My love of covers is well documented. I really love how different bands can put their individual stamp on a song, and so here are a couple of wildly different takes on the same song.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sS5jSbV0Vg]
First we have Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys, doing a “western swing” version of a super-cool song about taking a breakup in stride.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_1KfXIXfcE]
Here’s Cream’s electric-jam acid blues-rock version. Man, this whole album (Wheels of Fire) is just awesome. Seriously one of my favorite albums in the world.
Man, while I’m on the Cream songs, this here’s one I kept meaning to and intending to post during the election season, but I just never remembered to do it when I sat down in front of a computer. Anyway, 40 years on, and the damn song still fits the bill, no matter which side of the aisle you sit on.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2PWDAhxADk]
Back in the ’90s, I really thought this song ought to be dubbed on to a tape and mailed to President Clinton. It’s got that kind of louche sliminess that he exuded, all oversexed and amoral. It just seems like it was written for him.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnE_H3Et_s8]
Guess this is a CREAM day over here. When I was in college, I used to get stoned and recite this “song” at parties.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT95XvCZNwg]
And this song…oh my god, it has sentimental significance. When my sis and I were little twerps, our dad used to sing this song to make us howl in protest over the depravity of it all. Then, when we were in our late teens Audrey and I used to sing it as a duet, in as horrible of voices as we could manage (which were pretty fucking dreadful, to be honest). I’ve never done Karaoke, but I think if I ever do, this will be my song, because you don’t have to be able to sing at all to sing it. YEAH! Either that or some Meat Puppets.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUiOKkZBA7I]
This is one of the songs I could possibly do in Karaoke. I had this album (Too High To Die) on cassette tape and I used to listen to it on my way to school my Senior year of highschool. I’d be driving along in my old 1959 VW, with my shitty aftermarket tapedeck blasting the Meat Puppets, and yowling along with them. My poor sister used to have to either cope or participate.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd4cRXmWt3o]
This is another song that I can “sing.” We were listening to this album (Meat Puppets II) the day that my car literally got blown off the road on the way to school. We were on the Dam Road (more properly “Dunlap Road,” but everyone calls it the Dam Road, ’cause it’s on the way to the Box Butte Reservoir, colloquially known as “the dam.”) Anyway, we were on the Dam Road, heading for Hemingford, and we’d had sleet the night before. The road was coated in black ice, and I was takin’ it real easy; couldn’t have been going over 35mph, but it was one hell of a windy morning, and the wind was straight perpendicular to the direction we were trying to drive. A big gust caught my little car broadside and the car just started sliding across the road. I knew if I hit the ditch sideways like that, we’d roll, so somehow I got the sucker steered so that we’d be heading down the ditch at an angle. Man, we were pretty much out of control, sliding and bumping down that steep embankment near Delsing’s place. There was no stopping nor slowing down, and didn’t we just plow through their barbed-wire fence. When we finally came to a stop, the car was about 20′ out into the pasture, one fence post was busted off and two were uprooted, and my home-made speaker box had upended from behind the backseat, but the Meat Puppets were still wailing away on the stereo.
The aftermath of the tangle with the barbed-wire fence.
Oh hell, why not one more Puppets song? One of their most famous, probably ’cause Nirvana covered it. It’s definitely worth a listen.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uALqExeVawI]
I actually quite like the meatpuppets, and yes, you introduced that weirdness to me. I remember crusin’ with The Butthole surfers, Meatpuppets or Pantera cranked as full blast as mom’s poor misused orange 73 could manage. Ah, good times. At least the ones I choose to remember. . . Oh and I still love cream as well, White Room will always hold a special place in my heart.