Cover, Cover
Jul. 28th, 2010 02:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakYouTube is still my friend and yielded some amazing Beatles cover versions, some of which I hadn’t known existed (Aretha Franklin did way more Lennon/McCartney than I had assumed, wow); others I had been looking for since eons. Also one amusing crossover I had forgotten (Joe LoDuca actually used We can work it out on Xena for Xena and Gabrielle).
Eleanor Rigby was always one of my favourite songs, but I somewhat naively thought it would be difficult to cover in a concert performance, because of the string octet. (This is a Beatles song where none of Beatles played any instruments, though John and George contribute harmony vocals; otherwise it's all Paul and four violins, two cellos, and two violas, scored by Beatles producer George Martin.) Well, quite a lot of artists rose to the challenge, and I find it striking how different the following three versions are from each other:
Ray Charles:
Aretha Franklin:
Joan Baez
More trufax about Eleanor Rigby: when you visit Liverpool these days and do a tour, they show you not only a statue depicting her (in Stanley Street) but also her tombstone, but here’s what the composer himself has to say:
I’m told that there’s a gravestone with Eleanor Rigby on it in the graveyard in Woolton where John and I used to hang out, but there could be 3000 gravestones in Brtain with Eleanor Rigby on. It is possible that I saw it and subconsciously remembered it, but my conscious memory was of being stuck for a name and liking the name Eleanor, probably because of Eleanor Bron, who we knew and worked with around that time. I’d seen her at Peter Cook’s Establishment Club in Greek Street, then she came on the film Help! so we knew her quite well, John had a fling with her. I liked the name Eleanor. I wanted a genuine second name. I’m big on names, always have been, so I was very fussy to get the correct name and I was in Bristol on a visit to see Jane Asher at the Old Vic, and just walking around the dock area I saw an old shop called Rigby, and I thought, Oooh. It’s a very ordinary name and yet it’s a special name, it was exactly what I wanted. So Eleanor Rigby. I felt great. I’d got it! I then took it out to John because I hadn’t finished all the words. And he and I worked on it.
I had Father McCartney as the priest just because I knew that was right for the syllables, but I knew I didn’t want it even though John liked it, so we opened the telephone book, went to McCartney and looked what followed it, and shortly after, it was McKenzie. I thought, Oh, that’s good. It wasn’t written about anyone. A man appeared, who died a few years ago, who said, ‘I’m Father McKenzie’. Anyone who was called Father McKenzie and had a slim contact with the Beatles quite naturally would think that. John wanted it to stay McCartney, but I said, ‘No, it’s my dad! Father McCartney.’ He said, ‘It’s good, it works fine.’ I agreed it worked, but I didn’t want to sing that, it was too loaded, it asked too many questions. I wanted it to be anonymous.”
On to other songs. I had seen Tina Turner perform Help in concert last year, and her version has been haunting me ever since (it brings out the desperation John said inspired the song). Turns out YouTube has several versions of her singing the song, and here is one:
We can work it out was a Lennon/McCartney song that was actually 50/50 in origin instead of being mainly by one or the other. Which is as good a time as any to quote John's famous description of the general writing process in the 1980 Playboy interview: "We wrote a lot of stuff together, one on one, eyeball to eyeball. (...) Paul hits this chord and I turn to him and say, 'That's it!' I said, 'Do that again!' In those days we really used to absolutely write like that - both playing into each other's noses." Re: We can work it out specifically, he said: "You've got Paul writing, 'We can work it out / We can work it out'—real optimistic, y'know, and me, impatient: 'Life is very short, and there's no time / For fussing and fighting, my friend."
Which defines pretty much their public personas, if not the more complicated realities behind them. I had forgotten that in the less successful second musical episode of Xena - where instead of an original musical score, as in The Bitter Suite, composer Joe LoDuca arranged cover versions of a lot of popular songs - the show used We can work it out. Someone later used the vocals of that (with Lucy Lawless - Xena - and Susan Wood singing, since Renee OConnor, who plays Gabrielle, couldn't) for a Xena/Gabrielle vid. Behold:
Here, There and Everywhere is a classic McCartney ballad that John Lennon named as one of his favourites. (So did George Martin.) Paul McCartney: “When I sang it in the studio I remember thinking, I’ll sing it like Marianne Faithfull; something no one would ever know. You get these little things in your mind, you think, I’ll sing it like James Brown might, but of course it’s always you that sings it, but in your head there’s a little James Brown for that session. If you can’t think how to sing the thing, that’s always a good clue: imagine Aretha Franklin to come and sing it, Ray Charles is going to sing it. So that one was a little voice, I used an almost falsetto voice and double-tracked it. My Marianne Faithfull impression.”
