Is Doing A Covers Album Or Too Many Cover Songs A Bad Thing?
“Come on, baby, cover me.”
When Bruce Springsteen sang those words on his 1984 “Born in the U.S.A.” album, he didn’t realize that several years later, he would be proven a Nostradamus.
Even though the Boss hasn’t yet been the subject of a “tribute album,” covers of everyone’s songs from Springsteen’s to Rex Smith’s a frightening thought have been on the charts recently.
The Eagles, the Bee Gees, the Carpenters and more have been honored by tribute CDs.
In the last year, we’ve been inundated with all-covers albums: Guns `N’ Roses’ “The Spaghetti Incident?,” Huey Lewis & the News’ “Four Chords and Several Years Ago” and Luther Vandross’ “Songs” are only three of the culprits. And I won’t even mention the various “Unplugged” discs teeming with odd covers and artists’ re-recordings of their own material.
Is originality dead? Are people running out of ideas? Has everything been done that can be? The answers are no, yes and no, respectively.
Originality is not dead. Every time I think I’ve seen everything, along comes a band like Nirvana, that blows everyone out of the water, or an artist like Beck, who sounds like no one I’ve ever heard before.
Has everything been done? Don’t tell that to rap artists, who are notorious for coming up with new slants on old grooves. Dr. Dre, PM Dawn, Lucas — they’ve all created something new from an old scene.
But are SOME people running out of ideas? Maybe, but it’s nothing to have a spaz about.
Many music critics are screaming about the appalling lack of originality on the music scene. In some cases, they’re right — the covers seem to be nothing more than a way for artists to pad out their record contracts while they’re treading water creatively see Huey Lewis & the News.
But harsh criticism of the current scene is very short-sighted. Rock ‘n’ roll was founded on covers, as Elvis, the Beatles and other early rockers recycled songs by even earlier groundbreakers like Chuck Berry.
Cover albums haven’t been the end of the line for many a pop singer. The Rolling Stones did quite a few covers on their early albums, primarily of old rock and blues numbers, but they followed those with a 30-plus year career. When John Lennon hit a block in the ’70s, he came out with “Rock and Roll” — a weak covers album that, ironically, had an awesome record cover. He then went on to create some savagely great material. And then, of course, there’s David Bowie’s “Pin Ups,” an all-cover disc that has come to be revered by critics.
As with everything, there’s a good and a bad side to the trend.
Covering a hit song to break onto the charts came back into vogue in the late ’80s. Scads of soon-to-be one-hit wonders dug up old vinyl and set out to strike chart gold, thinking that once they had one big hit, there would be more to follow.
Yeah, right. Has anyone heard from Club Nouveau “Lean On Me” or Times 2 “Cecilia” lately?
It was even worse for other bands, that either picked a song that was cold to begin with or a song that was done so perfectly the first time that it was almost blasphemy to re-do it the Far Corporation’s attempt at “Stairway to Heaven” comes to mind.
On the other hand, some savory covers were served up in that time period. And over the long run, the wheat is quickly separated from the stinkweeds.
Run DMC’s cover of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” was a masterpiece, melding rap and hard rock and helping to pave the way, along with the Beastie Boys, for many of the current hard rock, rap and alternative bands that blend the same elements.
UB40’s slick takes on Neil Diamond’s “Red Red Wine” and Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” were priceless and refreshing, showing that some songs could gain a new life if created from a different musical palette. Unfortunately, the band started the now lame-o trend of remaking a song Caribbean-style, resulting in the nausea-inducing “Baby I Love Your Way” by Big Mountain.
Probably the best covers album was released during the late ’80s — Metallica’s “Garage Days Revisited.” The disc took a group of little-known songs that members of Metallica loved, ripped them to shreds and pieced them back together in the band’s own vision.
Those records, while the minority, raise a provocative question attached to any criticism of originality: While creating something completely original is great, isn’t taking something old and re-creating it in a new way also to be admired?
