The Worst Cover I’ve Ever Heard™

On November 24, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn Pop Culture21 Comments

I love cover songs. If any artist has an interesting or entertaining version of someone else’s music, then I’m generally down for it. My personal music collection contains something like 1500 cover songs from different artists.

I especially love when a cover is so good that it becomes the more well-known version, and the fact that it was sung previously by another artist becomes a matter of trivia. A great example of this is “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” I became acquainted with this song originally as the version from They Might Be Giants, on their 1990 album Flood. The original is a 1953 track by The Four Lads.

Sometimes, if I’m not in the mood for something specific, I’ll just fire up a good old fashioned shuffle play. My continuing adventures in shuffle-play recently served up the Worst Cover I’ve Ever Heard™. I do not use this label lightly. I’ll forgive a lot, with the possible exception of covers of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah- none of them get it right. Sometimes a cover misses greatness and it’s just sort of okay- this was not that. This cover is actively, horribly terrible.

I’m not making this up. And those of you who’ve known me for a while know that because I’m fond of covers. I love the hell out of all kinds of covers, even the covers that make purists run away, climb trees, and gibber.

But this… this…

It all started one night many years ago, probably in 1998 or 1999. I had gone to Respectable Street Cafe to dance and drink and hang out with my friends. When I arrived, there was a band playing.

The band was called Apocalypse Theatre, and they produced two albums between 1998 and 2002. They still have an active FaceBook presence, although I haven’t been able to find any new music by them after 2002. I remember thinking at the time that most of their music was fine, a sort of industrial-with-a-side-of-noise aesthetic. They reminded me a bit of Android Lust, only not as danceable.

I remember it very clearly- I was sitting out on the back patio happily talking with friends when they played The Cover. I didn’t even notice it at first- It was so, so bad that they were a good two minutes or so into the song before I even realized what it was. When I noticed it, I stopped, flabbergasted. Then I ran into the interior of the club to hear the rest.

It was so amazingly bad that I bought the unlabelled cassette they were selling for $8, hoping like hell that the song would be on it. By the way, this show occurred well after the compact disc was commonplace, but they were still selling tapes.

The tape did have the Worst Cover I’ve Ever Heard™. Years later, I took the time and effort involved to move it from cassette to mp3. Now I’m sharing it with you. Apocalypse Theatre’s finest work. The Worst Cover Song Ever.

I deliberately encoded this without the song title, because I want to see how long it takes each of you to figure out what the song is. ::evil grin::

Try to figure out what song this is.

If you figure it out right away, please, please, please don’t answer in the comments. I don’t want to deprive anyone of their chance to puzzle through this for the first time. If you’ve listened, and you still haven’t figured it out, I put the answer over here. Oh, and the rest of their stuff is over on Spotify, and it’s worth a listen.

Provided this one track hasn’t shaken you to your core, that is.

What’s your favorite cover song?

45/52 (and 24 of 30!)

Music History*: Notes (both Major and Minor) from my childhood

On February 18, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn Life At Home, Pop Culture1 Comment

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always liked comic books. When I was growing up, there were always comics around- old tales of the Green Lantern Corps, silver-age Superman stories with Jimmy Olsen, and even some Legion of Superheroes stories with Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad, and Saturn Girl. The Greatest American Hero hit television when I was eight years old, and it was a foregone conclusion that I’d love it. With my nascent love of music already running strong, I also loved the theme song by Joey Scarbury. I remember sitting on the end of my mom’s bed, singing along to the song on the radio. Mom was super amused that I knew all the words.

Along with my love of superheroes, I have a long-standing fondness for all things Disney. One of my earliest Disney Music loves was the Main Street Electrical Parade. This goes beyond mere Disneyana. I used to have a tape of a 1983 album by Michael Iceberg, the composer of the theme, with all kinds of neat stuff like a Robot Revolt theme. One year, Michael Iceberg brought his pyramid-shaped synthesizer cubicle, the Amazing Iceberg Machine, to the South Florida Fair. I got to meet the man after the show, and I remember someone commenting that he was spectacularly drunk at the time. In any case, the original parade is long gone from Disney, but the music lives on as an amazingly persistent earworm. Mua ha ha!

Speaking of all things Disney, let’s talk about EPCOT. When I was ten, my dad drove both of us up to Orlando one weekend to go to the theme park for the first time. I brought back two souvenirs from that trip. The first was a brochure book about the park, detailing all of the pavilions, including the still unopened Horizons (coming soon!) and also detailing the planned but never built World Showcase pavilions for Israel, Spain, and Equatorial Africa.

