Huh. I wish I'd gotten just about any other tune by Miracle Legion, who are a fairly obscure band I happen to really like for fairly obscure reasons, to cover. And not just because of the Christmas thing, although that really is the most persistent thorn in my side in this project. Anyway, this doesn't even sound that much like Miracle Legion. Neither does Johnny Cash, and I'm submitting that as my rationale for why this cover sounds the way it does.
Definitely the quickest turnaround between a purchase and a 39-40 cover thus far, this comes from a Stringfellow album I picked up last month fer cheep. The tune is a little overlong in its original version and even more so in the acoustic format I'm sort stuck with for now, so I cut a bit here and there (and picked up the tempo). 
Time is tight, or I would've added a banjo track on this one.
So I'm thinking, what would make this sound a lot less like Stereolab? And what I come up with is having it played exclusively on a whole bunch of acoustic guitars. And then I'm thinking, what would then make it sound even more like Stereolab than it did to begin with? And what I come up with is changing the time signature to something weirder. It's not very nuanced or anything, but I think it works well enough.
This one was going to be a Braine track, but time ran out and all that made it onto there was Miranda's bassline. So a lot of what ended up on here was meant to be my sloppy guide tracks for the kids to play correctly. It's not ideal, but at this very moment I have to work even more quickly than usual.
This one took on a life of its own as I was recording it. I like the way it turned out... in many ways it sounds more like what I would've thought a "typical" 39-40 cover might sound like before I actually started doing them.
Considering how often I've cited Billy Bragg as an inspiration for my entire approach to solo performance, here on 39-40 and in any live setting, it's a damn shame that I didn't have time to do any kind of real justice to this song, which is... well, it's great, really just one of the great songs of forever times. And something that should be heard by anyone who thinks Billy's all politics. It's easy for me to love his political stuff, since it's right on and also incredibly doesn't suck in the least, but there's too much heart and soul to him for that pigeonhole to fit, or something like that.
I think... well, I'm actually sure that I put out about as much surf guitar as I have in me for at least a month's time on the Beausoleil tune last week, so I arranged this one as an acoustic tune. And somehow I made it substantially longer, which was the least of my intentions. Sorry about that.
A few procedural things before launching into the usual nonsense. Firsty, today marks the last belabored tribute/parody cover art for a while. The hiatus is necessary because I'm about to go on vacation to my hometown in West Virginia, and not only do I need to focus on getting ready for that, I also have to bang out a bunch of extra cover songs just in case I end up in a travel situation which won't allow me to record anything within a 24 hour timespan. Probably won't happen, but you never know... however, I'm quite likely not to have the time to crank out the cover images to go with said recordings, so I'm putting them on hold until I return. It's also a function of having to leave some of my hardware behind... I am taking mixers, mics, mic stands, guitars and all manner of other paraphernalia, but there's a limit, even for me.
I don't know if I've ever heard the original Peter Frampton version of this song. I think I may have very recently and remarked upon it in passing, but it didn't stick to my mind enough to displace this version, which I've heard really quite a lot over the years. It's a weird thing about my youth that I didn't really ever hear the pop music of the time for which a lot of my peers have a great deal of nostalgia, ironic or otherwise. In my house we basically heard the country radio of the day, which had both great stuff (the Outlaws were out in force) and not so great stuff (it was also Urban Cowboy time), and I didn't really get out to other kids' places much, living way back in the woods as I did. Later on, at about 14 or 15, we got cable, and I checked into MTV very briefly, but for the most part Talking Heads, R.E.M. and the voracious consumption of rock lit steered me right out of mainstream pop music and within a year of starting to listen to rock and roll I was all about Sonic Youth and Husker Du, the Velvets and Throwing Muses, Television and the Voidoids. There are some really popular arena rock songs that I don't know which of those bands it is. Now, I don't think this makes me really cool or anything... it's just how it worked out. But it has some nifty advantages... lacking that haze of nostalgia, I can experience a fairly real thrill at realizing belatedly how awesome Fleetwood Mac often was, meanwhile not having to justify my non-existent prog-rock phase to my punk rock self. That sort of thing.
A rare instance of the tribute album cover image dictating the specifics of the cover recording, and I am glad of it.
This one turned out completely wrong, but in as good a way as possible. The concept of the original tune is the "Cajunization" of a surf song, which is cute, but I don't have the instruments or chops to really produce anything vaguely Cajun sounding. I do have the stuff to produce a low-rent surf track, but I was again stuck with the problem of how irritating listening to 3 minutes of my own playing can be to me. So I tried to enlist someone else to play at least some of the solos, and got no response at all. I also considered doing all of the solos on oddball instruments I can barely play for a really weird sound, and even just dropping a message into the tune saying, "Okay, play your own solo here" or something.
