[Punkrockmonday #10] Doog - Famous Blue Raincoat (orig. Leonard Cohen); sElf - Back in Black (orig. AC/DC); Johnny Cash- Down There By the Train (orig. Tom Waits)

A few years ago my friend and sometimes collaborator Mark Silcox introduced me to a strange and wonderful past-time. Take a song and/or performer you love and type their name and the word "cover" into youtube, and then dig through every performance you can find. If you do this with enough songs in the course of an evening you'll end up finding some people of whom you've never heard creating moments so perfect that the universe seems to be evolving just the way it should.

Consider these guys with questionable hairstyles noodling around in somebody's basement.

If another musician described to me the changes they make to Cohen's original performance I would be 100% convinced that it would be terrible! The singer/guitarist isn't arpeggiating as Cohen does. He's not even playing chords for the most part, just banging out the tonic note on his plugged in acoustic. And he starts singing the same notes as Cohen but then inexplicably shoots up a whole octave, followed by the bass player doing these weird arpeggiations apropos nothing during the chorus. The drummer just beats out monotonous triplets along with the guitarist and the keyboardist just hangs onto the chords the guitarist should be playing. From this description you'd think it would be a butchery of Cohen's beautiful song. Cue the Tori Amos version. But, wait. These anonymous dudes in the basement not only create something new and beautiful out of the song, but what they create manages to be in a new way still utterly fitting for Cohen's perverse tale of despair and forgiveness

And here's another exercise in the impossible. Matt Mahafrey is just banging on a drum and playing one note at a time on his keyboard. He can't even remember the words! But again he's creating magic, channelling something perfect and beautiful.

I should probably explain here that when I was a young child in Alabama churches I was taught several times at youth group meetings that this song was a record of how AC/DC made a deal with the devil so that Brian Johnson could be demonically possessed by the soul of the recently deceased Bon Scott. Lots of kids in the United States are taught things like this and worse. I don't know how many of them become philosophy professors. . .

But I do have to wonder how much of AC/'DC's rabid fan base get a little extra pleasure from the band now as I do because listening to them later became synonymous with rejecting that kind of idiocy? In any case, the song is simply another manifestation of the rock and roll trope of getting back up after being knocked around. Not the forgiveness that Cohen is trying capture, but something just as redeeming I think, because there's no anger in it, just joy at the fact that you're back on your feet.

Tom Waits says that when you play someone else's song it's like trying on a new suit of clothes, then doing your own tailoring to make it fit you. And then you find you can move in all sorts of cool new ways. And a great cover version always has to bring something new out of the song that you might not have noticed from the original version. If I remember correctly, Waits' sentiment was in reference to how wonderful it was to hear Johnny Cash play one of his songs, this one again about redemption. If you are in the right frame of mind, when he gets to the following lines:

There's no eye for an eye
There's no tooth for a tooth
I saw Judas Iscariot
Carrying John Wilkes Booth

you'll tear up a little bit. It's just as noble a sentiment as that echoed by the brothers Young I think.

1. [Punkrockmonday #1] The White Stripes - Jack the Ripper (orig. Screaming Lord Sutch), Black Math, and the Big Three Killed My Baby]
2. [Punkrockmonday #2] Roy Cook - Saint Paul Cathedral, Minneapolis Capitol Building, Aayla Secura Mosaic, and Firefly Class Spaceship
3. [Punkrockmonday #3] El Général- Rais Le Bled (President, Your Country)
4. [Punkrockmonday #4] Charlie Patton -High Water Everywhere, Part 2
5. [Punkrockmonday #5] Henry Rollins- What Am I Doing Here; Willie Nelson- Me and Paul; Rainbow Connection (orig. Kermit the Frog)
6. [Punkrockmonday #6] Philip Larkin - Church Going
7. [Punkrockmonday #7] David Bowie - Time
8. [Punkrockmonday #8] P.J. Harvey - When Under Ether; White Chalk; Broken Harp
9. [Punkrockmonday #9] Allison Kraus and Robert Plant - When the Levee Breaks (orig. Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie)