Vote For Pedro: Next week is the annual Cover Freak Anniversary Post. If there’s something from the last year you’d like for me to repost let me know. You can leave a comment or shoot me an email via the contact page.
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Last week I had parent-teacher conferences at young Freakette’s school. She’s doing quite well and it’s always nice to hear people tell you good things about your kid. One of her teachers was running late and as I sat in a tiny chair at a tiny desk waiting for her some songs started running through my head…
Better Than Ezra “Conjunction Junction” (From Schoolhouse Rock)
Those of us of a certain age fondly remember Schoolhouse Rock, the series of short educational cartoons that aired between the regular Saturday morning cartoons. They featured catchy songs and cool animation and they taught you math, grammar, science, and civics. I can still recite the preamble of the U.S. Constitution thanks to Schoolhouse Rock. For some reason this song was always my favorite.
The Last Hard Man “School’s Out” (Alice Cooper)
Talk about your musical schizophrenia. We start with some finger poppin’, slide into a pretty straight cover of the chorus, and then morph into a pretty neat rhythmic arrangement.
Julie Doiron “Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard” (Paul Simon)
I never really thought of Paul Simon as a lively fun guy until I heard this song. This fragile acoustic take on it takes away the infectious joy and replaces it with a quiet thoughtfulness that I’m not entirely sure works all that well. Maybe I’d like it better if I didn’t like the original quite so much.
Theo Bleckmann and Fumio Yasuda “Teacher’s Pet” (Doris Day)
Some wonderful cool jazz here. Great vocal harmonies.
Detholz! “Hot For Teacher” (Van Halen)
I went to an all-boys Catholic high school that had very few female teachers. The ones that they did hire tended not to last too long in the sea of frustrated teenage testosterone. Consequently I didn’t have a whole lot of opportunities for the whole “hot for teacher” thing. There was this one time that I wrote about the last time I posted a cover of this song, but I won’t repeat myself here.
The original version of this song was sleazy but still pretty lighthearted. The folks in Deatholz! sound like they’d like to put their teacher in a rubber bondage outfit. Listening to this song makes me want to take a shower.
The little arrow that lets me listen quickly has disappeared!
Great post as usual!
Sue, I think my web host changed something on the back end that broke the audio player plugin. In fact, almost none of the available audio player plugins work now. I did find one that uses the Yahoo audio player, and while I don’t particularly like the way it pops up a player in a floating window I’ll keep that one installed until I find a better alternative.
I was in that English class, heh heh.
I dunno about you Matt, but that was quite possibly the highlight of my entire time in high school. I wonder whatever happened to her.
Didn’t she marry the baseball coach? Since there was a rule against married couples working together at the school she was the one to leave. That’s what I remember anyway, also that the two of them had the same haircut leading up to and throughout their courtship.
Most definitely the highlight of high school, just remembering that event is going to cause me to annoy my wife a little more than usual for a while.
I didn’t even know they dated. I guess I just wasn’t as plugged into the teachers’ love lives as I should have been.
It was when they started looking and dressing alike that it could no longer be denied.