There might be an actual Marianne Faithfull cover somewhere, but the one that struck me most was by Emmylou Harris:
I Wanna Be Your Man will never make it among anyone's "best of Lennon and McCartney" list - it was their song for Ringo for their second album, and written-for-Ringo-songs tend to be enjoyable but simple - but the Rollling Stones cover was one of their earliest hits. What cracks me up about this vid is that the Stones do come across as, to quote Philip Norman on this earliest incarnation of them, "ersatz Beatles" there; they hadn't yet hit on the formula of being the wild and overtly sexual alternative.
Quotes from the composers about how the Stones got the song:
Paul: "We were in Charing Cross Road, where we often used to go to window-shop at the guitar shops and daydream. It was a great hobby of ours when we first came down to London. Dick James, our song publisher, was on Charing Cross Road. We'd go to his office and window-shop on the way. Coming out of his office one day, John and I were walking along Charing Cross Road when passing in a taxi were Mick and Keith. We were each other's counterparts in many ways because they became the writers in the group and were the twosome, the couple, as it were. So they shouted from the taxi and we yelled, 'Hey, hey, give us a lift, give us a lift,' and we bummed a lift off them. So there were the four of us sitting in a taxi and I think MIck said, 'Hey, we're recording. Got any songs?' And we said, 'Aaaahh, yes, sure, we got one. How about Ringo's song? You could do it as a single.' And they went for it and Bo Diddleyed it up a bit."
John (in a typical display of Lennon bitchiness, which means both entertaining and mean): "''I Wanna Be Your Man' was kind of a lick Paul had and I helped finish. It was a throwaway. The only two versions of the song were Ringo and the Rolling Stones. That shows how much importance we put on it. We weren't going to give them anything great, right?"
Speaking of John in bitchy mode: he once called The Long and Winding Road from Let it Be Paul's last gasp as a song writer and declared him dead after that. (And then he went on to complain that Paul hadn't given him the later written Oh!Darling to sing, because that was such a great song and clearly much more suited for his, John's voice, than to Paul's. That's John "You're dead to me/ waiiiiit, don't you dare leave me!" Lennon for you.) The Beatles version of The Long and Winding road was infamously given the Phil Spector treatment without consultation or agreement with the composer, which angered Paul so much he named it as one of the six reasons for breaking the Beatles as a legal entity in court. (Short version of the complicated backstory: John and Allen Klein - the manager John wanted and Paul did not - hand over the Let it Be recording tapes in January 1970 to Phil Spector, Spector gives The Long and Winding Road the full Phil Spector treatment on April 1st 1970, Paul gets sent the remixed version, writes furious letter to Klein, demanding that the added instrumentation be reduced, the harp part eliminated, concluding "Don't ever do that again". Klein ignores him, the Spector version makes the album, Paul asks Klein to dissolve the Beatles partnership, Klein refuses, Paul sues.) Given his fondness for Aretha Franklin, he must have liked her version:
Olivia Newton-John also covered the song:
John once joked about Come Together that he wanted to give British Football fans a new song to sing; it turned out to be one of his most covered. Here's a Tina Turner version from 1970:
Going back in time a bit to '66: For no one, from Revolver, was one of several ballads inspired by Paul's stormy relationship with Jane Asher which was nearing its end and is unusually bleak for a McCartney love song; naturally, John loved it ("One of my favourites of his"). It's a great example of how the cooperation with producer George Martin worked. Quoth Barry Miles: Paul hummed the melodo that he wanted the French horn to play and George Martin wrote out the score. When it was finished, George pointed out to Paul that the high note went just beyond the top of that horn's range and showed him the reference book used for orchestral writing which showed the top notes of orchestral instruments. George Martin said, 'But you know, these good players, they can play above the range.' Paul said: 'Let's try him then.' The French horn player in question, Alan Civil, came through, and the song went on to be covered a lot. Here are Anne Sofie von Otter and Elvis Costello doing the honours:
(I can't resist adding a not-cover here, because the way Paul improvises the French horns in this studio recording cracks me up:)
Get Back, because it was going to be featured in the concert documentary film that turned out to be a documentary of the group breaking up instead, is one of the few Beatles songs we have on film in many versions during various stages of its development. John was alternatively dismissive ("a better version of 'Lady Madonna'. You know, a potboiler rewrite") or extremely suspicious (""there's some underlying thing about Yoko in there") about it. Neither of which concerned the various artists who later covered it. Tina Turner and Rod Stewart both sang Get Back a lot in their respective concerts, so it was inevitable they’d once sing it together:
