Discovered Uncovered #3 (Nirvana-rama)

I started writing this post two days before Halloween, and I thought to myself "wow, I may actually post something relevant for once." And then I didn't touch it for almost a month. Granted, there were many things to be done in the city of Taipei, including finishing the process of becoming a legal alien resident, and buying things like cheese graters and mini plastic palm trees for my apartment. Basically I'm groping for an excuse for calling this a Halloween themed post. But I have none. Fuck it; here's the super-spooky edition of Transmissions From Wintermute's Discovered Uncovered. Sorry...

Molly's Lips - Nirvana

Ain't it a Shame - Nirvana

Here She Comes Now - Nirvana

Heartbreaker (Live) - Nirvana

The above covers are of songs by The Vaselines, Lead Belly (most famously), The Velvet Underground, and Led Zeppelin, respectively.

I will always love Nirvana. They changed my brain in high school. Sorry to be such a cliche, but I have never gotten their sound out of my bones.

So much of their b side material, as well as all the live and unreleased stuff floating around the intra-net, and recently released on With The Lights Out, is covers. I always found this slightly odd because of their general standing as a band with a very distinct style and a seminal place of importance in rock history. Probably not that strange though with Cobain's acclectic musical taste and appetite. Nirvana was certainly always first to claim, even broadcast, their influences and idols, usually downgrading their own uniqueness. However, whenever they covered anything, it instantly became their style, just drenched in their personality and the sound of the early 90s. I kinda think this was Nirvana's power in general, the ability to absorb and synthesize so many of the rock, punk, and pop breakthroughs (or breakdowns) of the late 80s-early 90s, along with Cobain's personal imagination and outlook. They took all this amazing noise happening around (and before) them, and turned it into this loud, full, coherant sound. It was challenging and personal yet widely appealing.

Anyway, it's pretty fucking hard (I said "fucking" to sound more "punk") to find a bad Nirvana cover. At the top are four of the best I've come across. The Lead Belly cover was done as the grunge supergroup, The Jury (consisting of Kurt Cobain on vocals, Krist Novoselic on bass and backing vocals, and the Screaming Trees' Mark Lanegan on guitar and Mark Pickerel on drums). According to wikipedia, it was done as part of a planned Lead Belly tribute album which was never finished. Also, the VU cover isn't the rockin' version they did as a Sub Pop split with The Fluid, but is rather an acoustic version I found online. If anyone out there in blogland has any idea where it's from, please hook it up in the comments.

Sub Pop has a way cool site with a bunch of original Nirvana press photos and one sheets from their Bleach days, as well as a really comprehensive discography. Here is how they described Nirvana back then:

NIRVANA sounds like mid-tempo
Black Sabbath playing the knack,
Black Flag, the Stooges, and a
pinch of the- Bay City Rollers.
Their personal musical influences
include H. R. Puffnstuff, Speed
Racer, divorces, drugs, sound
effects records, the Beatles,
rednecks, hard rock, punk rock,
Leadbelly, Slayer, and, of course,
the Stooges.

And if for some reason you're still reading, here's an old and unidentified film of them playing Seasons in the Sun, (Made Famous by Terry Jacks).



Hope you enjoyed the tardyness.

Happy late Canadian Thanksgiving!

Discovered Uncovered #2 (Turn Me On Dead Man)

Wild Honey Pie - The Pixies

Eleanor Rigby - Aretha Franklin

Tomorrow Never Knows - Jad Fair & Daniel Johnston

Happiness Is A Warm Gun - The Breeders

The theme of this second installment of Transmissions From Wintermute’s cover series is Beatles songs. In their short eight years of active time on the pop landscape, The Fab Four released 12 albums and 12 Eps, and numerous volumes of repackeged material. All this adds up to a fuckload of songs for the past, present and future musical world to covet, cover and cannibalize until eternity. But other than just sheer volume, what’s the appeal of covering Beatles songs? The instant recognition? The communion or confrontation with a legacy? The multiple haircuts and facial hair stylings? What sticks out to me most is the malleability of their brilliant pop structures, the hooks that lend themselves to endless reinterpretations without loosing their catchiness. Of course they’re not always easy to pull off.

The above artists, though, definitely do so with these strange and divergent covers which hold on to the original songs’ inescapable pop awesomeness.

Any suggestions for other good Beatle covers out there?

Discovered Uncovered

I Wanna Be Your Dog - Joan Jett

Freezer Burn/I Wanna Be Your Dog - Sonic Youth

This post is the beginning of a series in which I will be posting awesome covers. Most of them will hopefully be some what hard to come across, but the only guiding criteria is that they are awesome (he above picture is a drawing by Daniel Johnston, whose tribute album is the namesake for this post).

Ohmygodimmike challenged his co-bloggers to post covers last month after becoming enamored with Firewater’s Song’s We Should Have Written, and me and DJ have done cover-themed posts in the past (post a comment if you want any songs relinked). Covers are fascinating; on one level a simple form of flattery that gives the listener a grounding recognition when hearing something new. Beyond that though, they can be a sincere modernist reinterpretation, a beloved artifact from the cultural past being reconnected to and built off from through an act of revisiting, almost approaching artistic worship. Or, a cover can be a postmodern denial, a conscious severing of the past from the present and an attempted destruction of the linearity of cultural advancement or of any sort of artistic trajectory. Such a cover gives us a complete reworking of its material in such a way as to destroy any sanctity held by the original or its time and foreground or exploit its anachronisms.

The discerning line between these two ways of covering is of course very thin and blurred (and by no means consistent or exhaustive), and the deciding factors surely lie more in the artistic intent than in the songs covered themselves.

Basically I just love covers, because I think they’re awesome, and I’ll take any chance to post some of my favorites.

So here are two covers of one of the best songs Iggy and The Stooges every did; I Wanna Be Your Dog off their 1969 debut. Both versions are very sincere homages to a proto-punk cockrocker whose rebelliousness paved the way for the expansive rule-breaking of art rockers like Sonic Youth and Riot Grrrls like Joan Jett. Yet both covers interpret the material very differently (off the albums Confusion Is Sex and Up Your Alley, respectively). Anyway......enjoy.