Summertime: Bus Stop

Lori Lieberman: Bus Stop

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I wanted to behave myself. I wanted to post Bus Stop this week, and I wanted to follow the informal rule here, that a posted song must be old enough to have stood the test of time. So I went looking for versions of Bus Stop, and I found plenty of them. Then I listened. A distressing number of them are sound-alikes of the original Hollies version. A small number display the disastrous results of poor artistic decisions. I appreciate the artistry of the original all the more, knowing how badly the song can be done. But then there is this.

I reviewed Lori Lieberman’s album Gun Metal Sky just last year on Oliver di Place, and her Bus Stop was one of the songs I posted then. Usually, I favor original songs over covers in my reviews. But there are times when a cover version of a well known song reveals just as much originality as the artist’s original songs. This was one of those times. Lieberman’s Bus Stop is a delicate work that perfectly captures the innocence of the summer romance described here. It caused me to completely reevaluate a song I had never really liked. I can think of no higher compliment than that.

BTW, perhaps as you have been reading this, you have had the gnawing thought that you should know who Lori Lieberman is. One evening, 40 or so years ago, Lieberman went to hear a young singer named Don McLean. That performance inspired Lieberman to write the poem that became Killing Me Softly With His Song. That song may have been a sort of one-hit wonder, but I can prove that there is more to Lieberman than that.

Summertime: Summer of Drugs

Soul Asylum: Summer of Drugs

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Ack! - I have three perfectly good Summertime original songs to post for this week... but far be it from me to break the Covers Chain... :-)

I have written of the Sweet Relief tribute album before... here and here - this Soul Asylum take on a Victoria Williams tune is from there as well...

From the website:

"Long a beloved fixture on the Minneapolis hardcore scene, this foursome [Soul Asylum] has evolved a thoughtful and melodic, yet still aggressive approach."

Dave Pirner, lead singer of Soul Asylum says, "Victoria's music is an adventure, and her special world has more personality than anything else you'll ever listen to."

Summertime: In the Summertime

Shaggy ft. Rayvon: In the Summertime

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Mungo Jerry's #1 hit In the Summertime will always take me right back to the beach in Avalon, New Jersey, where my extended family would spend a summer week (although we gave it up after Hurricane Agnes came ashore in 1972 and sent us scattering home in driving rain). For a kid like me from southern Michigan, hanging out at the ocean was a ginormously big deal. My teenage cousins and I would stake out an empty bedroom or some sand near the boardwalk and crank up the AM radio. This song was a staple that summer, for obvious reasons.

I don't wanna jinx the cover sub-theme, so here's a 1995 reggae version by Shaggy and Rayvon that was a UK hit.

Summertime: Boys of Summer

Bree Sharp: Boys of Summer

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A cover of a song about summer? Hey, I can do that too!

Don Henley's 1984 hit "Boys of Summer" is perhaps one of the quintessential songs about the season in the last few decades. The feel of the music just feels like summer, and the lyrics exemplify the season and how it, and us, change over the years.

In the song, as in life, summer begins as a season of fun and adventure that seems almost surreal when it's over. It's the time of year everyone gets excited about when they're growing up as it means no school or homework, and a time to travel, spend time with your friends with less supervision, and partake in those glorious summer romances. Alas, as we grow older the summer loses some of it's luster as we do much of the same things we do the rest of the year. No longer do we have a whole season to revel in those travels, romances and adventures, but we always feel that surreal feeling of summers gone by when the boys/girls were prettier, the weather nicer, and the days shorter.

As brief as the summers of our youth that were over way too soon, so are the memories and romances of those years gone by. The whole feeling in the song is that we may try, but we can never recapture those feelings, despite how real and significant they feel at the time. The love for this song has lasted long past those sweet summer romances though, as it's been covered a bunch of times over the years. This one, sung by female singer-songwriter Bree Sharp, brings a new twist to it from the voice of the other sex.

Summertime: Summer Evening

Gillian Welch: Summer Evening

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Have we really fallen into an all-covers subtheme this week? Then far be it for the resident coverfolk blogger to miss his opportunity to share this delightfully languid take on Greg Brown's gentle love song to the season as performed by one of my absolute favorite folksingers, who I recently featured over at Cover Lay Down.

Summer Evening comes from one of my favorite tribute albums, the all-female voiced Going Driftless. Brown's rural, deeply confessional songsmithing never sounded sweeter.