I know David Crosby is kind of a punchline and a punching bag for a lot of people, but I can't help but like the guy. First of all, if you're going to tell me he's not talented, I'll fight you. He's the most inventive rock rhythm guitarist I can think of (and if you thing that's damning with slight praise, you haven't listened to his guitar work on the Byrds records as closely as I have). And it may be true that the harmony work of CSNY is often overrated, but Crosby's part in it, and certainly that of the Byrds, sure as hell isn't. His songs are baffling... the distance between "Everybody's Been Burned" and "Mind Gardens", written around the same time, is almost precisely the distance between the sublime and the ridiculous. He has a weight problem, and a drug problem, and basically rather a lot of problems, but writing him off as a dated hippie joke is just not right.
One of the challenges of 39-40 at almost four months deep is to produce the occasional track that actually sounds a little bit different. In theory this shouldn't be too hard... one should have plenty of time to think up ideas like "I'll play this whole song on a rake" or "How about recording it and then rerecording it playing on the computer from 20 feet away" or whatever. The reality is that when you have so much stuff set up and so little time to work, and a chunk of your time is spent just plain learning the song, you really tend to use the same guitars and basic setups fairly frequently. Well, I do. Maybe someone else would do it better, and if so, they should please demonstrate it, because I don't see anyone else doing this shit.
In the end Wilco kind of pisses me off. And I loved them, truly I did. In the fallowest period of the '90s and on a whim I picked up a rilly cheap used copy of Being There and was pretty well floored by it. It was rock and roll, and it was good, and it had that good rock and roll feeling I hadn't felt since, let's say, the heyday of the Replacements. The band and its lineage-- I had missed Uncle Tupelo the first time around-- stood me in good stead for quite some time, as lineups changed and critical darlinghood peaked, culminating in what I thought was a fascinatingly rough-hewn semi-masterpiece in A Ghost Is Born. Some very intriguing krautrock influences were peaking through, and there were Television- and Crazy Horse-inspired passages that seemed inspired, and the lyrics were going places. They added Nels Cline, one of my favorite oddball guitarists, for the tour and then as a permanent member, so I'd hoped for more out-there adventures on the first record featuring him as a full member...
I finally heard Young Marble Giants maybe three years ago, after frequently stumbling across them being cited as an influential and seminal group and almost always misunderstanding what that influence actually was. I initially got the impression they were somehow proto-grunge, and then that they were trip-hop precursors, and exactly neither of those ideas were even close to the mark. Nothing prepared me for the bewitching sparseness of the actual YMG; they really don't sound like anything else, and that almost restores, to the extent that it ever existed, my faith in the gatekeepers of musical hipsterism... it's amazing that this music was ever recognized as being quite as great as it is, and that its reputation has persevered, however warped the associations might have become.
This one' from The Happy Listener's Guide to Mind Control, a compilation of bizarre propaganda, agitprop and subliminal-message-like stuff that's entertainingly alarming to listen to in an "it couldn't happen here... again... could it?" way.
I'd always assumed that when I finally hit a song that I "couldn't do" for 39-40, it would be because of some really difficult structural or musical issue. But that wasn't the case. When The Machine dropped this one in my lap, I knew right away I was going to have trouble performing it because of the lyrical content. It concerns a-- if not the specific-- Roman Polanski-esque case of child fixation and probable molestation, referring specifically to the age of the victim as 12, which is the age of one of my daughters. Now, it's not a bad song or anything... it's a critical indictment, in fact, just one that takes the often effective first-person perspective of the offender, like the murder ballads of old, country prison tunes, most of the songs on Peter Gabriel's melting face record, and countless other compositions. It's just that I can't imagine myself singing these particular words.
As a cursory listen to the original-- and that's the only kind of listen possible-- will reveal, this isn't really a Neil Young tune. The soundtrack to the film Where the Buffalo Roam is credited to Neil Young, who created the score as such, but it also includes a whole bunch of other stuff, including complete tracks by Hendrix and the Beach Boys, and dialogue segments like this one. So I'm still no closer to getting to do a legitimate Neil cover for 39-40 than I was yesterday.
So it's summer and the kids are at home with me almost all the time. And we're having an excellent time. But every once in a while I have to sneak off and record a cover song, and, the layout of the house being what it is, that pretty much has to happen in the "family room". So I often have to ask then to be quiet for a few minutes and then try to not screw up a take so I don't put a damper on the summatime fun for too long.
I've gotten away from explaining how my covers come to be as they are, but this one requires some background, I fear.
Another completely classic song by Grant McLennan, one of my absolute favorites about whom I've rhapsodized plenty already. Sometimes you just get out of the way of the song, and that's largely what I did here, other than having some fun endensifying the harmonies here and there. I love this song.
After a few days of relatively respectful or at least considered covers, I often feel the urge to do one of those more randomized deals. I hit on the idea of walking into record store (in this case Rockaway, within walking distance of my house) and walking up to the super-budget used-and-totally unwanted shelf, finding the first thing that clearly contained instrumentals I'd never heard of, and taking it home for mutilation as a backing track.
