The title of this week’s post comes from one of the more amusing Facebook comments I’ve seen in awhile. I’m not really sure what it means. It didn’t inspire me to try punching any supreme beings but it did inspire me to assemble songs relating to mountains.

Jim Of Seattle “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” (comp. Rodgers and Hammerstein)
This guy sounds like he’s practicing very hard in his bedroom to be a lounge singer when he grows up.

The Beat Farmers “Big Rock Candy Mountain” (Burl Ives)
I’ve always loved Country Dick Montana’s big bass voice. It speaks to some primal part of my soul. He sounds like somebody who would die with his boots on, which is exactly what Country Dick did. He played a show, walked off the stage, and promptly dropped dead from a heart attack. While wearing his cowboy boots. Here he sings the original hobo lyrics that Burl Ives sanitized for our children’s protection.

The Mountain Goats “The Sign” (Ace Of Base)
This stupid pop song is a guilty pleasure for many people. The Mountain Goats deliver a chipper acoustic version that just makes you want to smile. I also have a live version of them singing this song, complete with a story about driving through the Midwest listening to it over and over. It’s a nice story but I decided to go with the version that stands on its own.

Fifth Flight “Sugar Mountain” (Neil Young)
The tempo is pretty similar to the original but it’s got big rolling waves of Hammond organ.

Mountain “Theme For An Imaginary Western” (Jack Bruce)
Lots of people think that the guys in Mountain wrote this song, but it’s actually from Jack Bruce’s first solo album. It’s a song that I dearly love and in this version Lesley West does a great job of playing the organ parts from the original version on his guitar.

Last summer my niece and her boyfriend came over from New Zealand to visit us. In their honor I posted a bunch of Kiwi covers. They’re back again this week but as it happens we also have a couple of Germans staying with us. Since I’ve already done the Kiwi thing, this time around I’m posting songs to make our German visitors feel a little more at home. German translation is provided by Google Translate, so don’t blame me if it doesn’t make sense.

Im letzten Sommer meine Nichte und ihr Freund kam aus Neuseeland, um uns zu besuchen. In ihrer Ehre ich einen Haufen von Kiwi deckt. Sie sind wieder zurück in dieser Woche, aber wie es geschieht, haben wir auch ein paar der Deutschen bleibt bei uns. Da habe ich bereits getan, was die Kiwi, dieses Mal bin ich Entsendung Songs, um unsere deutschen Besucher fühlen sich ein wenig mehr zu Hause. Deutsch Übersetzung von Google Translate, also nicht Schuld, wenn es mir nicht sinnvoll.

Karel Gott “Geisterreiter (Ghost Riders in the Sky)” (Vaughn Monroe)
Karel Gott is the German Tom Jones. He’s got the big voice, the over-the-top arrangements, and the ability to totally commit to whatever song he’s singing. I always imagine the recording engineer coming out to hose him down after he finishes a take.

Karel Gott ist der deutsche Tom Jones. Er hat die große Stimme, die Over-the-Top-Regelung, und die Fähigkeit, sich verpflichten, völlig unabhängig von Lied er singt. Ich habe immer vorstellen, dass die Aufnahme Ingenieur aus Schlauch auf ihn ein, nachdem er Ende nehmen.

Echo-Echo “Jeder Tag mit dir (Every Breath You Take)” (The Police)
Last week I featured a syncopated synthesizer-heavy version of this song. This time around we have an a capella performance from a German boy band. Even though I don’t speak German the lyrics still sound creepy to me.

Letzte Woche habe ich über ein Synthesizer-synkopierte schwere Ausführung dieses Lied. Dieses Mal haben wir eine A-cappella-Leistung aus einer deutschen Boy-Band. Auch wenn ich nicht Deutsch sprechen die Texte nach wie vor solide gruselig für mich.

Dominic Muldowney & Sting “The Ballad of Mac The Knife” (comp. Kurt Weill)
The first time I heard this song was when PBS started airing episodes of The Ernie Kovacs Show in the early 80s. There was an ongoing bit that involved this song in the original German. Years later I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing it and dug the words. There are lots of versions of this song, most of them giving it the reverential jazz standard treatment. This one has a nice semi-oom-pah arrangement with some tasty tuba and accordion. It comes from one of the two(!) Kurt Weill tribute CDs put together by Hal Wilner.

