Art of the Cover

I have a small obsession with the idea of the "correct" (and by "correct" I really mean "innovative") cover. Covering is an art that demands a combination of sensitivity and originality from its practitioners, requiring them to take a completed art form and reinterpret it so that it uncovers a new facet of the underlying structure in the original without destroying whatever made the song noteworthy in the first place. There are good covers that meet both criteria - Jimi Hendrix's handling of "All Along the Watchtower" might be the most famous, but props also to The Cure for "World Through My Eyes" and there are bad covers that miss on one - A Perfect Circle's version of "When the Levee Breaks" gets points for originality but obliterates the original - or the other - Black Tide's take on "Prowler," like pretty much everything else the band does, is completely derivative - or both - see: the pop punk fad covering 80s material - but rarely does the cover completely excel in both areas. A short list would already include Marilyn Manson doing "Down in the Park," Pig covering "1979," and Arch Enemy ripping through "The Oath," but after watching video above, I'm happy to add the Bare Egil Band joins this elite group for their treatment of "Umbrella." Somehow the band managed to make a fairly cheery song sound like the harbinger of the Apocalypse without destroying the hooks that originally made it a hit. My hat is off to you, sirs.

The Cure at Madison Square Garden

This show was one of "those shows;" an opportunity to see a band live that I'd wanted to see for years. I'd tried once, about ten years ago during the Bloodflowers tour, but never got anywhere because I couldn't find someone to go with me (something that would change as the years passed and I discovered that live music can be such a primal thing for me that I'm not bothered if there's no else around I know to share it with). This show was even a bit of an aberration than other examples of "that show" - Emperor, Metallica, Megadeth (the first time around) - because the ticket practically fell into my lap a couple of weeks before the show. Boy was I glad I went.

Back in high school and the beginning of college, I fancied myself a composer on the make. I wasn't dedicated enough - in part because I couldn't conceive of the level of dedication needed to be really good - to be an outstanding musician, but I had ideas about music and a fascination with technology that I figured would serve me well enough instead. I did some cool things, learned some stuff, and made some music that was different than what other people were doing around me, culminating in 10 minute piece in three or four movements, scored up for computer-based synthesizers, that I wrote when I was a high school senior. It was a pretty sweet accomplishment, and still makes me feel good when I think about it.

Here's why I bring it up: 65 Days of Static, the band that opened up for The Cure, sounded exactly like what I was going for with my music at its peak. Surprisingly (or maybe not, because I don't really have much of an ego about my creations), seeing someone do my thoughts better than I ever could made me really happy, like how a director must feel when watching actors bring their vision to life - if, you know, the director had absolutely no connection to any part of the movie they were watching. Good stuff; made me want to start writing music again.

Then The Cure came on and played over thirty songs in three hours, bringing me back to the exact same time period I'd so recently inhabited while enjoying 65 Days of Static's set, to the times when I wasn't trying to write music and was mowing the lawn or wooing girls or doing homework or driving around. I put their music onto mix tapes (and later mix CDs), declared "The Kiss" one of my favorite pieces of noise ever, reveled in the mix of "Close to Me" with the Dixie horns that I found on Napster, and used "Night Like This" to help assuage a breakup. This band was a formative part of my experience, and here they were, playing all of those songs and a whole lot more right in front of me. It wasn't all perfect, but in a night full of good things that made me feel ten years younger, I have no desire to complain.

Two things that really struck me about this show:

1. Robert Smith may look a bit worse for wear, but I couldn't tell the difference between his voice on Friday night and his voice on, say, Show, which comes from recordings made in 1992. What's even more impressive is that he still sounded just as good at the end of the show. I've gotten use to cutting older metal singers (Geoff Tate, Rob Halford, James LaBrie, even Bruce Dickinson to an extent) some slack when it comes to performing their earlier material, because their vocal cords are too damaged by age and years of the rock 'n roll lifestyle to hit those high notes with the same precision they had when younger, and I expected to do so with Smith, too, so (and even with the caveat of having less demanding material to sing) I was really surprised about how good he sounded.
   
   
2. No keyboards for this show whatsoever. I think I might have heard an organ piped in for "Close to Me," but otherwise Robert and Porl Thompson orchestrated all of the necessary keyboard parts to guitar and cut the rest. It didn't always work properly - "Hot Hot Hot!!!" sounded a little thin without the fake horns, for example - but mostly it was cool to hear the parts transposed to guitar. I'm not sure why the band didn't just hire a touring keyboard player, but maybe that would have hindered putting all of those songs into one set.
   

Set List for The Cure

1. underneath the stars
2. prayers for rain
3. a night like this
4. the end of the world
5. lovesong
6. to wish impossible things
7. pictures of you
8. lullaby
9. fascination street
10. from the edge of the deep green sea
11. the perfect boy
12. hot hot hot!!!
13. the only one
14. wrong number
15. the walk
16. sleep when i'm dead
17. push
18. friday i'm in love
19. inbetween days
20. just like heaven
21. primary
22. shake dog shake
23. charlotte sometimes
24. one hundred years
25. baby rag dog book

Encore 1

1. E1: if only tonight we could sleep...
2. the kiss

Encore 2

1. freakshow
2. close to me
3. why can't i be you?

Encore 3

1. boys don't cry
2. jumping someone else's train
3. grinding halt
4. 10:15 saturday night
5. killing an arab

On Tagging (Not the Spraypaint Kind)

When I'm not going to concerts (which, in the scheme of a year, isn't that often), I'm probably listening to music in some other form. I'm the anal retentive music geek who not only alphabetizes his CDs by artist and then organizes within the artist by release year (to the endless fascination of my wife, who can't figure out a.) why the CDs are that important to me and b.) why I need to keep them in such a and rather difficult detailed order), but also does his damnedest to keep his large mp3 collection organized; not just including title and artist information, but also release year, genre, album name and album art. Henry Rollins, with his rants about music organization, is my hero.

To be honest, I blame my current fixation on mp3 tagging on one thing: iTunes. Back in the day (by which I mean up until about 2 years ago), I was a Winamp user. I did some tag editing, but as Winamp didn't correct your song information when you added music to the player, I lived a fairly ignorant and blissful existence. And then I downloaded iTunes.

All of the sudden there were all kinds of new tags to fill and even worse, the program had filled most of them for me! Now aware to the vast possibilities of arranging all of this new information, I found myself editing tags like a fiend, mining the CDDB for missing release years (which are the devil in the details for iTunes to download, for some reason) and then trying to decide the proper genre. Was Van Halen rock or metal or both? Did it depend on the album or even the song? Was I going to get that granular? Would I buy into the hype of post-punk and label The Cure as "Alternative & Punk"? Would I invent new tags of my own?

I settled for a happy medium that allows me to organize without going crazy - my obsessive compulsive nature settles for strong organization without getting to Monk-like levels - and went for the default tags, making an overarching decision about a band's genre even if they've defied classification throughout their career. Van Halen became metal (yes, even the Van Hagar material), The Cure became Alternative & Punk and I was happy.

In the end, I found there was so much music and so little time to absorb it all that I needed a new listening system. Most people would have gone for shuffle, but thanks to the work I put into my tags, I had another, much geekier option: I started listening to things chronologically. I'll leave you to contemplate the full depths of that one.