"Love Buzz"

Didn't Shocking Blue do the original version of Venus?

Shocking Blue were undoubtedly one of the worst '60's Dutch bands. Which is why The Netherlands dumped them on us.

Track down Shocking Blue's "Inkpot". Great song, if slightly reminiscent of "Spirit in the Sky".

Shocking Blue, part of the early '70s 'Dutch Invasion' that also inckuded the Tee Set ("Ma Bella Amie"), the George Baker Selection ("Little Green Bag") and - depending how long you want to stretch the whole invasion thing - Golden Earing ("Radar Love), had a #1 hit with "Venus" in early 1970. It was ther only top 40 hit in the U.S.

I had to think for a minute when Tom said 'the original version', and then was surprised to find out that the Bananarama version of "Venus" also went to #1, theirs in November of '86. That makes "Venus" one of only a handful of songs to make it to #1 twice.

The Shocking Blue singer, Mariska Veres, died this past December.

There are about a million YouTubes of Shocking Blue doing "Venus".

Sorry, I know nothing about "Love Buzz", either version.

Umm, AMG gives their albums a 3, a 4 1/2, and a 4 out of 5. I don't remember them as that awful, but I guess you have to develop a taste or tolerance for the psych-pop or sunshine pop of that era. OTOH, as an insane collector who will listen to almost anything from that era, I checked my hard drive:

Shadows of Knight
Shaggs
She
Shin Joong Hyun & the Men
Shiva's Headband
Shiver
Shuttah

So I must not have liked them.

OMG The Shaggs....pin-up dreams.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00000I0QQ.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

"Umm, AMG gives their albums a 3, a 4 1/2, and a 4 out of 5"

Ok. Well. That settles that. AMG said so.

Cuby & the Blizzards, Focus, Golden Earring (nice album side-long "Eight Miles High"), Outsiders!!, Groep 1850!!, Waterpipes & Dykes Compilation!!, Earth & Fire!!

I guess Finch is from the Netherlands, I always thought they were Canterbury. First rate prog.

There is a Dutch group called Les Baroques, but don't confuse them with the Milwaukee band, which is good garage/psych.

Am I boring you yet? :) Don't mention 60s music again.

"Ok. Well. That settles that. AMG said so."

Hey! All AMG says is that people who like Bobby Sherman and the Archies will like Shocking Blue. AMG rates within a genre, not across genres. That is the way it should be done.

It is, IMO, a very bad genre, but gustibus etc. I am not crazy about math-rock, and my reviews of Slint should be ignored. I do kinda like Don Caballero & Mogwai.

I actually think it makes a lot of sense to cover songs that aren't very good. You can take a bad song, depending on why it's bad, and change the arrangement, production, etc enough to make it much better. On the other hand, if you cover a great song, most likely your version will just be mediocre when compared to the original.

A fun piece of history: I did my undergrad thesis on punk rock in the USSR, which involved reading a number of Russian-written histories of rock. Now, in the Soviet Union, only one or two rock/pop records would be released a year (via Melodiya, the only legal label in Russia). So those one or two records would be received like new books of the Bible by desperate Russian rock fans. The result was that these histories of rock tended to lean heavily on what was available to the writers, often giving them a somewhat distorted perspective. And so, in any Russian history of rock (at least those written before about 1993), Shocking Blue is considered a major psychedelic band, at least as important as The Doors.

It always sounded to me like they were singing "I'm your fetus."

I went to see Nirvana a couple times on the Bleach tour, and while they were certainly one of my favorite bands at the time, I can't imagine anyone coming out of one of those shows thinking, "man, that guy is the voice of my generation."

Most people aren't musically savvy enough to recognise the extent to which their attachment to their favourite songs is based primarily on familiarity and cultural context, rather than the song's actual creative value.

This became obvious to me when I explained to a rabid REM fan that I didn't think "Losing My Religion" was all that great a song because the verse and the chorus use the exact same melody. She had to sing the song out loud halfway before she understood my point.

And as a general rule, cover songs serve the same purpose, by removing a song from its original context, and forcing it to be observed and evaluated within a new, unfamiliar one.

But... for the sake of pop music, this is a good thing: there simply aren't enough unique melodies and chord progressions to go around. That are palatable for mass consumption, anyway.

Hey, I like Shocking Blue's version of Love Buzz.

They're sort of psychodelic crossing over into protopunk.

You're a madman, Yglesias. That's a fantastic song. Stephin Merritt plays it at his DJ night every chance he gets. Were you raised by wolves?

At this point, I could fight the losing pedantic battle of the terms "cover song" vs. "remake".

What we have been talking about here is the Nirvana *remake* of the Shocking Blue song (And Bananarama's "Venus" was also a remake, not a cover).

A "cover version" of a song is (or at least was) when a singer "covered" another artist's song, either in competition with the original, or perhaps for another distinct market: but always within the same time period. Some examples would be Pat Boone having the bigger hit version of "Tutti Frutti" than Little Richard's original, which had to fight its way to "cross over" from '50s black radio to mainstream white radio; both songs charting in early 1956.

