Indiana Wants Me

Here's a rare radio station DJ copy in red vinyl!

They don't make hit records happen like this anymore. Singer-songwriter R. Dean Taylor already had co-writing credits with Motown including such hits as "Love Child" and "I'm Living In Shame" by the Supremes, "All I Need" by the Temptations, "I'll Turn To Stone" by the Four Tops, and "Just Look What You've Done" by Brenda Holloway. Not a bad start.

In 1970, Taylor recorded his song "Indiana Wants Me" for Motown's new Rare Earth subsidiary label. The song tells of a fugitive on the run who is approaching the end of the line. Taylor felt it could be a hit record, so he went to Motown Vice President, Barney Ayles and asked him if he could put some serious promotion behind this record. Ayles knew it was getting some airplay in Detroit & Ontario and the record was getting positive feedback, so he agreed to hire an independent promotion man, Al Valente, to go out with Taylor on a promo tour to radio stations, large and small, in the Michigan area. Soon enough, more stations began playing the single. "Indiana Wants Me" eventually became a million-seller and climbed to #1 in Canada and #5 on the US charts, making R. Dean Taylor the first white artist in the history of Motown to do so.

A typical K-Tel album

Fast forward to 1992. Chicago based Pravda Records has the notion to produce a tribute album that focused on the K-Tel collections from the 1970's. Those K-Tel records were of notoriously poor quality but were certainly budget-friendly and usually featured loud graphics with a subtle title like "20 Super Fantastic Mega Hit Explosions!!" or something else equally silly. Nonetheless, these records sold like candy to kids with allowance to burn. Pravda's idea was to have a variety of modern indie rock bands update the 70's pop of their youth.

As it is with most tribute albums, this is almost always a hit & miss proposition. There's gonna be some pleasant surprises and there's gonna be a dud or two. That's very much the deal with Pravda's three(!) K-Tel themed releases. There's a few tracks I could feature here (and may do so later), but I happen to really like this one by the sarcastically named Frampton Brothers from beautiful downtown Pittsburgh, Pa. (No relation to the more well-known Peter, I'm certain.) They absolutely attack the song, putting some much needed hair on the arrangement. Doing away with the dated siren & bullhorn effects from Taylor's original, this band replaces them with some smokin' guitar work. It makes a world of difference.

Here's "Indiana Wants Me" by the Frampton Brothers. Turn it up good 'n loud.

The Pravda cd's are long out of print but are still available at Amazon. The Frampton Brothers put out 3 cd's on small indie labels, all of them now defunct. R. Dean Taylor's original version can be found on Volume 3 in Rhino's ginormous Have A Nice Day series. 25 cd's in all, superior mastering throughout, lots of rarities, very highly recommended.

Rock 'n Roll All Nite

Ok, so you've had the brilliant notion that you're gonna cover a song by cartoon rock monsters, Kiss. And not just any Kiss song. You're covering THE Kiss song; the Kiss anthem of all anthems, "Rock & Roll All Nite". What are you gonna do? More importantly, how are you gonna do it? (Why is another thing, but..)

This much we know. You CAN NOT do this song any bigger or better than Kiss did it, so don't try. It's a long way to fall. Doing a completely straight cover that simply mimics the original Kiss recording without trying to out-big them is simply pointless. The only thing you can do is what any decent musician would do (besides run away) and that is to completely deconstruct the song, so it doesn't sound like Kiss at all. And what better place to do that than on a band-authorized, label-commissioned Kiss tribute album?

The regrettably titled album, "Kiss My Ass" was released in June of 1994. It contains mostly pedestrian versions of Kiss tunes by performers of the day such as Lenny Kravitz, Anthrax, Gin Blossoms, Extreme and even country music cottage industry, Garth Brooks, who turns in a fetid take of "Hard Luck Woman". If they'd gotten Rod Stewart, for whom the song was originally written, then that might have been more interesting. But no.

And then, there's Toad The Wet Sprocket.

Yes, Toad The Wet Sprocket, who took their name from a Monty Python comedy sketch called "Rock Notes", in which a journalist delivers a nonsensical music news report. (More on this later.) The men from Toad do a fine job of reinventing this arena rock pounder into a waltzy acoustic number that invites, rather than demands, a singalong during the chorus. Nice job, fellas.

Ok, just for a refresher, here's the original 1975 studio cut of  "Rock 'n Roll All Nite" from Kiss.