And lastly, have a medley of various songs, as performed by: Tina Turner, Cher and Kate Smith:
Eleanor Rigby was always one of my favourite songs, but I somewhat naively thought it would be difficult to cover in a concert performance, because of the string octet. (This is a Beatles song where none of Beatles played any instruments, though John and George contribute harmony vocals; otherwise it's all Paul and four violins, two cellos, and two violas, scored by Beatles producer George Martin.) Well, quite a lot of artists rose to the challenge, and I find it striking how different the following three versions are from each other:
Ray Charles:
Aretha Franklin:
Joan Baez
More trufax about Eleanor Rigby: when you visit Liverpool these days and do a tour, they show you not only a statue depicting her (in Stanley Street) but also her tombstone, but here’s what the composer himself has to say:
I’m told that there’s a gravestone with Eleanor Rigby on it in the graveyard in Woolton where John and I used to hang out, but there could be 3000 gravestones in Brtain with Eleanor Rigby on. It is possible that I saw it and subconsciously remembered it, but my conscious memory was of being stuck for a name and liking the name Eleanor, probably because of Eleanor Bron, who we knew and worked with around that time. I’d seen her at Peter Cook’s Establishment Club in Greek Street, then she came on the film Help! so we knew her quite well, John had a fling with her. I liked the name Eleanor. I wanted a genuine second name. I’m big on names, always have been, so I was very fussy to get the correct name and I was in Bristol on a visit to see Jane Asher at the Old Vic, and just walking around the dock area I saw an old shop called Rigby, and I thought, Oooh. It’s a very ordinary name and yet it’s a special name, it was exactly what I wanted. So Eleanor Rigby. I felt great. I’d got it! I then took it out to John because I hadn’t finished all the words. And he and I worked on it.
I had Father McCartney as the priest just because I knew that was right for the syllables, but I knew I didn’t want it even though John liked it, so we opened the telephone book, went to McCartney and looked what followed it, and shortly after, it was McKenzie. I thought, Oh, that’s good. It wasn’t written about anyone. A man appeared, who died a few years ago, who said, ‘I’m Father McKenzie’. Anyone who was called Father McKenzie and had a slim contact with the Beatles quite naturally would think that. John wanted it to stay McCartney, but I said, ‘No, it’s my dad! Father McCartney.’ He said, ‘It’s good, it works fine.’ I agreed it worked, but I didn’t want to sing that, it was too loaded, it asked too many questions. I wanted it to be anonymous.”
On to other songs. I had seen Tina Turner perform Help in concert last year, and her version has been haunting me ever since (it brings out the desperation John said inspired the song). Turns out YouTube has several versions of her singing the song, and here is one:
We can work it out was a Lennon/McCartney song that was actually 50/50 in origin instead of being mainly by one or the other. Which is as good a time as any to quote John's famous description of the general writing process in the 1980 Playboy interview: "We wrote a lot of stuff together, one on one, eyeball to eyeball. (...) Paul hits this chord and I turn to him and say, 'That's it!' I said, 'Do that again!' In those days we really used to absolutely write like that - both playing into each other's noses." Re: We can work it out specifically, he said: "You've got Paul writing, 'We can work it out / We can work it out'—real optimistic, y'know, and me, impatient: 'Life is very short, and there's no time / For fussing and fighting, my friend."
Which defines pretty much their public personas, if not the more complicated realities behind them. I had forgotten that in the less successful second musical episode of Xena - where instead of an original musical score, as in The Bitter Suite, composer Joe LoDuca arranged cover versions of a lot of popular songs - the show used We can work it out. Someone later used the vocals of that (with Lucy Lawless - Xena - and Susan Wood singing, since Renee OConnor, who plays Gabrielle, couldn't) for a Xena/Gabrielle vid. Behold:
Here, There and Everywhere is a classic McCartney ballad that John Lennon named as one of his favourites. (So did George Martin.) Paul McCartney: “When I sang it in the studio I remember thinking, I’ll sing it like Marianne Faithfull; something no one would ever know. You get these little things in your mind, you think, I’ll sing it like James Brown might, but of course it’s always you that sings it, but in your head there’s a little James Brown for that session. If you can’t think how to sing the thing, that’s always a good clue: imagine Aretha Franklin to come and sing it, Ray Charles is going to sing it. So that one was a little voice, I used an almost falsetto voice and double-tracked it. My Marianne Faithfull impression.”
