popular sound that was being...

Resurrected. It was popular in the early 60s. It came back again in the mid-70s. The Clash Incorporated. Lots of bands incorporated, actually. But it's now a part of that punk sound. Stray Cats. Stray Cats, yeah, sure. Yeah, Stray Cats were the big band in the late 70s. And they fit into the punk-ish thing because it was that sort of stripped down three-man band type thing. The fashion also, the hair and the... The fashion, the hair.

Yeah. In this list that I'm looking at, I'll put a link in the show notes. They list some really recent covers and it's like Beyonce covering Blackbird. Big deal. It's 150 musicians have covered Blackbird, if not more. Paramore covering the talking heads burning down the house. Yeah. Okay. Pretty good. Murder on the dance floor. Someone named Royal Otis doing the original by Sophie Ellis Baxter, which was a huge hit in 2001. Yeah. In fact, I still think of that as a...

Huge hit. Continuously a huge hit. It's one of the few songs I really like Sophie. I've got this other list of 850 covers, but it only lists the... original authors of the song it doesn't list the people who covered them which is a little bit weird and that doesn't really help it just says these are the originals

In other words, this is a list of original songs. No, sorry, sorry. No, sorry. These are the covers, but they don't list the original artists. Oh, well, that doesn't help at all. So for instance, Queens of the Stone Age covered Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Why not? Right? Yeah, sure. You know, anyone can cover Elton John's song. Well, no, not anyone can cover Elton John's songs. You couldn't. I certainly couldn't. What other covers can you think of? Well...

Geez, I mean I'm mostly into blues covers. So for instance anybody who does anything Manish Boy or Rolling Stone or, you know, any of those songs to me is like, you're not covering a song. You're doing the song. When I sit home at home and play Wang Dang Doodle, I'm doing Wang Dang Doodle. I'm not covering it. So that's interesting because when I think of the blues, I think of it more of an interpretation like...

Someone performing a classical track rather than Hendrix doing All Along the Watchtower in a very different version than Dylan. For some reason, blues songs leave themselves open to them. Well, because it's a standard, you got a standard algorithm.

one four five now depending on how you 12 bar blues 16 bar blues straight blues does it have you know there are all kinds of of of ornamentation you can do to the original one four five there's all kinds of dressing up you can do and how you interpret it and how you and the guys one or two or three or eight guys you're playing with, how they interpret it. And that's why blues is great. Actually, you know, I learned about another kind of music.

It has nothing to do with blues. It has nothing to do with covers. But it's Brazilian choro music. And it's where these guys sit around in a circle. And they jam like crazy. You have to be a virtuoso to do it. So they make up the music right away, but they incorporate Brazilian folk music and things like that into this incredible music. And so it's not a cover, but they do take...

things and incorporate them. Like a lot of blues bands do or rock bands do. They incorporate a blues sense, Pink Floyd. And anybody, really. I mean, I think most musicians start with blues or folk music and then move into electric music. You know, and you're always playing to music. I mean, every musician I know has sat and played to recordings and CDs and records and had a special had a special foot.

uh button so they could rewind the cassette another minute so they could keep playing the same riffs over and over again i mean you just normally listened to other people and played their music so it wouldn't be unusual to to be in a band at some point say hey You guys remember Echo Beach by Martha and the Muffins? Let's do a cover of that. Yeah. You know, that sort of thing. Yeah. So I'm just thinking of a song that I should have mentioned earlier because it crossed my mind. This was...

Bruce Springsteen's first album went more or less unrecognized. Yet there was one song that was covered that became immensely popular. Can you name this tune in one note? Oh, come on. Don't do this to me. Just tell me what it is. Blinded by the Light. That was a hugely popular song. And Springsteen, it seems, when you think about the publishing industry, it feels like Springsteen went to a publisher or their publisher was shopping these songs around. Well, that's what I wonder about.

um dylan it's like who is shopping the songs for him the publisher And I'm not thinking of just Dylan specifically, but you mentioned it earlier, and we weren't able to figure out how did he make that leap from being just a guy, you know, writing songs in Greenwich Village, and then how does all of a sudden...

Peter, Paul and Mary and the birds are playing his tunes. It's like, how the heck did that happen? Yeah, no, that's definitely publishers who are putting the songs out there. And I think a lot of it also probably happens in the... in the clubs in Greenwich Village, where some of these musicians hear someone performing and say, that would sound good with our three voices as Peter, Paul, and Mary, right? Yeah.

It's like in a movie. It's like, hey, I heard Bob. He played this great song all on Watchtower. Let's go home and steal it. Or someone else played. Hey, Mr. Tangerine Man. Tangerine Man? Sounds better that way. A musician heard it and said, that's really good. Oh, that's a Bob Dylan song. OK, I want to cover it. Because it could also be that. But remember, Dylan wasn't that popular when this came out, right? So the early stuff, he didn't have the name recognition.

that he does now. And there are some artists who wrote intentionally for the publishing industry, Jackson Brown. What was he in that we talked about in the last episode, something he wrote? I know he wrote a song on Nico's Chelsea Girl. Right. He wrote songs for the Eagles. Lou Reed used to work for Pigwick Records. That's right. He famously would be a guy. He'd listen to hits on the radio and write Copycat.

