A Day in the Life

May 12-18, 2014

Uncover that song, please

By Becca Bona

Every time my parents went on vacation without us kids, we were rewarded with strange trinkets and treasures from faraway lands. 

(I’m using creative license here, and calling New Orleans a far away land because of a certain mystic surrounding the beaded, musical Bourbon Street.)

My mom brought me a masquerade mask back from the French Quarter that harbored different sections of regal hues of gold and purple. The holes for the nose and eyes were perfect for a small ten-year-old face, so I wore the thing. 

Literally, for a week. 

My mom eventually convinced me to take the façade off so we could see what she dubbed, “the original artwork.” My face is now known as the original artwork in my nuclear family, but that’s another story.

This masked anecdote sums up how I feel about cover songs. Ultimately, I always prefer the ‘original.’ 

Anytime you find yourself in a dive bar listening to a small-town band play cover after cover frustration eventually ensues. I’m sure new bands just want to prove their level of skill and expertise by playing something already beloved and familiar, but sometimes, you just can’t touch established greatness. 

You know you’ve thought, “Great, now they’re about to ruin my favorite Rolling Stones tune, at least once.” 

(Technically, you could insert any band in the wake of the Stones, but for future reference, if you’re a band and you like to play “Beast of Burden,” please just don’t. I’ve had enough.)

Frustration aside, it turns out cover songs can be, if not better than the original, interpreted in such a way that they can become a hit on their own. 

It was Jimi who brought this to my attention, and recently, as he was spitting out lyrics from “All Along the Watchtower.” 

I’d like to call myself someone who takes an interest in music, but this one completely slipped past me, mostly because I don’t really care for Bob Dylan all that much. 

Bobby, as I call him in my head, is of course talented, but I can’t really handle his voice. I’ve always thought he was a brilliant song writer. I reveled in the fact that he was able to give so many bands so many great hits. 

I knew that “Mr. Tambourine Man” was a song Dylan had written, but I was in love with the Byrd’s version of the song. That being said, I don’t know how I missed Dylan’s own version of “All Along the Watchtower.” I had no idea that Bobby had originally written the song for his album John Wesley Harding. 

Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower” was the only time he topped the charts in the US, and Bob Dylan liked the cover so much that he played it the way Hendrix recorded it for years afterward. Hendrix was the one to make the song famous, but he was also an advocate of Dylan’s songwriting, claiming that he himself could never finish writing the lyrics to a song without help. 

Asking which version is better is probably not the correct question to be asking when examining the two side-by-side. The better question is, why don’t we have more musical collaborations? Every time something is a hit there’s almost always more than one name on it. 

Think Lennon-McCartney.

Maybe it’s the conversation that occurs back and forth between musicians that makes a song good. 

Either way, there wouldn’t be a masked version of a song if it weren’t for the original, but in the same token, sometimes an original needs some pizazz, even if only for a week.