Battle of the Beatle Boots: when the pros turn amateur

Got a reminder recently, that some people find cover bands, in general, to be bogus.

This guy I used to be in a band with, one of the last times I saw him, gave me a rough time--as if I was supposed to be ashamed or apologetic--because playing in a cover band was "all" I was doing musically at the time.
Wish I'd had the presence of mind to point out it was more than he was doing. But that was essentially his contention, that he'd rather not play music than play cover music.

Certainly, if I had my preference, I'd rather always play music that I've written. And I consider myself very fortunate, not to mention atypical, to have had a band that played nearly as many of my original songs as it did covers, for a couple of years.

The fact is, for most of we amateur, part-time musicians, if we want to perform for anyone other than ourselves, we either play cover songs or we play to ourselves. By and large, folks who go out to a club or bar to hear live music want to hear live music they're familiar with.
So the choice for most of non-pro rock and rollers is not whether or not to play someone else's songs, but whether to play in public or not.

Along with being reminded of this smug former band mate, the other thing that brought the cover music issue to my mind was hearing Dwight Twilley's album, The Beatles.
It's a 2009 release whose cover emulates "The White Album," although the set covers material as old as "I'll Be Back" from A Hard Day's Night.
And it's . . . ok.
None of Twilley's arrangements are going to supplant the originals as anyone's favorites. His signature tremulous vocals sound to be in top form, and his voice and ear for harmony certainly lend themselves to this material. I question the need for another version of Come Together; the Aerosmith cover was all it took to convince me that the song is ridiculous, even unbearable, without Lennon's vocal. Several of Twilley's selections--Helter Skelter, Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey, Bungalow Bill, Tomorrow Never Knows--would make most short lists of the most challenging Beatles songs to attempt, which may have been the point. But there's no excuse for a cover version of the sniggering throwaway Why Don't We Do It In the Road, especially one that runs longer than the original.

Listening to Twilley's The Beatles is not unlike, oh, going to hear a really solid cover band.
You will enjoy it while it's in your ears, and you will never yearn to hear these versions again, over the originals. That's about the most good cover bands can aspire to.

(Also demoralizing, my discovery that he also released another all-covers album last year, Out of the Box, which includes five Beatles songs--at least some of them overlapping his all-Beatles album--among selections as inexplicable as Good Golly Miss Molly and, lord help me, Old Time Rock & Roll. The disappointment of learning about this has been somewhat mitigated by news of Green Blimp, apparently a new album of original material, due out yet this year.)

Twilley is a novice, though, compared to The Smithereens, who have released two albums composed entirely of Beatles material, including a complete cover of the Meet the Beatles album, essentially. a note-for-note rendition, only with DiNunzio's distinctive lead vocals. Which, after hearing it on two consecutive albums of the stuff, I can only conclude isn't all that well suited to stand in for either Lennon's or McCartney's.
To their credit, the 'reens' second album of Beatles covers, B Sides the Beatles, features some more-rarely covered material--Cry for a Shadow and Ask Me Why, in particular. Like Why Don't We Do It In the Road, it's just possible these songs aren't recorded that often because, in comparison to the rest of the Beatles' catalog, they just aren't that great!

(Ask Me Why, in fact, often makes "worst of the Beatles" lists. Bing that phrase and see what I mean. While I'm at it, Revolution #9 is not their worst song--it's a sound collage, not a song at all--and Ob-La-Di isn't the worst song ever, polls to that effect notwithstanding, although it sure is lame and annoying.)

Even more-worthy contributions to the vast Beatles tributes, such as Cheap Trick's live Sgt. Pepper's-with-orchestra, nice as they are to listen to, and impressive as they may be as performances, seem rather pointless. Yeah, you can play an entire album's worth of challenging songs extremely well . . . lots of people can! When are you going to turn out another album as good as In Color? You know, really contribute something new to rock and roll?

What disturbs me about this isn't hearing, sometimes buying more versions of songs I already own, dozens of times over. Or even that most of these renditions are imminently unnecessary.

It's that these bootleg Beatles could be performing their own songs, and that's a choice that's largely denied to we amateurs. Dwight Twilley and Cheap Trick, and to a lesser degree, The Smithereens have all written substantial amounts of original material, to the extent that, if tribute albums to them don't exist, they could.

Since when is it a legitimate career move for immensely talented songwriters to poach on the cover bands' turf? These are artists of the same caliber as those whose material we cover!

Maybe everyone wants to play Beatles' music, which is understandable, and who am I to claim that as exclusively the amateurs' province? Maybe I'm just sour because these pros play cover band out of choice, and I do it out of necessity.