Or (I guess because I have songs with Venus in the title on my mind) Jimmy Clanton having the original U.S. hit of "Venus In Blue Jeans" but not charting in Britian, while Mark Wynter had the British hit and didn't chart in the U.S.; both from September/October of 1962.

And (because I have bananas on my mind?) if you don't like "The Banana Boat Song" ("Day-o Daylight come and me wanna go home"), be happy you weren't around in 1959. In late January and early February of 1959, five (!) different versions of "The Banana Boat Song" made it into the top 20, and a sixth version came along in April. (The biggest seller was by a folk group called The Tarriers, which included actor Alan Arkin. Arkin actually has a somewhat bogus co-writer credit for the song. But that's another subject :-).

So "remake, not "cover".

- Robert

I'll just borrow from a burgeoning critic at YouTube:

yea i guess nirvanas is better.....if you like staring at cocks and listening to the poorest singing out there. at least shocking blue had one smoking babe and skill

Robert Earle, that battle was lost a long time ago. In modern parlance, a cover song means a remake. But having thought about it some, it seems reasonable to me why this might be.

These days, artist and repertoire are considered one and the same. For as long as our generation has ever known, musicians write their own songs. In fact, it doesn't even matter when they don't. Justin Timberlake might not be any more involved or responsible for the songs he performs than Frank Sinatra ever was. They're still Justin Timberlake's songs. He doesn't have to share credit with Max Martin the way Sinatra might have with Hoagy Carmichael.

So in this context, to say that one can "re-make" a Bob Dylan song comes off a little bit insulting. It's still Dylan's song. You're just covering it.

So would a cover band have to be called a remake band?

Robert Earle, I think you're full of crap.

I totally don't remember typing "I think" in my last post. I'm drunk, though.

"Robert Earle, that battle was lost a long time ago."

Yeah, I know. I just like to point it out every now and then, so that people are aware that at one time there was a significant difference (in the black radio vs. white radio of the '50s, it was a BIG issue), even if they are now used interchangably.

So I've been trying to think - what was (or were) the last true "cover" songs, in the old meaning of the word? The best I can come up with - and its 20+ years ago - are "Der Kommissar" by Falco and After The Fire. (Although there may have been 'pop' vs. 'country' covers since then).

Now I freely admit that, having crossed over the generation gap years ago, I am in no way conversant in pop music of the '90s or the '00s. The way I came up with "Der Kommissar" was to think of conditions in the modern world where there would be competing versions of a song. And what I came up with was a song coming to the U.S from overseas such that there was the 'foreign; version and the American version. (Were there two versions of The Macarena?). In the mash-up sampling world of today's music, are there ever true competing "cover" versions of the same song out there?

let's face it, people, Bleach, were it not recorded by Nirvana, wd be known as an average grunge LP--"Blew", "No Recess", ok, but really the Divine Comedy illustration is the best thing about it--

ps--losing pedantic battles are fought by pedantic losers.
pps--yeah, benny, I'm with you--but the paradigm is shifting again...rock historians of the near future will undertand that Timbaland gets more space than all those pretty interchangable boyz and girls...

Oh, there's no doubt that I'm full of shit. But not on what used to be the difference between "cover" and "remake".

From the learned pages of Wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_version#Early_cover_versions_and_the_origin_of_the_term

I think we should just go ahead and devolve this into a "Best Cover Ever" thread. The only rules are no "All Along the Watchtower" and no jazz. C'mon, you know you want to indulge in a little music snob masturbation. I know I do.

My vote goes to "Hazy Shade of Winter" as done by the Bangles. Although for a recent on, the Brand New Heavies' version of "I Don't Know Why I Love You" is fairly awesome.

How about Guns n' Roses, with "Don't Cry" and "Don't Cry (alternate lyrics)"?

I kid, I kid.

Yeah, hip hop is definitely pushing the paradigm into uncharted territory. In many ways, back to something quite similar to the original A&R model.

"Hazy Shade of Winter" is great, but it always throws me a bit when it gets to where they left out that part of the bridge - ".. at any convenient time, funny how my memory slips, while looking over manuscripts of unpublished rhyme, drinking my vodka and lime...". I heard Suzanna Hoffs on the radio once say that when the record came out, the Bangles sent Paul Simon a copy along with a quart of Vodka and some limes, as an apology.

My hard drive is half-full of "remakes" :-) so picking just one is next to impossible, but as long as you (almost) mention Dylan, how about Kenny Wayne Sheppard's version of "Everything is Broken". Both artist and song may be a little obscure, but the redition is just great.

OK, I thought about it a while, and using Benny's concept of hearing a song anew by "removing a song from its original context", I will nominate Johnny Cash's version of the U2 song "One" as perhaps the best cover/remake I know of. It gives me goose-bumps every time I hear it.

Great covers or remakes?

First to come to mind, and probably til I die, is Eva Cassidy
singing "Over the Rainbow". "Covering" is about re-interpretation, as in Glenn Gould and the Goldberg. Something you know by heart becomes brand new again. Cassidy showed us stuff that was in that standard we didn't know was there.

