Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011)

Gil Scott-Heron, Spoken-Word Musician, Dies at 62

Covering the Beatles: Please Please Me (part 4)

Track eleven: "Do You Want to Know a Secret?"

Lennon was inspired by this song from Snow White which his mother sang to him as a child:



Here's an instrumental cover by Count Basie. Yes, that Count Basie. Apparently everybody has done a Beatles cover album.



Track twelve: "A Taste of Honey"

"A Taste of Honey" always seemed out of place in The Beatles' oeuvre, a bit of saccharine oldies bombast amongst the rocking 60s tunes. It's not that simple, of course, as The Beatles weren't simply influenced just by proto-rock stuff, but this tune does stick out. Case in point: the most famous version of this song isn't by the Fab Four, but an instrumental two years later by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. This is a hysterical parody of the song by Allan Sherman of "Camp Grenada" fame.



Track thirteen: "There's a Place"

This project is taking me in some odd places, but that's the magic of serendipity. One place is the blog Swedesplease, dedicated to Swedish indie music. (Yes, there's a blog about everything now.) There I found a mesmerizing cover by Ossian Ekenger of Gothenberg, about whom I otherwise know nothing, and the blog isn't particular forthcoming, other than this picture which looks like it belongs on a 1920s passport.

Covering the Beatles: Please Please Me (part 3)

Track seven: "Please Please Me"

The recording of this song was a turning point for The Beatles. George Martin was set to have them do another cover tune as their next single, but they turned up with an up tempo, rollicking version of this song, so Martin released this instead and it became their first #1 hit. So by way of contrast, here's a languid indie rock cover by Will Phalen.



Track eight: "Love Me Do"

Here's a bluesy cover by Dallas Hodge.

Track nine: "P.S. I Love You"

It was hard to find a cover of this song I liked. The problem is that this Paul McCartney tune shares its name with a great 1934 Johnny Mercer tune, which is why The Beatles' song was relegated to a B-side. Everyone has covered the Mercer tune: Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Mel Torme... But I couldn't find many Beatles covers and even resorted to listening to shitty covers by a bad Japanese girl group and an weird Slovakian singer. I finally found this one by Scottish singer Barbara Dickson from her 2006 Beatles cover album Nothing's Gonna Change My World. Dickson has been covering The Beatles for decades: she performed their music in the 1974 Willy Russell musical John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert. George Harrison loathed it:

I saw it up until the intermission and then — I saw it with my friend Derek Taylor, who's a writer who used to work for Warner Bros. and Apple — I said to him we either have to leave now or I'm gonna jump on that stage and throttle those people. It was awful stuff. All these idiots acting out people — it's like I say in "The Devil's Radio," talking about what they don't know. It's like a rumor. It's like those Beatles cartoons, and it was so inaccurate it was nauseating, having been one.

When Harrison left, he took with him permission to use his song "Here Comes the Sun", which the show replaced with "Good Day Sunshine".

Find more Barbara Dickson albums at Myspace Music

Track ten: "Baby It's You"

A tune by Burt Bacharach and friends, it was originally released as a single by The Shirelles and became one of two Shirelles covers on Please Please Me. It reached number 5 when later covered by white blues rock band Smith in 1969. This cover is by Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe.

Covering the Beatles: Please Please Me (part 2)

Track four: "Chains"

This song was originally released in 1962 as a single for The Cookies, the backup band for Little Eva of "Locomotion" fame. Can't find a version of this song that really works for me, even the one by The Beatles. Maybe no one has done it justice, or maybe it's just a slight song. Here's a version by The Everly Brothers. The sounds of actual chains are a bit much.



Track five: "Boys"

This was originally released by The Shirelles as the B-side of "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", the first #1 hit for a girl group. Paul McCartney recalls covering the song live:

Any one of us could hold the audience. Ringo would do "Boys", which was a fan favourite with the crowd. And it was great — though if you think about it, here's us doing a song and it was really a girls' song. "I talk about boys now!" Or it was a gay song. But we never even listened. It's just a great song. I think that's one of the things about youth — you just don't give a shit. I love the innocence of those days.

Track six: "Ask Me Why"

And here's some random guy on the internet with a ukulele. Is it me, or does he look like Robert Patrick?

Covering the Beatles: Please Please Me

Track one: "I Saw Her Standing There"

In 1964, Motown guru Berry Gordy put together an album called A Bit of Liverpool featuring The Supremes covering British Invasion tunes. Critically regarded as a disappointment, it featured five Lennon/McCartney tunes and even two Motown songs covered by The Beatles. This Beatles cover, featuring Florence Ballard on lead vocals, was left on the cutting room floor, however, until a 2008 compilation album.



On tour in January 1963, The Beatles wrote this song for a planned country album by tour headliner Helen Shapiro called Helen In Nashville, but it was rejected. Also on the tour was singer Kenny Lynch, who recorded his own version, the first ever cover of a Beatles song. The Beatles, needing material for their debut alubm, recorded it themselves. Lynch's version was issued as a single the same day that Please Please Me was released, March 22, 1963.



Track three: "Anna (Go to Him)"

Soul singer Arthur Alexander deserves to be a lot less obscure than he is, and after you hear this you may agree. Penned and released by Alexander in late 1962, the song became a favorite of John Lennon's and The Beatles regularly covered it in their early shows.

Milton Babbitt (1916-2011)

Captain Beefheart (1941-2010)

Trout Mask Replica is the most fucked up, most avant garde, most indescribable album to ever enter the rock and roll canon. I've been listening to it for years and I still have yet to figure out what the hell it is. The track that sticks with me the most, "Orange Claw Hammer", can be heard above. It comes up so often on shuffle that I think it's haunting me.

Alternatively dissed (Christgau: "Very great played at high volume when you're feeling shitty, because you'll never feel as shitty as this record") and praised to the skies by critics, I think John Peel said it best: "If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work." I think the dissonance and delusion and disregard for the audience are things that maybe you can only latch onto if you are an artist or have experience with that sort of postmodern frenzy. This isn't to say that you can't think it sucks. After a decade or so of listening to it, I haven't figured out whether or not it's any good myself. But it's compelling and I keep coming back to it, so that's something.

Captain Beefheart is the nom de art of Don Glen Vliet, a child prodigy at sculpture who soon turned to painting and the blues. He was a high school friend of Frank Zappa, and makes Zappa look square, so that should give you an idea of what we're dealing with here. What I've heard from earlier albums from His Magic Band was more blues-oriented and traditional compared to what they recorded in 1968. He had accomplished musicians play unfamiliar instruments in unfamiliar ways and created melodic and rhythmic patters almost randomly but assembled the parts in deliberate ways that were performed exactly. The end result was a tension between skill and naivete and formal construction and improvisation. Plenty of people dismiss this potent stew as the work of tripping hippies banging away at instruments, but then they level that sort of tired accusation at anything more complex and unfamiliar than Thomas Kincaid. Think whatever you want, as long as you think about it. Let me know when you figure it out.