One of the best things about living in Chicago is that Robbie Fulks lives here too. An even better thing about living here is that every Monday night he plays a show at the Hideout with a different friend of his. Last week he played with incomparable singer Kelly Hogan.

Ms. Hogan had requested that they play a James Taylor song, which launched Robbie on a long and hilarious rant about Mr. Taylor’s music. He did allow that he was beginning to warm to Mr. Taylor’s songwriting after two of his collaborators had requested his songs.

So I figured that if James Taylor is good enough for Robbie Fulks, I should take a closer look at him as well. Which led to this week’s tribute to Mr. Taylor’s music.

The Isley Brothers “Fire And Rain” (James Taylor)
Part of Robbie’s rant was about a television commercial for a bank that featured a jingle written and sung by James Taylor’s brother who apparently sounds quite a bit like James Taylor when he sings. Robbie sang it with a pretty good James Taylor impersonation. He said that it was a useful song since it told him which bank was the best place to keep his money. He compared it to “Fire And Rain,” which he described as abstract gibberish. But even if you can’t understand what the song is about, the Isley brothers give it a very soulful reading that’s well worth a listen.

Ingrid Kjosavik “Shower The People” (James Taylor)
This song is the kind of easy listening crap that I always associate with James Taylor. It’s got that simplistic kind of Up With People sentiment without the energy of Up With People. Ingrid Kjosavik does what she can with it, trying for an Isley Brothers style soul infusion and is only partly successful. Still, it’s miles ahead of the original as far as listenability goes.

David Kamakahi “Your Smiling Face” (James Taylor)
Ukuleles are getting trendier by the day. I haven’t checked out that Eddie Vedder uke album, I really should get around to doing that. Anyway, this song works pretty well as a happy uke tune.

Mud Acres “Carolina In My Mind” (James Taylor)
James Taylor wrote this song when he was in England recording his first album for the Beatles’ Apple Records label. He was apparently strung out on drugs and feeling homesick and this is what came out.

Ray Charles had Georgia on his mind. He was sentimental about his home and thought of all the things he loved about it. But you never got the impression that Brother Ray was trying to escape from where ever he was. Mr. Taylor, on the other hand, is “going to Carolina in (his) mind.” It sounds like he’s trying to retreat into some fantasy world inside his own head so he doesn’t have to deal with reality. It reminds me of the protagonist from the movie Brazil. And things rarely work out well for folks who escape into their own make-believe realms.

James Taylor “Suzanne” (Leonard Cohen)
Several of Mr. Taylor’s biggest hits (“Handy Man,” “How Sweet It Is”) were covers. But he also put out a whole album of covers, some of them rather unexpected given the type of music he writes. But of all the songs on that covers album the idea of James Taylor covering Leonard Cohen seemed the most absurd to me. The result is pleasant enough but just doesn’t pack the emotional wallop of any other version of this song that I’ve ever heard.

Don Cornelius, the man behind Soul Train, took his life recently. The show had been off the air for awhile but his stature in the music world was such that the news still came as a shock. I occasionally watched Soul Train back in the day, but the dancers invariably made me painfully white and arhythmic so the whole experience didn’t help my self-esteem.

But it’s time to honor the legacy of Mr. Cornelius by listening to a very small sampling of music from the vast number of artists who appeared on Soul Train.

Michael Bolton “(Sittin’ On The) Dock Of The Bay” (Otis Redding)
I’ve never been shy about posting bad covers here at Cover Freak. In fact I relish a cover that’s so bad that it’s revelatory. As Arlo Guthrie famously said, “You can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in.” And you can’t appreciate a good cover until you’ve heard an awful one.

But there are still a few covers so heinous that I try to keep them locked away, beyond the ability to harm the unsuspecting. Covers of mass destruction, so to speak. But this week I’m unleashing one on all of you and I can only hope that you find it in your hearts to forgive me.

I was reading Wikipedia’s list of people who appeared on Soul Train and was shocked to find Michael Bolton listed. I know that all kinds of acts appeared on the show over the years but it’s really no exaggeration to describe this guy as a no-talent ass-clown. He sings like he’s constipated as he butchers this song.

Johnny Aloha “Gangsta’s Paradise” (Coolio)
Don Cornelius wasn’t afraid to have edgier acts on Soul Train. It’s easy to look back on Coolio as a one-hit wonder but at the time this was quite the urban anthem. Here it gets loungified by Richard Cheese protege Johnny Aloha.

The Groovegrass Boyz “Wabash Cannonball” (The Carter Family)
Bootsy Collins appeared on Soul Train many times over the years. I don’t think he ever appeared on the show with this band. This song is one of the few that you’ll ever hear that features both Bootsy and Doc Watson. It’s from an album called Groovegrass 101 and was part of an effort to expose a young urban audience to country music. I don’t think it was very successful on that front but it’s a fantastic album.