"Cortez the Killer" with Dave Matthews has gotten some recent attention (you can't "re-interpret" a great guitar solo, especially NY's schizo minimalism), but I turned on to Gov't Mule when I heard them cover a very old, obscure Dave Mason song:"Sad and Deep as You". They caught the failed romanticism of 1970 as if they had been there.

Megan McArdle had a long interesting thread on why nobody can cover Paul McCartney's "Blackbird" (White Album). One consensus was that the simpler and more personal/idiosyncratic a song was the harder it is to cover. McCartney wrote "Blackbird" for his voice.

Has anybody ever added anything to Robert Johnson's "Crossroads"? Tho 100's have tried. And contra Earle, I listen to blues and jazz, and have to call them covers, not remakes.

I agree on the simple/idiosyncratic bit, but I also think Blackbird is one of those songs that would inspire the type of people to cover it who would try to milk it too much.

There are a lot of great covers (remakes) out there...Brave Combo's "Way of Love" and Willie Nelson's version of "Time After Time" come to mind. And I love nomeansno's a capella version of "Forward To Death". But of the ones that come to mind, I'd have to put Buckley's "Hallelujah" at the top of the list.

Sorry, but we'd be living in a different, and definitely inferior, world had Hendrix not cut All Along the Watchtower. I'm not sure how well we'd be doing without Willie Nelson's version of Whiter Shade of Pale -- probably be muddling through, I think . . .

Shocking Blue's "Send me a postcard" is actually a pretty good song. Although this is by no means a measure of a song's worth, the Raconteurs have covered it live.

Composers and performers throughout history have turned for inspiration to source material considered of dubious quality by critics. Miles Davis regularly covered "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper, and Beethoven wrote his "Kakadu Variations" based on a banal TV-jingle-level melody from a comic opera of the time.

I'm not saying Kurt Cobain was musically the equivalent of Beethoven--my point is that inspiration is wherever you find it.

In terms of the classic "cover" issue, I believe that the Leann Rimes and Trisha Yearwood versions of "How Do I Live" came out around the same time, in 1997.

More recently, when I was in Germany in 2004 there were two competing versions of "Dragostea din Tei" (the O-Zone version and one by Haiducii), and I think this kind of thing happens more commonly with European pop than it does in the US.

There's "Our Lips Are Sealed". Co-written by Terry Hall of Fun Boy Three and Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go's, recorded and released by both groups at roughly the same time, each one charting on its side of the Atlantic. But which one is the "original"...?

Has anybody ever added anything to Robert Johnson's "Crossroads"?

Cream added lots and lots of volume.

Not best, but certainly damn good, cover: Firehose covering Superchunk's Slack Mutherfucker. Or, hell, Jane's Addicition covering the Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil." Agian, not best, but damn good.
BEST may be Johnny Cash's cover of Will Oldham's "I See a Darkness," but the whole Cash-as-best-cover artist is probably played out.

One note on (OK, I give up) uncoverable songs: during the Academy Awards, when they can't get the original artist to appear and perform the song, they have someone else come out and do a (usually quite lame) version for the audience. But the year that Eminem's "Lose Yourself" was up for the award, and he didn't appear, they didn't even try to have someone else perform it. They pretty much ignored it...right up until it won. I don't remember the show's producers ever doing that, before or since.

(John, you are correct about "How Do I Live". Good call. And while I was looking at the 1997 Billboard charts, I noticed that there were also competing versions of "Butterfly Kisses", the Raybon Brothers and Bob Carlisle.)

I used to think Shocking Blue were a 1 hit wonder joke, and back in the day I bought the 7" single of Venus to put on mix tapes. One day I decided to play the b-side "Hot Sand" and found out it rocked! Yes, a little cheezy in that "I can hear the singers Swedish (or whatever) accent*" and the lyrics made me laugh, but still pretty rocking. Then I bought the album that had Venus, Hot Sand, Send Me a Postcard, and Love Buzz on it and I still think it rocks in a Dutch kind of way. You need to give it a few more listens. For the record, they're CD "Greatest Hits" has a number of clunkers on it and to me, doesn't do them justice.

*the rumor was she spoke no english and performed the songs phonetically

I went to see Nirvana a couple times on the Bleach tour, and while they were certainly one of my favorite bands at the time, I can't imagine anyone coming out of one of those shows thinking, "man, that guy is the voice of my generation."

Wow, you're so fucking cool. I wish I were 35 years old. Do you have a fucking ponytail? Cool. If anybody's going to rock shows looking for the voice of their generation, they don't understand music. "Voice of a generation" status is hard to attain: step one is getting really fucking good, step two is getting really fucking huge, step three is crashing really fucking hard. Maybe with a shotgun in the mouth.

The whole point of your post was to let us all know that yes, you were there, but you're not, like, super stoked about it, and that you still retain your snobster cred because you're not a 14 yr. old girl who worships Kurt Cobain along with Jesus and Brad Pitt and unicorns. I mean, you were there, but like, it was cool, you guess.

PS:
I would kill to have been there. Kurt is like cooler than God or even Jim Morrison.

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thanks