Not covers, but copycat songs and had bands who recorded at Pickwick, which was, I don't know, they're kind of not even a real record company, but they, you know, they would hire musicians to... play these songs that were written to be copycats of popular hits. And that's what Lou did for a long time.

That's funny, actually, when you think about it. It's like, oh, he worked at Tin Pan Alley, and then it's like, satellite of love. It's like, what? Or more sweet Jane than heroin and stuff like that.

There are also cases where someone wrote a song and... A friend of theirs recorded it. So You've Got a Friend was written by Carole King, but made popular by James Taylor. By her friend, James Taylor. Exactly. Woodstock was written by Joni Mitchell and was more popular by Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

And it was because they weren't always competitors, were they? Well, not out there they weren't, because they were stoned all the time. In the singer-songwriter period, California, they weren't competitors out there. Oh, yeah, they were totally like, here's a song I wrote for you, Dad. And then boom. Ah, one of the best Talking Heads covers ever. A song that the Talking Head covered. Take Me to the River. Exactly. That is such a Talking Head song.

when you hear the way they do it. Unfortunately, it is now because I like the original Al Green and I also like, what's his name? Brian Ferry did a nice version and Brian Ferry's version came out just around the same time as Talking Heads version and they won yeah sorry but his version is much more like Al Green's Eric Clapton did I Shot the Sheriff by Bob Marley and the Wailers right that's another one that got famous

Bob Marley got more famous after Clafton did. Exactly. And that's something that happened sometimes is that the original artist... wrote on the coattails of the cover, ooh, that's a great song. Who wrote it? Oh, let's check out Bob Marley and the Wailers. And history proved that to be a good idea. This is interesting because three different artists that I know...

performed this song. And there's also others. Me and Bobby McGee was written by? Chris Christopherson. It was performed by Roger Miller, Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Charlie Pryde, all of these people. And that's an interest because you get a song like that. We're in 1969. We're not in the early 60s with the Bob Dylan and the Byrds covering Dylan songs. And you get a song like that that speaks to...

The youth of the time. And the zeitgeist all together. It was in the air. And each one of these interpretations was different. Presented the song in a different way. That's very interesting. And that's a good song, too, to do it with because the lyrics can be interpreted many different ways. First of all, is Bobby a man? Is Bobby a woman? Depending on who's singing it, that's kind of interesting.

But also, where are they going? Why are they going there? You know, what does freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. What does that mean? You know, there's all kinds of great things you can enjoy about it. The Roger Miller, I had forgotten about that. He does a fantastic version of that song. Yeah. Really popular song by Joe Cocker with a little help from my friends. That was in Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

Well, it's also on his, no, it's on Woodstock. The film I'm talking about. I first saw it in the film. That's right. But he also did it at Woodstock and it's also on his first album. It's like suddenly everybody said, oh, the Beatles. I never heard of them before. Not many covers of other songs from Sergeant Pepper, really, when you think about it. Just that one. You'd have to look it up, probably. At least not because we're famous. Who would do a version of Lovely Rita?

You know? I didn't realize that Tainted Love by Soft Cell was a cover. I mean, someone wrote it. Mark Boland's girlfriend, Gloria Jones, wrote Tainted Love. Oh. And were they the first to record it? Tainted? Who did Tainted? Minor UK hit, it said, for the original version. But that obviously sounds like something that has to have the synthesizers. Oh, I do know that song. And it's more like a soul song.

It's... Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I do know the original. That almost sounds Motown-ish, doesn't it? Yeah, it has a kind of Motown feel. With the chorus in the background. Yeah, I like it. It has a good vamp. Okay, that's enough of that. We're going to have to pay for the licensing of that. Exactly. Be careful. So I've done my next track pick. What's yours?

Well, I tried to think of a good cover album, but the only stuff I could think of were like novelty records where, you know, they intentionally do a bunch of covers. And that doesn't seem... appropriate for a program such as this. So I picked one of my favorite cover albums by the Rolling Stones, and it's 12 by 5. Actually, the first Rolling Stones album I ever heard. I used to hear their singles on the radio, but I didn't care much about the Rolling Stones when I was a kid.

Until I met some people in junior high school who were Stones aficionados. And we used to listen to 12 by 5 all the time. They had an EP at the same time called 5 by 5. Guess how many songs were on it? So this album is about half covers and half originals. They're not quite created. at crafting songs yet on here, but they do versions of Around and Around, Chuck Berry's song, Confess in the Blues, Great Blues Number, Time is on My Side, which I think was one of their first hits in this country.

It's all over now, Under the Boardwalk, and Suzy Q, and like I said, the originals on here just aren't that great. But this is one of those albums where they're sort of transitioning from... We're a blues cover band into maybe we'd like to be a better pop band. And the covers are really great. They sound really great. The originals just don't. Maybe in hindsight, we can appreciate them for the kind of, but anyway.

I'm going to be skipping over a few songs when I listen to 12 by 5 by the Rolling Stones. It's my next track. This was episode number 314 of The Next Track. Thank you very much for listening. You'll find links to some of the things that we talked about in the show notes for this episode. They are located at thenexttrack.com.

We hope you'll support The Next Track by making a regular donation via Patreon. We're ad-free and self-sustaining, so we depend on the listener support of our Patreon patrons. Visit patreon.com slash The Next Track. We can always use a new patron. I'm Doug Adams, and for Kirk Mack... Thanks again. We'll talk to you next time.