Cover story

There is a train at version city

It’s Friday and, like I said last week this time, couldn’t we all stand to take it easy, and by “we all” I mean me. I could — indeed, I will — remind you I had a big operation less than three weeks ago and, though I am not yet at full strength according to this here sheet the doctors gave me, I have for two weeks been coming up to scratch every day like the old war horse I am, pumping out copy in between paroxysms and fistsful of pills.

Well. It hasn’t been that bad. The doctors took out my Jackson-Pratt drain the other day. It had been poked through my abdominal wall, pushed up into my peritoneal cavity, and tied in place with a little tiny piece of string for two weeks, draining purple runoff from my maimed pancreas. And that’s pretty much all there is to it; it’s disturbingly simple, like it was something they jerry-rigged on the battlefield and after the war they said, eh, why fiddle with it. Its dispatch was unceremonious. The doc cut the string and, not as slowly as you would imagine, yanked out about a foot of plastic tubing. I half expected a slide whistle and colored scarves at the end.

The post-splenectomy vaccinations were a bitch — and they didn’t even warn me! They gave me a paper guide that told me about minor side effects like “poor appetite” and “crying, irritability, or fussiness” (ha, I thought, business as usual!) but late in the evening I suffered complete lassitude, a fever, and the conviction that here was the end at last.

I got better and am getting stronger and taking fewer naps. And I try to be neither too much of a wuss nor too much of a hero about it. I’m right on that borderline between recovery and shirking. I feel fully within my rights, if someone stresses me, to draw my lap blanket up around my shoulders and in a weak voice bid them leave me to my tremors.

But look, this is good for all of us — my stuff is intellectually challenging (put it to the old Flesch-Kincaid test sometime – it’ll make you feel good about your reading skills!), and all work and no play makes Jack a dull Jill or vice versa. So how about we just do one of those fun things today? And in fact let’s make it even easier than usual:

What’s your favorite cover version of a song? And why?

Now, I had a feeling I’d done this before, so I looked and found that I did a modest version at alicublog nine years ago. And, as I did then, I’m going to nominate the Residents’ “Viva Las Vegas.” But this time, since volume and value for money is part of the REBID pitch, I’ll explain more thoroughly.

I mentioned more recently that a good cover is one that makes you hear the original differently. This means that just hitting the notes ain’t gonna do it. In fact one of the great things about this game is, covers can be cutters — you can put a new singer in there and, even if the arrangement isn’t too different, if he or she has something unique to bring to the song you’ll hear the song differently. That’s what I get from Shawn Colvin’s “Baker Street,” for example, or Ray Charles singing “Eleanor Rigby.” In a different way, the eerie small-club version of D. Boon singing John Fogerty’s “Don’t Look Now” in his weak, earnest voice does it for me too.

But I’m really moved when the artist changes the whole approach to the song and makes it entirely new to me. By this I don’t mean silly mockeries like oompah and hardcore versions that basically make fun of the song. Don’t get me wrong, I do like those. And I’m a big fan of the Residents, who do a lot of covers that are mainly mean jokes on popular music, like on the infamous Third Reich ‘n’ Roll album: I still laugh like a naughty schoolboy at their exhilaratingly stoopid version of “Yummy Yummy Yummy.”

But they really pulled something special out of that dumb Elvis movie theme. It’s weird — though the Residents are obviously an “intellectual” outfit, they never struck me a particularly profound; when they go for deep meaning as they did in God in Three Persons, I usually find it awkward and unconvincing. That GiTP uses Blake Shelton’s inflexible movie cowboy voice, which always seems like at least half a put-on, to carry the whole thing just makes it worse.

But Shelton’s fake cowboy voice is just right for “Viva Las Vegas.” Instead of the bouncy enthusiasm of the original, the music is slow and celestial: synth twinkling like stars, bass throbbing like an underground current, ceremonial bongos. It feels not like Vegas but the surrounding desert. The cowboy is talking about getting to the tables and having his big splurge, but he’s a little slow and tentative, as if cowed by the immensity of the scene. You sense he’s done this before, many, many, times, countless times, and that it’s all a ritual where even the pretense of excitement is part of the liturgy. In fact I think he’s not entirely in his right mind anymore. Though the stinging guitar prods him into something like excitement sometimes — “There’s blackjack poker an’ a roulette wheel!” — he seems to be in a somnolent trance, marching heavy-legged through the desert sand.

This is so mesmerizing and weird that when the Residents cheat and change some lyrics on the bridge, it’s not an offense against the song, but the sort of revelation that theater and movie directors insist they’re going for when they remake old properties but seldom achieve. One can imagine the old cowboy resting on his haunches, sifting sand between his fingers without looking at it as the endless universe stares down on him, murmuring to himself:

Viva Las Vegas turns day into night

And the night turns right into the place —

The place where life begins.

Nothing then for four measures but the stars and the pulse. Gets me every time.

What about you?