Maybe I'm just ashamed of never having made it any further than the local cover band.

Resumption of Service

Huh, another month goes by, and outta me, nothin'.

Since we last talked, I saw that long-running Charlie Sheen TV sitcom, and only made it through a few minutes. Until I saw the title in the credits, I thought it was called Two Half-Men. So it was kind of different than I was led to expect.

Thanks (?) to a CD titled Before They Were Hits Volume Five, I have now heard a version of "(They Long To Be) Close To You" I can tolerate even less than The Carpenters' . . . the original 1963 recording by Richard Chamberlain. At least Karen's amazing voice can distract from those drippy Richard Carpenter arrangements.

If vibrato were dynamite, Chamberlain's vocal on this thing would blow a crater the size of Tunguska. As it is, it just blows craters.

On the subject of intolerable singers, Kevin Cronin is doing infomercials for a dreadful Time-Life "rock ballads" collection. Hope they run it this month--it's creepy!
Kevin looks like that aunt who always smelled like gin rickies and hugged you considerably longer, and lower, than you were comfortable with.
Oh, and his voice makes "co-host" Amy Motta sound like a tough guy.

Look at me, I finally show up here and I'm nothing but a nattering nabob of negativity!

On more pleasant subjects, can you believe there are, at this late date, unheard Beatles recordings?
(Of course, if they were truly unheard, not even the bootleggers would know what they are. And what's with the phrase, "never before seen photos"? How did they process and print them if they've never been seen? How do they know what they are photos of?)
Last year brought the, um, revelatory Revolution 1, Take 20, a 10:47 version never before heard! Last I knew, experts considered it legit, and it's remarkable.

My latest Beatles boot discovery has probably been around for a while, just escaping my notice until now: Abbey Road minus the vocal tracks. This was their only album recorded on an eight-track recorder, and the power and depth of the instrumental tracks, already impressive on the released album, is stunning. The tightness of the collective band and signature flourishes of their individual players allows for the discovery of all kinds of nice little touches on songs I've heard hundreds of time. And it makes it easier to spot the little missteps, for those who are into that. Simply remarkable.

In yet more evidence that he's too good for the masses, Lew Shiner's "Death of Che Guevara" didn't win the Theodore Sturgeon Award for which it was nominated, which is both a shame and a puzzle. Though I'm hardly impartial, it's difficult to imagine a better piece of recent fiction. Go read it, at no cost, and see if you don't agree:

http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/fall-2009/fiction-the-death-of-che-guevara-by-lewis-shiner/

I don't know much about much, but I do know good writing, and this is it. See if, like me, you don't read it a second or third time. I loves me some short stories and this has become one of my favorites.

And since you asked, more of my favorites from the inimitable Mr. Shiner are available in his COLLECTED STORIES (which is not only a pleasure to read, it looks spectacular on your end table), here:

http://www.subterraneanpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=shiner03&Category_Code=B&Product_Count=124

and he's posted loads of his short and long-form writing, to read for free, at his Fiction Liberation Front site:

http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/index.htm

Did I mention, it's FREE!
Now you have no excuse not to be reading . . . go there!

How to Roll When It's "Hit Record Time"

Last post in January?! Well, I would hate for Blogger to assume this is an abandoned blog and delete it. And although posting here feels disturbingly like talking to myself, I'm going to put some stuff up here that has appeared, in different form and less rambly, on Blogcritics.

A couple of my favorite movies are American Grafitti and That Thing You Do. Both deal with a period for which I have what is likely an unhealthy level of longing. Both are about rock and roll and youth culture at a time when it was becoming a force for the grownups to reckon with. Now I have seen a film that belongs on my dream triple-bill with them, My Dinner With Jimi.

Among the fortunate few who saw director Bill Fishman’s My Dinner With Jimi on the big screen, at a film festival or in its limited theatrical release, this DVD has been eagerly anticipated. For the rest of us, who had only read praise for the film, the wait for this award-winning, low-budget quickie (shot in 12 days) has been agonizing. Now the DVD is here, and guess what? Entirely worth the agony.

My Dinner With Jimi is a factual account of a brief period in 1967 when the Turtles made the transition from opening act to stardom, however short-lived, with the number one hit, “Happy Together.” The first half of the film depicts the band’s struggle to achieve greater success than their modest hits to date, and to avoid the military draft. Their place in the L.A. rock and roll pantheon of the day is pointedly made when they are worthy of a 16 Magazine photo shoot, but get bumped from the cover in favor of the Monkees. The film’s second half plays out the Turtles’ first night in England, culminating in the title event, Kaylan’s early morning dining, drinking, and rap session with guitarist Jimi Hendrix, who was a personality on the hip London scene, but yet (prior to his first album’s release) unknown to America.

