This one had to be out there - just a question of tracking it down. Of course Bowie covered Reed - here’s a BBC session from 1972 - I chose this one because I remembered (no, really) that Bowie namechecks Reed in it.
Reed covers Bowie? Harder to find, but worth the effort, particularly because of the song. I think it’s generally accepted that Lou is the Queen Bitch in question. And it’s a duet - how cool!
And along the way a bonus Here’s another unexpected pairing, thrown up while researching the above - Lou Reed and Peter Gabriel (!)
The story that I recall is that Elvis wrote “Girls Talk” for Nick Lowe, and Nick Lowe wrote “What’s So Funny …” for Elvis. I don’t know if either did a studio version of their own song, but I think that they often did them in concert.
I don’t know about “Girls Talk”, but Lowe definitely didn’t write “What’s So Funny…” for Costello, but already in 1974 for the band Brinsley Schwarz he was in, at a time when Costello was still virtually unknown, and I doubt that they even had met yet (though it’s possible).
So, yes, Nick Lowe did a studio version with Brinsley Schwarz, the original version:
Ehhhh - Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds…easy mistake to make…
Actually, as I was typing that (hopefully amusing) aside, I just realized it’s a mistake I made myself on these boards when I referred to the wrong one as Johnny Cash’s son-in-law. (And I’m not going to risk guessing who’s the right one just now.)
Totally off-topic, but I remember a “news” article in National Lampoon back in the late 70s/early 80s talking about a fistfight between David Bowie and Lou Reed outside some New York nightclub. “Witnesses compared it to two old ladies trying to put out a fire on each other’s tummies.”
Now that made me curious. If you do a bit of googling, the repeated claim is that they first met near the Cavern Club in Liverpool in 1972 - though I haven’t yet found a source I would regard as authoritative. Here’s an example:
Costello first met Nick Lowe in a pub opposite The Cavern in Liverpool in 1972 at a time when the then “D.P. MacManus” and his partner Allan Mayes — as the duo “Rusty” — were performing many of the songs Lowe had written for the band Brinsley Schwarz.
Source. My Bold. And now I’m really curious. (Sorry about the hijack, BTW).
Our secret weapon was certainly a stack of Nick Lowe’s songs written for Brinsley Schwarz, which were not so very well‐known then. I think some casual listeners might have actually imagined we’d written them and I can’t say we always corrected this misapprehension but I suppose we’d acted as unpaid pitchmen for Nick by the time we met him, when the Brinsleys came to play “The Cavern”.
ETA2 - I’d regard this as more authoritative - see bottom of the first page.
Never mind the hijack, I love those little sidetracks in musical threads and all the trivia they uncover, and thanks for the research. I wonder if this first meeting was mentioned in the EC biography “Complicated Shadows”. It’s been some years since I’ve read it and couldn’t remember that factoid.
Lowe; actual film footage of his wedding to Carlene Carter (Johnny’s stepdaughter) was used in Nick’s video for his song “Cruel to Be Kind” (and Edmunds appears in the video, as well, as the limo driver):
Yep! (That’s a great book!) Complicated Shadows says the two met in 1972. It quotes Lowe:
“We were playing at the Cavern, and we were in The Grapes across the road, sitting there having a cocktail before getting ourselves set. He came in, and somebody said, ‘Look, there’s that weird-looking geezer who’s been at a few of our shows.’ And I thought, ‘Well, it’s about time I bought him a pint and I introduced myself,’ because he never used to come back stage or anything.”
I promise I’ll stop this hijack now, but… a speculative YouTube punt, and here’s a 1972 Costello (Rusty) demo:
So far as I can tell the first three songs are written by Costello and the last by Mayes. Also, I’m too out of touch to know that this existed: The Resurrection Of Rust. Costello and Mayes ride again (2022).
