Heavy snow. Cold temperatures. Let’s go to Vegas, baby!

Eldissa “Staying Alive” (Bee Gees)
Eldissa specializes in lounge versions of disco hits. I never realized how this song could swing without the falsetto vocals.

Nouvelle Vague “Too Drunk To Fuck” (Dead Kennedys)
Not to be outdone, Nouvelle Vague is a band that does bossa nova covers of punk and new wave hits. Apparently “nouvelle vague” means “new wave” in French.

Steve and Eydie “Black Hole Sun” (Soundgarden)
Yes, it’s Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. From the Merv Griffin Show.

I was teaching a computer class in Evanston one fine day. While Evanston has many things to recommend it, there is no good way to get from there to my home. So I was stuck there at rush hour after the class was over. There was an indie record store across the street from where I was teaching so I strolled in to kill some time while traffic died down and picked up the Lounge-A-Palooza CD.

I don’t know if it’s still in print, but check it out if you get the chance. It’s almost entirely lounge covers of rock songs, with performances by Ben Folds, Pizzicato Five, and P.J. Harvey.

Pat Boone “Paradise City” (Guns N’ Roses)
In a desperate attempt to be hip, Pat Boone put out a CD of hard rock and heavy metal covers called “In A Metal Mood.” He even had Dweezil Zappa help out on a couple of tracks.

The liner notes sound sincere as he talks about what quality songs these are. I remember him appearing on TV at the time shirtless wearing a leather vest. He looked like a creepy sugar daddy hanging out in the back of a gay bar.

Allegedly Slash’s original lyric was about going to Paradise City “where the girls are fat and they got big titties.” I would pay large sums of money to hear Pat Boone sing that.

Ragnar Bjarnason “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Nirvana)
There are lots of covers of “Teen Spirit.” Probably too many. There are almost as many covers of this as there are of “Stairway to Heaven” or all of the Beatles catalog. The Tori Amos version just makes me want to slap her.

I can understand why everybody wants to cover it, though. The Nevermind CD and especially “Teen Spirit” changed everything, at least for a couple of years. Before too long we’ll be inundated with covers of songs from Green Day’s American Idiot CD for the same reason.

“Teen Spirit” really seems to appeal to lounge artists, probably because they think doing a grunge song makes them hip, cool, and ironic. I picked this song because I like the horn arrangement.

Pastel Vespa “Living On A Prayer” (Bon Jovi)
Pastel Vespa is a character created by an Australian woman while she was working as an entertainer on an cruise ship. She’s the love child of a Brazilian woman and a scion of the Italian scooter-making clan. The only English word her mother knew was “pastel,” so she named her daughter that so she would have a happy, pretty life.

How’s that for a back story, Chris Gaines?