Summertime: Summer Wine

Ville Valo & Natalia Avelon: Summer Wine

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Summer Wine is a male-female duet made popular by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, released in 1967. The song's theme is the classic "boy meets girl, boy and girl party down and have euphemistically described wild monkey sex, girl rolls passed-out boy, who is left bereft and poorer but wiser." As you do. Little Feat mined this same ground with Dixie Chicken – do you remember any others? Its sister song is undoubtedly the "girl meets boy, girl is promised marriage if she puts out Right This Very Moment, boy cruelly abandons girl, who is left knocked up and single but wiser." In other words, the True Love Waits theme song.

We seem to be posting covers this week, so I'll follow suit. Here's a version from the German movie Das Wilde Leben, about a German rock groupie. Nancy's part is sung by the film's lead actress, Natalia Avelon, and Lee's sad cowboy is now Ville Valo, lead singer of the Finnish alt-metal group HIM, whose deep-voiced babies I'd volunteer to bear even if it ultimately means cruel abandonment and belated musical wisdom.

Summertime: Summer Breeze

The Isley Brothers: Summer Breeze

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There is a long history in pop music of white artists covering songs by black artists. In the '70s, R&B/soul/funk group the Isley Brothers turned this around by covering songs by white artists.

Their first album with an expanded six-person lineup, 3 + 3, included covers of Johnathan Edwards "Sunshine (Go Away Today)", the Doobie Brothers' "Listen to the Music", and James Taylor's "Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight, but perhaps the whitest song they covered was "Summer Breeze", originally a pop hit for Seals & Crofts. The Isley's version made the U.S. R&B charts in 1974.

With the guitar of new member Ernie Isley giving it some much needed-muscle, the song grooves. It's a great example of how the right arrangement can breathe new life into a song.

Summertime: Dancing in the Street

Jimmy Barnes: Dancing in the Street

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The time is right for this one. Apparently, Ella Fitzgerald absolutely nailing Summertime is proving to be a hard act to follow. So, I created this mess, and I get to fix it, (I hope). And why not do it with this classic workout in praise of summer partying.

The classic version is, of course, by Martha and the Vandelles. And that’s a fine version. But I thought, “This song is such a bar band classic. Surely there are many interesting versions to choose from.” So I went shopping, and the results surprised me. First of all, there are many versions which try to slavishly recreate the original. Why do people bother? Then, there was a flurry of disco versions, including a very unfortunate one by the Grateful Dead. To my ears, the version by Mick Jagger and David Bowie has not aged well; it sounds to me now more like a stunt than a song. There’s a jazz version without words by the Ramsey Lewis Trio, but it slows the song down and loses the spirit that makes the song work for this week’s theme. I almost gave up.

Then I found this version by Jimmy Barnes. Who? I had never heard of him either, and I almost ignored this one. But our Australian readers could have told me. That’s right, I had to go to Australia to find a version that was what I wanted. Barnes doesn’t change the music much. What makes this one is the performance. Barnes finds a way to outdo the intensity of the original by miles. On this, he is a top notch soul shouter, and the band cooks behind him. When I first came of legal age, I didn’t want to get drunk. I went to a bar to hear a local band. At its best, seeing a bar band offers an electrical connection, with the energy flowing from the band to the crowd and back. It’s very difficult to capture this experience on an album. Jimmy Barnes does it here.

Summertime: Summertime

Ella Fitzgerald: Summertime

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Let’s begin with this week’s theme song. Summertime, of course comes from George Gershwin’s classic, Porgy and Bess. The song is a lullaby, reassuring a child that all is well. Why has the song become a standard? There is no need for me to reply. Ella Fitzgerald has done so beautifully.

Bonus:

There are many wonderful versions of Summertime out there. If you would like to hear another one, I included a version by Herbie Hancock with Joni Mitchell when I welcomed summer on my own blog, Oliver di Place. You can still here that one here.

All Apologies: Green Monster Edition

No, this post is not about a famous wall in Fenway Park in Boston. The green monster I refer to is jealousy. It is one of our most powerful emotions, and here it drives two very different women to an act that they feel compelled to apologize for later. But their apologies are as different as are the women themselves.

Kirsty MacColl: Miss Otis Regrets

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Miss Otis Regrets is a standard by Cole Porter. Porter often focused on the foibles of the upper classes, but perhaps never as scathingly as here. The title character, driven by jealousy, has done something awful. So what does she apologize for? Through her servant, she sends regrets for missing a social engagement the next day.

Kirsty MacColl first recorded Miss Otis Regrets with the Pogues for Red Hot and Blue, an album created to raise money for AIDS awareness and research. That was a great version, but I did not feel that I could use it, because it was done in a medley with Just One of Those Things, which does not fit our theme at all. Fortunately, MacColl recorded Miss Otis Regrets again, this time as a stand-alone track. But this time, the Pogues were not involved. MacColl does just fine on her own though.

Tracy Nelson: Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair

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Now here is another woman in the same situation. Driven by jealousy, she has committed the same crime of passion as Miss Otis. But her reaction is quite different. She cannot live with what she has done, and she apologizes for something she knows cannot be made right, by begging the judge to show her no mercy. She is sorry, and she wants to pay the highest possible price. For this, she commands far more of our sympathy than Miss Otis does.

Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair was made famous by Bessie Smith about 75 years ago. Since then, many blues and jazz singers, both female and male, have sung it. David Bromberg did a great version, and I would love to have an mp3 of Roy Bookbinder’s rendition. But, even though the arrangement is quite different, Tracy Nelson’s version strikes me as being the closest in spirit to Smith’s.

All Apologies: "Regrets? I've Had a Few" Edition

Susan Werner: Sorry About Jesus

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Ani DiFranco: Superhero

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Dory Previn: Left Hand Lost

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Where does sorry end and regret begin... or vice versa? - there's a fine line between apologizing to someone else and apologizing to yourself for things you wish you'd done/said/thought differently... things which are unalterably life-changing, and indelibly mark a that-was-then, this-is-now crossroads...

Susan begs forgiveness for weird "Jesus freak" (we all knew one) behavior while in high school - "I'm hardly like the person that I was back then"...

Ani laments a relationship-induced self-transformation from strong to vulnerable, knowing she can never go back - "and now look at me, I am just like everybody else"...

Dory ponders who she would have been and what she might have accomplished, if she had not allowed the nuns in school to change her natural left-leaning inclination to the other side - "and I'll never be completely me again"...

I personally am sorry/regretful I don't post here as often as I used to, sometimes even missing a week altogether (very unlike me!) - I vow to do better in the future...

All Apologies: Glad and Sorry

Faces: Glad and Sorry

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"Glad and Sorry" is a bittersweet Ronnie Lane song from the last Faces album, Ooh La La. It's one of those songs that works better when you don't try to analyze it. It's all about the performance. You pick up the vibe from the music, and maybe a few words resonate, but that's all you need to know.

Golden Smog: Glad and Sorry

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Twenty-something years later, alt-rock supergroup Golden Smog covered it on their first full-lengther, Down By the Old Mainstream. The main piano riff is rendered on electric guitars, giving the song a bit more edge, but otherwise their version is spot on. The loose, relaxed vibe that permeates the album made "Glad and Sorry" a perfect fit.

All Apologies: I'm Sorry I Love You

The Magnetic Fields: I'm Sorry I Love You

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The driving force behind the Magnetic Fields, Stephen Merritt is well known in certain circles for his apt ability to evoke the complex emotions of the hipster set. Case in point: his delightfully imperfect three-volume 69 Love Songs project, which - like poet Pablo Neruda's 100 Love Sonnets - provides an intensely personal collective litany of the many ways that love manifests in our hearts and our lives.

The jangly, fuzzed-out eastern-toned surf-rock of I'm Sorry I Love You makes for an interesting apology/sorrow song, framing love as a temporary rose, fraught with its own passing, and the sorrow and pain that inevitably follows. The paired male-and-female vocals lend a rich layer of nuance to the universality of the message, too. Listen to the end, though, and the truth is revealed: roses bloom and die, but in this case, at least, the hopelessness and bitterness present in our narrator's lyric springs from the cavalier attitude of the gardner, not the rose inherent.

All Apologies: Forgive Me

Patti Rothberg: Forgive Me

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The biggest part of saying you're sorry is so you can potentially get the offended party's forgiveness. Despite being the offended party in the scenario, this song became very pertinent to me after a break-up I had many years ago, when I felt like if I had just not played it so cool, if I had just not played hard to get, or had been faster in realizing I wanted to be with him, then maybe he wouldn't have gotten bored and moved on.

Patti Rothberg had minor success with her single "Inside" from her debut album "Between the 1 and the 9" in the late '90s, but hasn't been able to recreate the magic since. This song is from that stellar debut that still remains one of the favorites in my collection, simple and affective songwriting that often touch on feelings that are slightly different than the typical love and lost that most are about.