Now, check out this sublime cover version by Toad The Wet Sprocket. 

At the time, I had a strong feeling that Toad was one of those bands that would one day release a most excellent best-of or greatest hits CD. I was not wrong. Get all that and more Toad as well at Amazon. 

And if you just gotta have more Kiss albums, they're at Amazon too. Cheap.

Before I forget, Eric Idle, the performer of the Python sketch, reflected on the band's name in an interview: "I once wrote a sketch about rock musicians and I was trying to think of a name that would be so silly that nobody would ever use it, or dream it could ever be used. So I wrote the words "Toad the Wet Sprocket". And a few years later, I was driving along the freeway in L.A., and a song came on the radio, and the DJ said, "...that was by Toad the Wet Sprocket", and I nearly drove off the freeway!"

Which proves that you can name a band just about anything at all.

Rusty Cage

To put it simply, this is one of the best rebuilds of a song I've ever heard. The musical arrangement is an almost total deconstruction. It's also a powerful demonstration of how changing the vocal delivery from a howling yell to barely sung speech can sound far more serious and threatening. And no one was ever more up for that task than the Man in Black, Johnny Cash.

In 1996, Cash and producer Rick Rubin enlisted Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers to provide the backbone for Cash's American Recordings album, "Unchained", which eventually won a Grammy that year for Best Country Album. As producer, Rubin was heavily involved in reviewing and presenting to Cash, the many songs that might be suitable for Cash to record. One of them was a scorcher by Seattle grungemeisters, Soundgarden, called "Rusty Cage"

Soundgarden

Although I've already inferred that there's a huge musical difference between these two recordings, the key is in the vocal. Soundgarden's Chris Cornell sounds like he's about to bust a lung. But by putting his famous rumbling baritone to full use, Cash sounds like a very dangerous man. I can see why Rubin suggested this one for Cash. To Cornell's credit, this lyric sounds custom written for Cash, especially the lines after the mid-song tempo change, which read, "When the forest burns along the road, like God's eyes in my headlights; when the dogs are looking for their bones and it's raining ice picks on your steel shores, I'm gonna break my rusty cage and run." That's one powerful lyric and Cash's delivery makes it sound like the voice of a mountain.

So, for a point of reference, here's Soundgarden's original grunge/metal version of "Rusty Cage". Yes, it's loud. Go for it.

 

 Now, listen to Cash's stripped to the bones version. Keep the volume cranked and buckle in.

So, if your music collection is short on Cash, get yourself over to Amazon & make things right.

They have a lot of Soundgarden there too, if you are so inclined.

Everlasting Love

I well remember hearing the 1967 original version of "Everlasting Love" by Robert Knight for the first time through the 4" speaker of the tube powered GE tabletop AM radio that I got from my grandmother. This is one of those songs that has a lot of drama created by musical tension. It's got the same feel as the intro to "Reach Out" by the Four Tops, which may have inspired the intro to this tune. I'll bet this record was cut live with everyone in the same room, like they often did back then. Without ProTools.

"Everlasting Love" made its next appearance on the charts with a discofied version by Carl Carlton in 1974. You may also remember Carlton as the perpetrator of the 1982 hit, "She's a Bad Mama-Jama". The song has since reached the U.S. Top 40 twice more, with more moderate success for remakes by Rex Smith and Rachel Sweet (#32 in 1981) and Gloria Estefan (#27 in 1995). Thus, "Everlasting Love" is one of two songs (the other being "The Way You Do the Things You Do") to become a Top 40 hit in the 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s.

But there's one other excellent version that didn't chart at all.

In 1988, U2 released a concert documentary film, "Rattle & Hum", along with an accompanying soundtrack album. As the band had done previously, for each single that was released from the album, there were 2 or 3 spare tracks included that were recorded during the album sessions, but not included on the album proper. These popular B-sides helped sell the singles. One of the extra tracks on the cd single for "All I Want Is You" is a scorching take of "Everlasting Love" that by all rights, should have been on the album and in the film, but was not used, for whatever reason.

Obviously, this should be played at an appropriate volume. Enjoy!

 

There is a metric ton of career-spanning recordings from U2 available at Amazon. Most commonly available recordings of "Everlasting Love" by Robert Knight are re-recordings that have little of the majesty of the original, which is only on the Rising Sons label shown above. The Mp3 file you heard on this post was ripped from very clean vinyl. Clean copies of the original single are out there and affordable. Just don't get stuck with a lame remake.