Das erste Mal hörte ich dieses Lied wurde bei der PBS begonnen Lüften Episoden der Ernie Kovacs Show in den frühen 80er Jahren. Es war ein bisschen, dass die laufenden dieses Lied im Original Deutsch. Jahre später hörte ich sie singen, Ella Fitzgerald und grub die Worte. Es gibt viele Versionen dieses Songs, die meisten von ihnen, was die reverential Jazz-Standard-Behandlung. Dies hat man eine schöne semi-Oom-pah Vereinbarung mit einigen schmackhaften Tuba und Akkordeon. Es stammt aus einer der beiden (!) Kurt-Weill-Hommage CDs zusammengestellt von Hal Wilner.

Sean Peter “99 Luftballoons” (Nena)
I really like the whiplash schizophrenia of this recording. Mr. Peter can’t seem to decide if he wants to do this as an oom-pah number or as a frenzied punk tune, so he just does both.

Ich mag das Schleudertrauma Schizophrenie dieser Aufnahme. Peter kann nicht scheinen, zu entscheiden, ob er will, dies zu tun als Oom-pah-Nummer oder als rasender Punk-Melodie, so dass er nicht nur beide.

Señor Coconut “Autobahn” (Kraftwerk)
I’ve liked other stuff that I’ve heard from Señor Coconut but this one completely blows me away. It goes beyond the camp of some of his stuff and delivers a really inventive arrangement that stays true to the original song while still making it sound completely new and different.

Ich habe gerne andere Sachen, die ich habe gehört, von Señor Coconut, sondern diese vollständig bläst mir entfernt. Es geht über die Lager von einigen seiner Bestellung und liefert ein wirklich erfinderische Anordnung bleibt wahr, dass an den ursprünglichen Songs, während es immer noch Sound komplett neu und anders.

I’ve seen a couple of stories lately speculating about what will be the official song of this summer. Beyond the pathetic fact that this is apparently all that’s left of the tradition of investigative journalism, the very question is absurd. The song of the summer is something you can only determine in retrospect. You hear a song and it transports you back to those warm summer days driving around with the windows down and the radio blasting.

Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn has posted a list of songs that he asserts are the songs of summers past. The idea is to look at the songs and determine when you entered middle age by finding at what point you can’t hum along with the songs. You can argue about whether or not that’s a valid concept, but it is an interesting way to chart your relationship with pop culture. Here are a few of the songs from that list.

The Magic Numbers “Crazy In Love” (Beyonce)
You just don’t hear the melodica enough in popular music nowadays. This is a very pleasant arrangement that features the melodica, acoustic guitars and very nice boy/girl harmonies.

Evil Adam “Genie In A Bottle” (Christina Aguilera)
Disney needs to bring back the Mickey Mouse Club so we can start grooming another generation of crazy, slutty pop stars. But at least Christina Aguilera isn’t nearly so slutty since she became a mother. Too bad that didn’t work for Britney Spears.

Frankmusik “Every Breath You Take” (The Police)
My introduction to cable television and MTV happened during the summer of 1983. A couple of friends and I subleased a house for the summer when I was going to college. The previous tenant hadn’t turned off the cable and so I plugged in my little television and sat transfixed by MTV. I watched it for 14 hours straight the first day and 12 hours the next. It seemed like there was this whole visual language that was foreign to me that I needed to understand. After two days of immersion I understood that this language was a collection of hackneyed cliches that I could safely ignore. I haven’t watched much MTV since then.

At any rate, the “artsy” black-and-white video for this song was broadcast every ten minutes or so over those first two days. After awhile I became numb to the visuals and just became disturbed by the creepy obsessive-stalker lyrics.

Veruca Salt “My Sharona” (The Knack)
Hearing this song really places me back in high school, for better and for worse. Veruca Salt slows it down just enough to make it sound very dirty.

Katie Price and Peter Andre “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” (Elton John and Kiki Dee)
I’ve always thought that what this song really needed was a disco backbeat.