All Apologies: I’ll Say I’m Sorry Now

Shawn Colvin: I‘ll Say I‘m Sorry Now

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Often, “I’m Sorry” means “I’ll change and try to undo what I have done”. But there also times when it simply means “I wish things had gone differently.” I’ll Say I’m Sorry Now finds Shawn Colvin’s narrator facing the fact that her relationship is doomed. She knows she can’t fix it, but she’s not quite ready to give it up entirely. She wants to apologize while she still can. And she does so beautifully. The arrangement on this one is suitably spare. There is no way to dress up what she has to say, no way to make it easier to take.

All Apologies: I Apologize

Billy Eckstine : I Apologize

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This 1950 hit for bop big band leader cum vocalist Billy Eckstine is a cover of an earlier Bing Crosby song. It showcases his smooth-as-butter baritone with a lush orchestra. And damn, does he ever sound sincerely sorry! I'd forgive him, wouldn't you?

Eckstine broke a lot of musical ground, both in the bop jazz world (working with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey…) and as one of the first black romantic singers interpreting American standards. His 1942 rendition of Skylark introduced the first black vocalist ever heard on US network radio. If not for the overarching racism in America at the time, he probably would've been as popular as Frank Sinatra, who recommended Eckstine as his replacement when his voice failed during the late 40's.

And now I'll offer my own apologies for not being able to post again for the next week – I'm headed for the east coast.

All Apologies: Sorry

The English Beat: Sorry

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I am sorry that I missed last week's challenge, being on vacation ("up north" in the vernacular of the natives) and away from my computer. This is kind of a two-fer, then, although I'd have chosen this song anyway.

The English Beat (or simply The Beat in Britain) was probably one of the better-known ska revival bands that popped up in England in the late 70's (as did The Selector, who Darius featured a few weeks back). They banged out albums in 1980, 1981, and 1982 and then broke up to form two new bands: Fine Young Cannibals and General Public.

This song is from their last album. What made the English Beat one of my favorite bands was not only their infectious rhythm, their sparkling vocals, and their tight arrangements, but their clever lyrics, e.g.:

Words are just another violence,
Nothing rings as true as silence.

Dave Wakeling, lead singer and nouveau Californian, has reformed the English Beat in recent years and tours the US regularly. They perform the old hits and are quite good if you have a chance to catch them live.

All Apologies: Criminal

Fiona Apple: Criminal

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I would like to begin by assuring our readers that our One Word theme is indeed over. But it’s hard to apologize, to admit that you were wrong. So that explains the one-word titles to start the week. Sometimes one word is all you can manage.

Take Fiona Apple. Her character in Criminal knows she must apologize. But she can’t quite bring herself to do it. It’s never stated who is being addressed in the song, but it’s not the lover she has wronged. She has gone to friend, or maybe even a therapist, to help her find the courage to apologize. The remorse is already in place, so she’s just seeking that final push.

All Apologies: Apology

The Posies: Apology

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And I asked again
Would it be alright for me
To acquire someone else's disenchantment?
I could reconnect to another time and place
Reconsider letting loose and running rampant

Take me back
Teach me
Take me back
Apology
I never meant to be and I won't take much with me

Just an open mind and a second nature
Don't forget you might just drink the water
If it illustrates the nonesuch nomenclature

So push the button ring the bell
Behold your tongue it's served you well
Enough to bring you here, won't you please

If we fall to touch

There will be no backlogged time
You can make believe it like a bunch of postcards
And the stones will read in a modest fashion
Don't expect too much - you might be disappointed

One Word / All Apologies: Sorry

Caitlin Cary: Sorry

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And I am sorry, sorry, sorry for my arms.
I tried to protect you.
Sorry, sorry, sorry for my arms.
I have darkened all of your charms.

Caitlin Cary may be less famous than Ryan Adams, her better-known partner in Whiskeytown, but don't sell her short: the fiddle playing songwriter has a power that lingers, regardless of mainstream cachet. And she certainly knows how to play the strong one, as in this gentle Americana ballad, its lyric a litany of regret for the way her shadow and strength and well-intentioned protection stunted the growth of someone loved yet unnamed.

Odds are good that Cary's "other" here is a lover, not a child. But the potential is there, and it's a scary conceit, for a parent - so hard, in the end, to nurture without smothering, to protect without damaging, and almost impossible to know whether you've gone too far until it's too late to do more than regret. As such, I keep Cary's apology as a morality play, a bulwark against the balance, a reminder that love can kill. May we never need to step into her sentiment.