Don’t Forget To Tip Your Waitress: I hate listening to public radio or watching public television during Pledge Week. They constantly interrupt their programming so some whiny poindexter can beg for cash. And it seems like every other week is Pledge Week. That’s why I usually let the PayPal donation button at the top of the right hand column just squat there quietly. But once a year I call your attention to it, dear readers.

Cover Freak is my hobby, and as hobbies go it’s not very time consuming or expensive. But I do have to pay for somebody to host the blog and I have to pay for the music I present for your dining and dancing pleasure. That’s why I’m asking everybody to use that screaming orange button to make a donation to Cover Freak. If all my readers would donate $2 it would be a big deal to me. Two dollars is less than the cost of a movie or a pack of cigarettes, and if you keep coming back here I hope that you’re getting at least two dollars worth of entertainment. But I’d appreciate any amount of cash you can spare. Last year I got contributions from American readers for the first time and I hope that trend continues this year. Thanks for your support. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming.

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When I started Cover Freak four years ago I had no idea that I’d be doing it this long. I just sort of assumed that I’d get discouraged by widespread indifference, or maybe I’d get too busy to keep up with it, or perhaps I’d run out of covers. And yet here we are.

I’ve had a great time with this little blog and the interaction with my readers has been both informative and heartwarming. Thanks to everybody who reads the blog and especially those folks who take the time to leave comments and/or send me email. My plan right now is to keep doing this as long as somebody out there’s interested. And what have I been doing for the last year? Glad you asked. Here’s a sample of some of the best stuff. See you next week.

Monica Green “25 Or 6 To 4” (Chicago)
This was Chicago’s first Top Five hit, and deservedly so. I don’t think this reggae version ever charted, but it certainly deserved to.

The Dollyrots “Brand New Key” (Melanie)
It starts out as a bouncy guitar-driven update of the original, but then it finds another gear and really rawks.

Celtika “Creep” (Radiohead)
Finally, a version of this song that you can bang your head to.

Devil In A Woodpile “The Most Beautiful Girl” (Charlie Rich)
I don’t know of many other Country and Western weepers recast as a blues stomp. That’s too damn bad because this is a really wonderful cover.

Lumpy “Red Rubber Ball” (The Cyrcle)
The Diodes did a punk version of this song just to piss off Paul Simon, but I much prefer this punch-drunk waltz.

Delopdere Big Gang “The Final Countdown” (Europe)
80s hair metal rewired as Turkish Gypsy disco. Absolutely brilliant.

Toadsuck Symphony “Stop In The Name Of Love” (The Supremes)
A well-written song can stand up to all kinds of reinventions. This song sounds like it always was a country/bluegrass tune.

Jim White “King Of The Road” (Roger Miller)
This is one of the most creative arrangements I’ve ever heard. It’s so far removed from the original that it’s hard to find any trace of Roger Miller’s DNA.

Jerry Garcia and David Grisman “The Thrill Is Gone” (B.B. King)
Despite my distaste for the Grateful Dead I have to admit a fondness for the album Uncle Jerry did with David Grisman. The songs are spacious and give Mr. Grisman room to strut his stuff without turning into endless Deadhead twiddling.

Das Palast Orchester “Sex Bomb” (Tom Jones)
Take a Tom Jones song, replace TJ’s manly musky swagger with Weimar cabaret sleaze, and this is what you get.

Vote For Pedro: Don’t forget, next week will be the hotly-anticipated birthday/anniversary post. There’s still time to let me know what songs from the past year you’d like reposted. Just leave a comment or click on the Contact tab at the top of the page.

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My wife and daughter are out of town this weekend. Not having my ladies around the house has gotten me thinking about the women in my life, past and present. So I’m taking that self-destructive urge to drunk-dial old girlfriends at 4 a.m. and redirecting it into something more productive.

Jacqui Naylor “Lola” (The Kinks)
I really like Jacqui Naylor. She’s always good for a swinging jazz tune. There’s some great Hammond organ and nice percussion work here along with her wonderful voice.

One could make the argument that this song isn’t really about a woman since it’s about picking up a transvestite in a bar. I would argue that Lola thinks of herself as a woman, at least while she’s at the bar.

Della Reese “Whatever Lola Wants” (From Damn Yankees)
This is a pretty sexy song to start with, but Della’s absolutely smokin’ on this cha-cha. I’ve never dated a Lola, so posting two songs about women with that name is just a coincidence. Honest.

Rachel Stamp “Carmelita” (Warren Zevon)
I’ve never been to Los Angeles but if I ever do get there the first place I’ll go is the Pioneer Chicken Stand on Alvarado Street. I won’t try to score any heroin, I’ll just get some chicken and people watch.

I absolutely adore this song, I’ve got eight different versions of it and I think I’ve posted them all. It’s the greatest song ever written about being strung out on heroin and it’s a touching love song to boot.

Queen Adreena “Pretty Polly” (Traditional)
You knew that I couldn’t post a collection of songs about women without at least one murder ballad. It’s things like this that make my wife nervous. Not really, my love of murder ballads just makes her roll her eyes.