Unlike most Sixties rock and roll films, this one has the advantage of being told by the story’s central figure, Turtles’ singer Howard Kaylan, who wrote the screenplay and fully acknowledges the possibility of memory lapses, and the likely causes. The casual attitude about drug and alcohol abuse adds to the film’s feel of authenticity, and it’s to Kaylan’s credit that he didn’t attempt to downplay it. In fact, extreme drug and alcohol intake figure prominently into his and Mark Vollman’s draft aversion tactics, which also felt quite authentic, although that lengthy sequence bogs down an otherwise snappy 90 minutes.

My Dinner captures the brief, breathless time when the scenario played out in That Thing You Do (a film that shares the same buoyant, delirious prevailing mood)—of a bunch of kids putting together a neighborhood band, making a record, and having a number one hit—was not only feasible, it was happening all over the world. The immensely likable Turtles’ wide-eyed, star-struck naivety adds to the realism of the pivotal scenes in London’s exclusive Speakeasy Club. One of the film’s greatest strengths is in these scenes that show us the human dimensions of larger-than-life cultural figures like Hendrix, Brian Jones, and The Beatles.

With few exceptions (such as “Graham Nash’s” dodgy accent and some of the worst wigs and beards this side of my high school’s production of Gone With the Wind), the cast pulls off the difficult task of celebrity impersonation, compensating for marginal resemblance with spot-on voices and mannerisms. The most impressive is Royal Watkins as Jimi Hendrix, who convincingly plays the coolest cat in the place, even in the presence of John Lennon and Brian Jones. Even if Hendrix never suggested that Kaylan perform “all done up like John Steed of The Avengers,”*** Watkins is utterly convincing giving this advice. The film’s best line, and its best-delivered, may be when Hendrix tries to talk Kaylan out of getting married, saying, “Don’t do it. This is hit record time.”

While scenes like the one in Cantor’s Deli, featuring Jim Morrison and a pickle, stretch credulity, they are so charming and funny, you won’t care about the “higher degree of accuracy” that producer Harold Bronson claims this film has over most films “based on actual events.” Accurate or not, My Dinner With Jimi captures the look and feel of the Sixties at their swinging-est. It’s a gas!

Turtles completists, take note, the film includes a couple of mixes Bronson did just for it, "Outside Chance" (by Warren Zevon, who Kaylan speaks about on the commentary track) with the lead vocal higher in the mix, and "She'd Rather Be With Me" (at the end, in the Speakeasy club), minus the horns, for a more "live" sound.

Extras include Howard Kaylan’s commentary, with Harold Bronson; their anecdotes add considerably to the story. Among other contentious comments, Kaylan repeats the claim that, unlike the Beach Boys and most every other L.A.-area band, The Turtles never used studio musicians (like Hal Blaine and the Wrecking Crew), but played all the instruments on their records, presumably not including horns and strings. He's a little rough on Jim Tucker, who left the band in 1967, and he does some other interesting name-dropping. It truly enhances the film.

It would be wonderful to see more films like this, which attempt to depict actual events from rock and roll's golden era, realistically and with human dimensions. My Dinner With Jimi -- it's a treat.

*** Strangely, Kaylan and Bronson talk on the commentary track about the lengths they went to with the Smothers Brothers' "Happy Together" recreation, getting the set and costumes just as they were in the original. After finding the clip on YouTube, however, I found that the recreation is amazingly accurate . . . except for Kaylan. In the actual clip, he seems to be taking Hendrix' advice as to dressing like John Steed (albeit with top hat and cane, rather than derby and brolly); in the film, he's hat- and cane-less and wearing a grossly ill-fitting suit! Which I thought must've been true to the original until I saw it. Also strangely, in the Speakeasy club footage at the end, where the Turtles perform "She'd Rather Be With Me," Kaylan is wearing the John Steed look!

No matter . . . it's a great film, and after a dozen attempts, I think I've determined what "Paul" and "John" say to each other in that last scene. Something like:
Paul: This would make a great story. Wonder if someone will write it someday.
John: Yeah, it's great.
Paul: You better hope not. You come off as a prick.
There's no way Kaylan, performing onstage, could have heard that conversation if it took place, but (like Morrison and the pickle) it's funny enough, and in keeping with the film's tone, who cares.