Alton Ellis “La-La Means I Love You” (The Delfonics)
I was a little surprised to learn that this song was released in 1968. I just always assumed from the sound of it that it came out around 1953. I’m guessing that they were on Soul Train around the time the song came out. It holds up well as a reggae song.

Deep Purple “River Deep, Mountain High” (Ike And Tina Turner)
When I was in high school the Holy Trinity of Rock among my friends was the Stones, the Who, and Led Zeppelin. Even in those days my musical tastes were a bit different, my Holy Trinity consisted of Deep Purple, Jimi Hendrix, and Queen. As a result this version of the song is the one I first became familiar with. I had heard Ike and Tina, mainly their version of Proud Mary. But it was years before I heard Ike and Tina do their version.

This is from the early days of Deep Purple, before they released the Machine Head album and became proto-metal gods. They were much more experimental and much more open to recording creative covers of other people’s music.

Well folks, Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and so the fancy of young and old alike turns to love. At least love as it’s defined by the Hallmark/DeBeers/Fannie Mae mafia. I think it’s more important to express your love for your significant other in words and actions every day, as opposed to just buying flowers once a year because you feel like you’re supposed to. That’s what I try to do with Mrs. Freak, and sometimes I do a better job of it than others. Like today.

Longtime readers are no doubt well aware that my yearly Valentine’s Day posts always contain the song “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)”. I posted it the first time because it was so wildly inappropriate. I soon discovered that Mrs. Freak despises that song and so I kept posting it every year just to be obnoxious. But this year I’m giving it a rest in the hopes that  the delightful Mrs. Freak will view this week’s songs as a more pure and true expression of my love for her.

Mic Conway and Robbie Long “The Masochism Tango” (Tom Lehrer)
Love sometimes hurts, and sometimes people like it that way. This isn’t a serious examination of the dark side of kink, but rather a bit of satire from the guy who brought us “Poisoning Pigeons In The Park.”

Dave Navarro “Venus In Furs” (The Velvet Underground)
This song takes its title from the book of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the guy who gave masochism its name. Knowing that you would probably expect lyrics like “kiss the boots of shiny leather.”

Pat MacDonald “Master and Servant” (Depeche Mode)
And if you’re not into leather and pain you can express your love through dominance and submission. I really can’t understand how this song became a radio staple in the mid 80s. I’ve always liked the line about how domination is the name of the game in bed or in life, but only one of them is fulfilling.

David & Roselyn “Lady Marmalade” (LaBelle)
I originally wanted to do a whole post about bondage and domination but I had problems finding five good songs on the topic. So here we have an ode to an unforgettable night with a New Orleans prostitute. I would guess that Valentine’s Day is a hooker’s busiest day of the year as desperate men seek sex instead of love. Or maybe hookers take the day off. I really don’t know.

Vorsprung durch Technik “In Every Dream Home A Heartache” (Roxy Music)
While this song is certainly about an inflatable sex doll it’s also a commentary on consumer society. Really. When I was doing college radio I liked to play this as part of a larger musical tribute to vinyl playmates. If I could have found covers of Frank Zappa’s “Ms. Pinky” and Root Boy Slim’s “Inflatable Doll” I would have posted them this week.

The singer here is probably a little too much in love with his doll. The line “I blew up your body but you blew my mind” has always slayed me.

I dearly love baseball. I like hockey and soccer. I’m indifferent to basketball. But I hate football. I think George Will is a pompous windbag but I do like his description of football as “violence punctuated by committee meetings.”  The Super Bowl is today and as much as I dislike the sport a couple of good things have come from the football championship game. Hunter Thompson’s account of the 1973 Super Bowl is hilarious, and it’s always a good day to go to the deserted hardware store. People get very excited about the television commercials that air during the Super Bowl and I can understand the argument that they’re often more interesting than the game itself. But for me the really interesting thing is the halftime show.

In the early days of the Super Bowl halftime was sort of a necessary evil and they just threw a marching band on the field to kill the time. But the moguls in charge of the NFL eventually realized that the halftime show could drive higher TV ratings and so they began to book popular artists. So here’s some music played and/or originally performed by artists who have played the Super Bowl halftime show.

Taco “Puttin’ On The Ritz” (Fred Astaire)
In 1984 the NFL presented a “Salute To The Superstars Of The Silver Screen” as played by two college marching bands. The extravaganza was produced by the Walt Disney Company, who showed a little more imagination than they did for their previous Super Bowl halftime show. That one was entitled “It’s A Small World”. This was one of the songs that they played. And it’s a fitting song since it’s probably one of the songs most often associated with 1930s musicals.

Taco is an Indonesian-born Dutch singer who made it big in Germany before he became a one-hit wonder in the U.S. with this song in 1983 thanks to MTV. This song is more than just a cover, it contains snippets of a half-dozen or so Irving Berlin songs.