There might be an actual Marianne Faithfull cover somewhere, but the one that struck me most was by Emmylou Harris:
I Wanna Be Your Man will never make it among anyone's "best of Lennon and McCartney" list - it was their song for Ringo for their second album, and written-for-Ringo-songs tend to be enjoyable but simple - but the Rollling Stones cover was one of their earliest hits. What cracks me up about this vid is that the Stones do come across as, to quote Philip Norman on this earliest incarnation of them, "ersatz Beatles" there; they hadn't yet hit on the formula of being the wild and overtly sexual alternative.
Quotes from the composers about how the Stones got the song:
Paul: "We were in Charing Cross Road, where we often used to go to window-shop at the guitar shops and daydream. It was a great hobby of ours when we first came down to London. Dick James, our song publisher, was on Charing Cross Road. We'd go to his office and window-shop on the way. Coming out of his office one day, John and I were walking along Charing Cross Road when passing in a taxi were Mick and Keith. We were each other's counterparts in many ways because they became the writers in the group and were the twosome, the couple, as it were. So they shouted from the taxi and we yelled, 'Hey, hey, give us a lift, give us a lift,' and we bummed a lift off them. So there were the four of us sitting in a taxi and I think MIck said, 'Hey, we're recording. Got any songs?' And we said, 'Aaaahh, yes, sure, we got one. How about Ringo's song? You could do it as a single.' And they went for it and Bo Diddleyed it up a bit."
John (in a typical display of Lennon bitchiness, which means both entertaining and mean): "''I Wanna Be Your Man' was kind of a lick Paul had and I helped finish. It was a throwaway. The only two versions of the song were Ringo and the Rolling Stones. That shows how much importance we put on it. We weren't going to give them anything great, right?"
Speaking of John in bitchy mode: he once called The Long and Winding Road from Let it Be Paul's last gasp as a song writer and declared him dead after that. (And then he went on to complain that Paul hadn't given him the later written Oh!Darling to sing, because that was such a great song and clearly much more suited for his, John's voice, than to Paul's. That's John "You're dead to me/ waiiiiit, don't you dare leave me!" Lennon for you.) The Beatles version of The Long and Winding road was infamously given the Phil Spector treatment without consultation or agreement with the composer, which angered Paul so much he named it as one of the six reasons for breaking the Beatles as a legal entity in court. (Short version of the complicated backstory: John and Allen Klein - the manager John wanted and Paul did not - hand over the Let it Be recording tapes in January 1970 to Phil Spector, Spector gives The Long and Winding Road the full Phil Spector treatment on April 1st 1970, Paul gets sent the remixed version, writes furious letter to Klein, demanding that the added instrumentation be reduced, the harp part eliminated, concluding "Don't ever do that again". Klein ignores him, the Spector version makes the album, Paul asks Klein to dissolve the Beatles partnership, Klein refuses, Paul sues.) Given his fondness for Aretha Franklin, he must have liked her version:
Olivia Newton-John also covered the song:
John once joked about Come Together that he wanted to give British Football fans a new song to sing; it turned out to be one of his most covered. Here's a Tina Turner version from 1970:
Going back in time a bit to '66: For no one, from Revolver, was one of several ballads inspired by Paul's stormy relationship with Jane Asher which was nearing its end and is unusually bleak for a McCartney love song; naturally, John loved it ("One of my favourites of his"). It's a great example of how the cooperation with producer George Martin worked. Quoth Barry Miles: Paul hummed the melodo that he wanted the French horn to play and George Martin wrote out the score. When it was finished, George pointed out to Paul that the high note went just beyond the top of that horn's range and showed him the reference book used for orchestral writing which showed the top notes of orchestral instruments. George Martin said, 'But you know, these good players, they can play above the range.' Paul said: 'Let's try him then.' The French horn player in question, Alan Civil, came through, and the song went on to be covered a lot. Here are Anne Sofie von Otter and Elvis Costello doing the honours:
(I can't resist adding a not-cover here, because the way Paul improvises the French horns in this studio recording cracks me up:)
Get Back, because it was going to be featured in the concert documentary film that turned out to be a documentary of the group breaking up instead, is one of the few Beatles songs we have on film in many versions during various stages of its development. John was alternatively dismissive ("a better version of 'Lady Madonna'. You know, a potboiler rewrite") or extremely suspicious (""there's some underlying thing about Yoko in there") about it. Neither of which concerned the various artists who later covered it. Tina Turner and Rod Stewart both sang Get Back a lot in their respective concerts, so it was inevitable they’d once sing it together:
And lastly, have a medley of various songs, as performed by: Tina Turner, Cher and Kate Smith:
