Cover Me: The Stories Behind the Greatest Cover Songs (Sterling), by Ray Padgett
Cover bands get no respect—and yet, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones began as cover bands and some of popular music’s greatest moments have involved artists interpreting someone else’s song.
As Ray Padgett points out in Cover Me, before the 1960s, there was no expectation that “singers would record songs they had written themselves.” The term “cover” originated in a 1949 Billboard article, which referred to the common record label con-job of releasing copycat versions of rising hits from competing labels. Many times, covers involved white acts copying black performers at a time when African-American music was often treated as separate but unequal.
Padgett’s primary focus is on creative interpretations, from Elvis’ rendition of Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” through Johnny Cash’s reconstruction of Nine Inch Nail’s “Hurt.” Among the most radical reinventions cited in Cover Me is Patti Smith’s “Gloria,” which used Them’s original as a launch pad into a confrontational version that included pieces of her own poetry and a new chord structure. In her hands, “Gloria” became almost entirely a different song.
Led Zeppelin: All the Albums, All the Songs (Voyageur Press), by Martin Popoff
Looking at the pictures is part of the fun—those early concert posters, the picture sleeves, the concert photography, a 1966 shot of John Paul Jones in suit and tie wielding his bass. But the point, as the title indicates, is a track-by-track, album-by-album description of Led Zeppelin’s songs. Especially interesting are insights into how the band worked in the recording studio. On “No Quarter,” the “underwater keyboard sound” resulted from Jones processing an electric piano through a synthesizer; the song was also slowed artificially through a “vari-speed pitch control,” the ancestor of Auto-Tune. Backwards echo was applied to Robert Plant’s harmonica and Jimmy Page’s Les Paul to enhance the doomy vibe of “When the Levee Breaks.” Odd time signatures were all over their records, anchored by the heavy beat of John Bonham.
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Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by David Yaffe
Joni Mitchell painted with words—and odd open tunings that somehow evoked the Canadian prairie where her childhood unfolded. As she puts it, her music has “ a lot of space between individual sounds.” An essayist whose resume includes the New York Times and Slate, David Yaffe has composed an abnormally well-written musician biography—descriptive, culturally aware and highly supportive of his subject, whom he interviewed at length. Reckless Daughter charts the course Mitchell took from the ‘60s folk-blues revival into a distinctive body of work that hovered beyond the reach of most singer-songwriters. Yet, she rode a river of restlessness, abandoning the approach that made her an album rock staple and even gained her a Top-40 hit for the idiosyncratic jazz-based Hejira and albums that followed. Yaffe traces every turn.
Spinal Tap: The Big Black Book (Backbeat Books), by Wallace Fairfax
The Spinal Tap movie (1984) set the pace for mockumentaries to come, and at the time of its release, no one guessed that the actors would cobble together a real version of the band and set out on tour—or that the joke would still be funny 35 years or that a mock band bio, lavish with photos (and “Priceless Facsimile Memorabilia”) could find an audience. The Big Black Book is chockablock with quotes from Nigel Tufnel and the gang and recounts their archetypal Britrock history: beginning in the wake of the British Invasion and tripping into psychedelia before settling on a bloatedly pretentious iteration of “sweaty heavy metal that made white teenage boys extremely happy.” Whether or not the rock critic author, Wallace Fairfax, is real, he performs a fine job of gently poking fun at both genres—heavy metal and rock criticism.