Concrete Blonde “Ghost Riders In The Sky” (Vaughan Monroe)
In 1987 they got Disney to produce the show again and the imagineers showed a puzzling lack of creativity by throwing together “A Salute To Hollywood’s 100th Anniversary.” Complete with marching bands, drill teams, George Burns and Mickey Rooney. The music was a weird mishmash of television show theme songs, music from Disney cartoons, and this tune. This was kind of Disney’s Dark Days, so maybe we can excuse them for doing halftime shows about Hollywood movies every time they got the chance.

Hearing Concrete Blonde usually makes me reach for an ice pick to plunge into my ear canal, but somehow they got this song right.

Motorhead “Blue Suede Shoes” (Carl Perkins)
I’m sorry I missed the 1989 halftime show. Diet Coke presented “Be Bop Bamboozled.” In 3D, no less. Featuring some Elvis impersonator named Elvis Presto, who also did card tricks. Wikipedia doesn’t have a set list for this one, but I can’t imagine that 3D Fake Elvis didn’t do this bit of standard repertoire.

I wanna be like Lemmy when I grow up. This is without a doubt the fiercest Elvis cover ever recorded.

Shinehead “Billie Jean” (Michael Jackson)
It wasn’t until 1993 that the NFL moguls realized that they could rake in advertising bucks by getting real live musical stars to play at halftime instead of having college marching bands play popular hits. Michael Jackson had not yet become the tragic/pathetic self-parody that he was to become in later years and acquitted himself quite well.

This song works surprisingly well with a reggae arrangement.

Kate The Kat “I Was Made For Loving You” (Kiss)
1999 saw one of the most misbegotten Super Bowl halftime shows. It was a “Celebration of Soul, Salsa, and Swing.” Which is kind a weird concept since those musical styles don’t seem to me to have a whole lot in common except for the fact that they all begin with the letter “s”. Couldn’t they have just picked one and filled 15 minutes? But the most bizarre aspect of the show was that one of the featured performers was Kiss. Say what you will about their music, I don’t think anybody would describe it as soul, salsa, or swing.

For some reason I have a fairly extensive collection of lounge covers of Kiss songs. This one’s a favorite of mine.

The Academy Award nominees were announced last week and it looks like it was a bit of a down year for movie music since only two songs were even nominated. No matter, this week we celebrate Best Song winners from past years.

Elton Britt “Sweet Leilani” (Bing Crosby, 1937)
The original version of this song was string-drenched and only vaguely Hawaiian. Since then there has been no shortage of covers done in a more “native” style with lots of lap steel and/or slack key guitars. But for some reason Elton Britt decided that this song was the perfect candidate for a singing cowboy remake complete with yodeling. Because nothing evokes the South Pacific for me quite like yodeling.

Gene Simmons “When You Wish Upon A Star” (Cliff Edwards, 1940)
It must have been the late 70s when the members of KISS all decided to make solo records. But since they were savvy businessmen and knew deep down in their hearts that nobody gave a crap about them as individual musicians, the albums were released as a sort of matched set. The covers all had the same design, and each record came with a poster honoring the kabuki-painted mope that created it. If you collected all four records you could put them all together into one huge super-awsome poster, sort of like the Power Rangers.

It must have been the early 80s when I found Gene Simmons’ solo record rotting in a cutout bin at my local record store. It only cost a buck or two so I picked it up. I was disappointed when I discovered that my copy did not include a poster, but that disappointment faded away when I heard this song. I don’t know who told Mr. Simmons that covering this song would be a good idea, but I hope he was taken out and shot afterward. Mr. Tongue’s attempts to hit the high notes in this one never fail to make me howl with laughter.

The Utopians “Love Is A Many Splendored Thing” (The Four Aces, 1955)
This song comes from an album called Down To GREASE On Holiday which had alternative takes on music from the musical Grease along with a few other songs actually from the 1950s. There’s a pretty straight cover somewhere in there underneath all the layers of odd sound effects and synthesizers.

Mrs. Miller “Chim-Chim-Cher-ee (Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews, 1964)
Long before Wing was being immortalized on South Park, there was Mrs. Miller. She had a horrible pseudo-operatic “style” of singing and no sense of rhythm or melody. She was so bad that she became a minor celebrity, appearing on the Tonight Show for Johnny Carson to laugh at. I think she finally figured out that she was being ridiculed and quit show business. And all of our lives became a little more dreary.

Doping Panda “Under the Sea” (Samuel E. Wright, 1989)
This song marked the beginning of Disney’s decade-long domination of the Best Song award. One could argue that consistently winning speaks to Disney’s mastery of the use of music in film. But considering how many times two or three songs from the same Disney movie were nominated, I’d suspect different reasons. Bribery is a possibility but I don’t think it’s anything so dramatic. I just don’t think that there’s much original music being written for film these days outside of animation. Maybe there should be a new award for best use of music in a film. Then Quentin Tarantino would get an Oscar for every movie he made.