I hope everybody had a good Independence Day celebration yesterday. Hopefully you still have enough patriotism in your hearts to enjoy these songs about our great nation.

Everclear “This Land Is Your Land” (Woody Guthrie)
It always amuses me that this has become one of our nation’s essential patriotic folk songs. Woody Guthrie wrote the song because he was sick of hearing Kate Smith sing “God Bless America” on the radio. He felt that song was unrealistic and complacent.

People also forget that Woody was quite the socialist and included this seldom-heard verse in the song that’s guaranteed to drive patriotic Republicans crazy:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing;
That side was made for you and me.

Keb’ Mo’ “America The Beautiful” (comp. Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel A. Ward)
This is my favorite patriotic song. It speaks to the beauty and plenty of this great country without getting militaristic or overly religious. It’s much easier to sing than the Star-Spangled Banner and would be a much better national anthem, although that will never happen.

Keb’ Mo’ does a wonderful soulful version of this song. In a time when all the great old blues musicians are dropping like flies this young(ish) man is more of a national treasure than ever.

Matmos “The Stars And Stripes Forever” (John Phillip Sousa)
I just love this demented cover of the song that everybody associates with too-loud out-of-tune brass bands. This song is always played with such reverence that it’s good to hear somebody bring a sense of humor to bear on it. The weird thing about this cover is that it travels backward in time, starting with very synthetic-sounding instruments and ending with, you guessed it, a brass band.

Octapella “My Country ‘Tis Of Thee” (comp. Samuel Francis Smith)
Writing patriotic songs is difficult. Thus the need to take the British national anthem and tack on new lyrics to make a song Americans can sing. And the Americans of Octapella do a really wonderful job of singing this one.

The Pickin’ On Hacks “American Idiot” (Green Day)
The Pickin’ On albums are some of the most cynical bits of marketing I’ve ever seen. They don’t even credit the musicians in any way. The producers apparently just round up whatever studio musicians are available when they’ve got the studio time booked, give them enough heroin to numb the emptiness of their souls and roll tape.

That said, I find this stuff interesting and amusing for a song or two, it’s just too monotonous to listen to for a whole hour at a time. In this example they apparently needed to make sure that they could get the CD into Wal-Mart so they sing about “mind-screw” America. Really people, what’s the point of covering this song if you can’t even say “mindfuck?”

I didn’t watch or read too much of the coverage of Michael Jackson’s death. It was pretty unavoidable though and among all the eulogies I found it curious that I didn’t see anybody compare him to Elvis, except when talking about record sales.

Make no mistake, Isaac Hayes was Black Moses and Michael Jackson was Black Elvis. He was an immense talent who gained huge success at a young age. He then succumbed to the temptations of fame, becoming a drug-addled freakshow and dying prematurely of a massive heart attack. The main difference between Michael Jackson and Elvis is that when MJ died he took the internet down with him.

Señor Coconut & His Orchestra “Beat It” (Michael Jackson)
This meringue arrangement makes you want to dance, even if you can’t moonwalk.

Joe Dolce “Thriller” (Michael Jackson)
I had never thought of “Thriller” as a blues tune, but it works. I also love the demented medley it devolves into. More great stuff from Andrew Denton’s Musical Challenge.

Me First & The Gimme Gimmes “Ben” (Michael Jackson)
Just ignore everything that’s been written about Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery obsession, his strange relationships with chimpanzees and young boys, and his decision to let people use Beatles songs in commercials. The only thing you need to remember is that his first hit as a solo artist was a heartfelt love song to a rat. That tells you all you need to know about the man.

The Bates “Billie Jean” (Michael Jackson)
These guys were a German punk band who had a Top 10 hit with this song in Switzerland. One more example of the universal appeal of a well-crafted pop song.

Paul Anka “The Way You Make Me Feel” (Michael Jackson)
This song is such pure pop that it doesn’t sound that much different as a glossy Vegas schlockfest. Richard Cheese is famous for doing covers like this with his tongue firmly in his cheek. Mr. Anka was deadly serious when he released this song on his Rock Swings album in an attempt at a Johnny Cash-style career revival. The strategy was not successful.