On Friday evening I went to a father-daughter dance put on by the local Girl Scouts. She had never had any interest in going to these events in the past (much to my relief) but this year she was very excited about it. Since I figure it will only be a few years before she doesn’t want to be seen in public with me I made a date night out of it. It was a terribly sweet experience and probably one that I’ll cherish when I’m old and feeble (well, older and more feeble than I am now). None of these songs were played at the dance (the playlist skewed more toward the Macarena and Justin Bieber), but they are all appropriate in their own way.

La Grande Sophie “My Heart Belongs To Daddy” (comp. Cole Porter)
Yeah, I know that it’s bad and wrong to post this song in the context of going on a date with my daughter. Just be glad I’m not posting “Thank Heaven For Little Girls.” But I’m pretty confident that her heart does indeed belong to her daddy. She seemed very excited to step out with me on her arm.

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy “I Wanna Be Like You” (Louis Prima)
Remember the 90s swing revival? Then you remember Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. I always thought of them as crass prefabricated opportunists jumping on a hot trend. But as it turns out they’re still around, recording and playing live shows. So I guess they honestly love this kind of music after all. I’m so glad I was wrong about them.

Ska Daddyz “Hotel California” (The Eagles)
The original version of this song always struck me as a tad pretentious. I remember hearing a recording of the rest of the band deconstructing the song when Don Henley wasn’t around. But I like it much better as a smokin’ ska tune.

Big Daddy “Once In A Lifetime” (Talking Heads)
Big Daddy just slays me. They did such unexpected arrangements of contemporary music that were note-perfect with their stuck-in-the-Fifties conceit. Brilliant stuff.

Action Camp “Gone Daddy Gone” (Violent Femmes)
It’s a competent cover, not revelatory by any means. But it just doesn’t work for me without Gordon Gano’s adenoidal whine. I don’t know if anybody could successfully cover this song.

I had my Fantasy Baseball draft last Friday, which meant that I was spending all my spare time pouring over arcane batting statistics instead of lovingly crafting a theme for this week’s post. So in keeping with Cover Freak tradition, here’s a collection of random songs on the occasion of my baseball draft.

Axton Kincaid “I Wanna Be Adored” (Stone Roses)
Remember when the Stone Roses were going to be the Next Big Thing? Didn’t quite work out for them, but this is not a bad song. Especially when played on a mandolin.

Nouvelle Vague “Human Fly” (The Cramps)
The original was a weird mix of punk and surf music. This is a conventional bossa nova, but it’s equally weird in its own way.

World Famous Blue Jays “Spiders And Snakes” (Crazy Jim Stafford)
Talk about your one-hit wonders. The World Famous Blue Jays (are they really world famous or are they just delusional?) give it the country-fried rock treatment.

Dash Rip Rock “Delta Dawn” (Tanya Tucker)
And here’s a country song that just gets fried in general.

String Swing “Things Have Changed” (Bob Dylan)
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’m not a big fan of Bob Dylan’s songwriting, except for the occasional nugget of brilliance he comes up with. This is one of those songs, reinvented in a completely appropriate swing style.

Singer, actor, Golden Age Vegas hipster. Frank Sinatra is a role model on so many different levels. Let us glory in magnificence.

Baumann “Strangers In The Night” (Frank Sinatra)
Peter Baumann of Tangerine Dream put this song out on a solo album he released in the early 80s. This is the extended mix from the 12″ single they sent to the college radio station I worked at. It’s quite the relic of the early MTV disco-tronic synthesizer school of music. Which is why I love it so.

Sid Vicious “My Way” (Frank Sinatra)
This is perhaps my favorite cover of all time. Sinatra hated this song, he found it pretentious to be singing his own praises. Which makes it all the more amusing to hear this doomstruck punk who was thrust into the limelight by Malcom McLaren snarling about how he did it his way. Sid didn’t know the words and really couldn’t relate to the narrative of a person who became famous, fell from grace, and climbed to the mountaintop of fame a second time. But he brings the snotty attitude and makes this a great song.

DJ Boosta “Fly Me To The Moon” (Frank Sinatra)
Of all the Sinatra covers out there, this song seems to have the most interesting arrangements out there. This version features a nice bouncy beat and some good distorted guitar.

The Transitones “New York New York” (Frank Sinatra)
Another 80s relic, this time from the southern Florida lounge scene. It combines Les Paul style guitar with cheesy Casio keyboards.

Frank Sinatra “Yesterday” (The Beatles)
It just sounds to me like Sinatra is gritting his teeth while he sings this song. I can’t imagine that he was happy to be doing a song by those dirty hippies who pushed him from the top of the entertainment heap.

As I drive to my new job each morning I pass a beauty supply store that sells wigs. They have a large sign over their door that says simply “HUMAN HAIR.” It could be that they sell wigs made from human hair, or they could just be selling hair by the bag for your home crafting and hair-shirt weaving needs. The sign is a little unclear.

It made me think of the George Carlin bit where he talks about how nobody wants your bodily fluids. They’ll take your blood if it’s an emergency, but nobody wants your sweat or earwax. And when I start thinking about stuff like that you know that those thoughts inevitably end up in a Cover Freak post.

The Jennifers “Good Morning Starshine” (from the musical Hair)
I’ve read that American hair is no good for wig making because we use too much shampoo. That apparently strips the hair of its natural waxy coating and makes it too brittle to sew into a wig. You want to source your raw material from places where standards of personal hygiene are more relaxed. So I’m not sure what the deal is with the whole Locks of Love thing. Do they encourage you to stop washing your hair while you grow it out?

A.J. Marshall “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” (Blood Sweat and Tears)
This is from a pretty bizarre album that came out in the late Sixties. It’s covers of what were then contemporary songs, sung by a guy doing an Al Jolson impersonation. I don’t know if it was intended to be ironic or if Al Jolson was the only impersonation this guy could do so he just went for it. The album is kind of hard to listen to all the way through but it’s pretty funny in small bursts.

Fishbone “Freddy’s Dead” (Curtis Mayfield)
There was an article in Wired a month or two ago about the international trade in body parts. Seems there’s a thriving black market in bones, largely because they have a relatively long shelf life. A mortuary in Philadelphia got busted for harvesting bones without permission from the stiffs they were working on. Needless to say, the bones in question were not removed according to organ donation standards for cleanliness.

Rosanne Cash “I Count The Tears” (The Drifters)
This twangy version of the Drifters hit comes from a wonderful tribute to songwriter Doc Pomus that came out in the mid-90s. People don’t want to see you cry and they don’t want your tears unless you’re a unicorn. Unicorn tears are magical and are very popular.

Richard Cheese “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (U2)
That wacky Ricardo Queso, turning U2’s self-righteous anthem about Ireland’s “troubles” into a hot latin number. That’s why he’s a national treasure.

The equinox is today. Now the days start getting longer and hopefully warmer. And that makes my heart burst with song.

Jason Gray “You Can Never Hold Back Spring” (Tom Waits)
Last week Mrs. Freak was complaining about the blustery weather on the same day that the clocks sprang forward. It made this beautiful Tom Waits song start running through my head. Most earworms are annoying, but I didn’t mind it at all this time. This version has some marvelous accordion work.

Sickidz “Springtime For Hitler” (From The Producers)
This is still one of the best intentionally-bad songs ever written, but I think the aggressive rock treatment works better for it than the big Broadway musical style you usually hear.

The Beatlesøns “Sunny Afternoon” (The Kinks)
The original version is on everybody’s list of favorite songs, and that means that it’s been covered quite frequently. Unfortunately most of the covers out there stay pretty true to the Tin Pan Alley vibe of the original. But the Beatlesøns come across with a snappy version that keeps the spirit of the Kinks but still sound quite fresh. This is from their wonderfully-named album The Lost Polka Tunes.

The Findells “Flowers On The Wall” (The Statler Brothers)
I was looking for a cover of Talking Heads “Nothing But Flowers” but couldn’t find one that didn’t sound just like Talking Heads. So here’s this week’s tribute to the flowers that will soon come sprouting up.

Being a big Pulp Fiction fan I always associate this song with Bruce Willis driving away from his apartment after blowing away John Travolta. But the Findells have carved out a place in my brain all their own.

Husker Du “Sunshine Superman” (Donovan)
This ain’t no mellow hippy-dippy kinda song. As much as I love Bob Mould’s solo material, I still miss Husker Du.