This version starts off slow and dreamy but all hell breaks loose when she gets to the part where Polly gets murdered.

Frank Zappa “Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up” (Jeff Simmons)
This is one of those songs that may or may not really be a cover. Jeff Simmons was in the Mothers in the early 70s and also has released a few solo albums. In 1969 he cowrote this song with FZ (one of the very few times that FZ cowrote a song with anybody) for his album of the same name. FZ produced the album and played lead guitar on “Lucille.” Then in 1979 FZ released this version on the Joe’s Garage album with a totally different arrangement. Can you cover a song that you wrote and played on if somebody else released it first? Discuss.

If there ever was a song that was the soundtrack of a drunk-dailing episode, this is it.

Another Year Come And Gone: In two weeks I’ll be celebrating Cover Freak’s fourth anniversary. As usual I’ll be featuring a special Best Of 2009-10 edition. Let me know if there are any songs that I’ve posted in the last year (October 2009-September 2010) that you’d like me to repost. You can just leave a comment at the bottom of this post or use the contact form to drop me a line.

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One of the things I look forward to around Cover Freak HQ are the emails I get from bands, record labels, and publicists letting me know about new covers from independent artists. I try to weave those songs into my normal posts but inevitably they pile up faster than I can shoehorn them into various themes. So rather than let these songs languish and deny these talented individuals the well-deserved fame that only Cover Freak can provide, I’m posting a bunch of them this week. If you like their music be sure to follow the links and give them money.

Model M “Diamonds And Rust” (Joan Baez)
I was introduced to this song by the Judas Priest cover. It was years before I found out that they didn’t write it. Model M does a version that falls somewhere between the mournful folk of the original and the aggressive anger of Judas Priest. I love how the singer rolls every mean-spirited word around in his mouth like fine wine before delivering it. He sounds strikingly like the guy from Crash Test Dummies.

Kay Pettigrew “The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air” (DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince)
I was reading an article recently that was complaining that modern televisions shows don’t have good theme songs. This one’s a throwback to the days of Gilligan’s Island, when the theme song set up the concept for the whole series. And the comic rap song made perfect sense in this case because Will Smith was just a novelty rapper at the time. My, how times have changed.

Kay Pettigrew is a Canadian singer who turns this epic saga into a nice coffee house number. It reminds me of Nina Gordon’s cover of “Straight Out Of Compton,” and that’s a good thing.

Ernie Halter “Black Coffee In Bed” (Squeeze)
I always thought that the music of the original version was way too cheerful for the melancholy of the lyrics. Fortunately Ernie Halter has come along with a wistful acoustic version that perfectly captures the spirit of the lyrics.

Maria McAteer “Baby” (Justin Bieber)
Prefabricated pop stars often have talented songwriters working for them. Sometimes it’s hard to realize that what with the bad haircuts, hackneyed musical arrangements and auto-tuned vocals. Maria McAteer‘s piano ballad really focuses on the heartbreak in this song.

Elmorell “Tell The World About You” (Ray Charles)
Elmorell is an acoustic duo out of Boston. I love the singer’s soulful voice, and it’s put to good use on this semi-obscure song from Brother Ray.

In the 80s Elektra Records came to the brilliant realization that they could make a lot of money off their back catalog by making their older artists seem trendy. And so cocaine and hookers were passed out to radio programmers and music journalists, resulting in the famous Rolling Stone cover with the picture of Jim Morrison and the caption “He’s Hot, He’s Sexy, And He’s Dead.”

I’ve always found the Doors to be interesting musically but I’ve always thought that far too much was made out of Morrison, to the detriment of the band. His voice was good, at least in the band’s early days, but Morrison’s lyrics never appealed to me. He became such a spectacle that the music became secondary. And I’m not really qualified to pass judgement on his hotness.

Nevertheless the music of the Doors has spawned quite a collection of covers. Here are a few.

The Lettermen “Hello, I Love You/Touch Me” (The Doors)
It’s cool, it’s lounge-y, it’s completely nonthreatening. It’s the Lettermen at their best.

Stevie Wonder “Light My Fire” (The Doors)
Judging by my iTunes library this is by far the most-covered Doors song. I’ve got nine different versions of it. Parts of this one sound almost like an Isaac Hayes song, what with all the strings and horns. But then there’s the harmonica solo that makes it all Stevie.

Johnny Hollow “People Are Strange” (The Doors)
This song does a great job of capturing the alienation in the lyrics. The strings are alternately low and menacing and high and screechy, and the vocals swirl.

McMinnville High School Stage Band “Soul Kitchen” (The Doors)
This is, without a doubt, the most inevitable high school marching band song ever written.

The Doors “Crawling King Snake” (John Lee Hooker)
The Doors could be a very good blues band when they put their minds to it. The musicians fall into a hypnotic groove and Morrison sounds both sleazy and macho without making himself the focus of the song. This is probably my favorite song that the Doors ever recorded.