My pick is Harry Nilsson’s version of Randy Newman’s “Cowboy”:
Come Back Little Sheba by Patti Smith. From a compilation album. She calls it one of her Appalachian Songs. Would love to hear more like that.
This YouTube “video” has less than 6k views. Because The Night has over 5 million.
Hoosiers are a largely ignored brit pop band. But my favorite song from them is not one of their hits, but a b-side, Ruby Blue.
Such a kickass song.
I’ll throw out a couple of B-Sides that fans are surely aware of but may not be known by others:
There’s a bootleg of a live show by the Flower Travellin’ Band recorded just before that incarnation was disbanded. It’s incredible. The lead guitar parts are played by Katsuhiko Kobayashi on pedal steel with an absolutely searing fuzz tone, and he’s an amazing player. The bass sound of Jun Kobayashi is just about my ideal bass sound, and Jack Bruce has nothing on him.
The fact that the album’s title, From Pussies to Death in 10,000 Years of Freakout, is a shoo-in for top 10 album titles ever, is just icing. The covers are more likely to be easy to digest, but their instrumental originals are awesome, too.
Covers:
Stone Free
How Many More Times (as a duet)
Originals:
I’m Dead Pt 1 Pt 2 (it’s a jam that’s longer than an album side)
Most of my friends who are into this kind of music don’t know who they are, much less about this record. Many thanks to Julian Cope for blogging about them.
Another one of Nilsson’s, I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City. Proffered as the theme song for the movie “Midnight Cowboy,” it was passed over for Everybody’s Talkin’.
The original Fox on the Run by Manfred Mann. It became a bluegrass standard (with some bastardized lyrics) and has been played by jillions of people who have no idea it was first done by a British rock band.
ETA: Nothing to do with song of the same name by Sweet.
Rush’s Best I Can from Fly By Night. Great groove, not a hit, but a great song. One of the rare Geddy lyric songs in the post Peart era.
The Bonzo Dog Band version of “Monster Mash” is superior to Bobby “Boris” Pickett in every way (including the video).
There’s also “In a Broken Dream” by Python Lee Jackson, which has Rod Stewart’s greatest vocal performance.
“Electric Sailor” by Kak, an great and obscure track off a great and obscure album.
Syrinx - December Angel
Wordburglars Rhyme O’clock, with More or Les. Or really anything by Wordbruglar, dude made an entire rap album about GI Joe which is surprisingly good.
Whenever this topic comes up, I’m reminded of Motor Scooter by The Surrealists. A friend of mine put this on a mix tape for me in 1990. He apparently knew of it from another friend who found it on a barely released cassette, etc. It’s a song you never heard of on an album you never heard of from a band you never heard of, but for one brief moment they transcended obscurity and made something great.
And until recently, if you searched for this song of the web the only hit was me having mentioned it here before. But no longer. The FOAF has digitized it, and even made a video for it. It does my heart good to know that this moment of brilliance will carry on to be shared with new fans. It can be seen here.
Exactly so. Pickett sounded like he was just having a lark. The Bonzos can make you believe the singer is actually deranged.
Kurt Weill’s “Dadeldoo.”
… but found a home with Sophia Loren’s “Lady Liberty.”
Joni Hendrix “Remember” and John Lee Hooker/Van Morrison “Never get out of these Blues Alive”.
Four Jacks and a Jill - “Master Jack”: They had the poor taste to be White South African when anti-Apartheid sentiment was on the upswing in the rest of the Western world, so that song never really got the play it deserved.
Reparata - “Shoes (Johnny and Louise)”: This is just a randomly forgotten song that I happen to like. It has a strange Old World feel to it, with something of a dark undertone.
The Roches - “Mister Sellack”: Asking for your job back in three-part harmony? They make it work.
Big Star - “September Gurls”: They would be revived by the later proto-grunge era (The Replacements had a song about and titled Alex Chilton) but they were out of place and without honor in their own era (How out of place? They were a bunch of White guys handled by Stax.) so they never made it to the heights they should have. Listen to all of their stuff, I just picked a song almost at random. Another good one is “Thirteen”, for something a bit slower.
Todd Duncan performing an abbreviated version of “Unchained Melody” in the 1955 film Unchained which is, of course, the origin of the song. This version has been so eclipsed by the Righteous Brothers’ version of the song that, if you search Google for something like unchained melody move soundtrack you end up with references to the Ghost soundtrack which, of course, used the Righteous Brothers’ cover. I’m familiar with covers eclipsing the original to the point the original becomes, essentially, a bad novelty version forever to live in the shadow of the later definitive version, but I’ve never heard of a song named after a film becoming so dissociated from that movie that people forget the movie even existed even as the cover of the song continues to be played.
And, no, Unchained, while it is a prison film, isn’t the movie where two escaped convicts are chained to each other. (My mom is also the only person who could confuse Five Easy Pieces with Slaughterhouse Five.)
I’m a big fan of people reworking their own stuff, like MTV’s Unplugged. Sometimes it’s harder to see how this would work. Case in point - Young Gods are a Swiss Industrial band, and especially their early stuff isquite heavy. But they seem to make it work here with just acoustic instruments + one megaphone :* Longue Route*.
And here they make it work with an orchestra (guest vocals by Mike Patton of FNM/Mr Bungle) covering Gary Glitter’s Did You Miss Me (AKA Hello, Hello, I’m Back Again). Here’s their original cover.
Keith Jarrett’s “European Trio,” Innocence (the Nude Ants version – I find the other versions weak). Great melody, great improvising.
Band of Gypsys (Jimi Hendrix), Who Knows. It’s just a groove, but what a groove!
“September Gurls” is pretty much the first song I think of when asked “Name examples of a perfect pop song.” Great song, great band. I’m not sure they’re quite that obscure these days, at least among music lovers, (heck, the Bangles covered “September Gurls” and the them from That 70s Show is a Cheap Trick cover of a Big Star song) but the fact they didn’t get blowup huge in their heyday is sad. Did you see the Big Star documentary from a few years back, “Nothing Can Hurt Me”?