The second souvenir from that trip was The Official Album of Walt Disney World EPCOT Center. On vinyl. I listened to that thing so much it’s a wonder the grooves didn’t flatten out. I can still sing large swaths of the original music from memory, and the vocals in the American Pavilion song “Golden Dream” are directly responsible for an ill-fated and poorly considered audition for the Voices of Liberty that I may or may not have attempted in the early 1990s.

Some of the album is very, very dated – “The Computer Song” specifically comes to mind- but I will always love it anyway. “Makin’ Memories” is another long-time favorite, left over from the early days of EPCOT when the pavilions were all sponsored by corporations. See if you can guess which mega-corporation sponsored this one:

As an aside- anyone who has ever gone on Journey Into Imagination with me can attest that I will always-and-forever sing the ORIGINAL version of Dreamfinder and Figment’s song, very very loudly, over the current iteration.

I’m skipping around my personal timeline a little bit, but I wanted to talk about 8-track recordings. When I was a wee lad, cleaning day was a family affair. We had an 8-track player in the living room, and we got those Columbia House shipments of new titles every so often. On family house cleaning days, we’d fire up the stereo, throw a tape into the 8-track player, and everyone in the family would pitch in to clean the house.

I suspect that a hefty percentage of my readers have probably never heard an 8-track tape, so you may not know that an 8-track splits the album up into four sections. Our player had no fast-forward or rewind, but you could switch between the four tracks, and the music would loop. If you let it play all the way through, our player would automatically switch from track to track in sequence. It’s because of the 8-track of the original Star Wars soundtrack that I whenever I hear The Cantina Band theme by John Williams, I expect to hear a fade-out, track change, and fade-in at roughly the middle of the song. That’s what it did on the 8-track. You can hear the fade-out at one minute and 40 seconds in the video below.

Here are samples of other artists that twisted the mind of proto-Steven from cleaning day 8-tracks- The Lettermen (Put Your Head On My Shoulder), Neil Diamond (America, September Morn), and John Denver (Country Roads, Thank God I’m A Country Boy).

(I just know I’m gonna get flack for the John Denver tunes.)

What music do you remember listening to with your family?

8/52

____

*This post is the second in a series on music throughout my life. Part one is here.

Music History: Firsts

On January 27, 2020May 22, 2022 By StevenIn Life At Home, Pop Culture11 Comments

I love music.

This may be the most understated thing I will say all year. Long-time readers of this blog probably figured out a long time ago that most of my non-work trips start with me going, “Ooh, a concert I want to see!” I’ve talked a great deal about music on this blog already- I’ve talked about They Might Be Giants, and Leonard Cohen, and Eurovision. I ‘ve posted about musicals in general, and about Starlight Express and A Chorus Line in particular. I’ve also talked about my first ever concert (New Edition), and about my memories of the Ghostbusters soundtrack in that glorious red plastic Arista case back in 1984.

And of course there’s a page on this blog that I keep updating to show the artists that I’ve seen play live.

I’ll say it again: I love music. I need music. If I don’t listen to music for a while, I can get downright cranky. It’s as vital to me as breathing, and I go to concert after concert after concert for the love of music, even though I hate crowds and I have a fair amount of travel anxiety. I can’t not go. (FOMAC, or Fear of Missing a Concert, is an entirely different blog post that I may come back to later. Shut up, it’s a real thing!)

With that introduction in mind, I want to talk about music throughout various parts of my life. I’ll start at the very beginning.

My earliest memory of music, any music, was all the way back in 1978. I was five years old, and I remember being in some sort of a school or daycare center or something along those lines- it wasn’t a usual place for me. I was waiting near some other kids while we picked up one of my siblings. The kids I was hanging out near were playing with original first-generation Star Wars action figures. I remember they made me be C3PO. While we played with the Star Wars toys, there was a radio on.

There were two songs in heavy rotation on the radio at that time, and they were the first songs to ever penetrate my tiny little head. Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana,” and John Paul Young’s “Love Is In The Air.”

Those two songs played back to back. I can’t remember ever hearing music before that day. I’m sure I did, but I don’t remember it.

I also recall the very first album that I ever owned. When I was ten years old, there were advertisements in the back of comic books that said that if you sell stuff from their crappy catalog, you could win prizes. This company sent an army of tiny Willy Lomans (Lomen?) door to door to sell magazine subscriptions, Christmas cards, pecan turtles, and wrapping paper. With enough sales, you could get yourself a tent, a bicycle, or any number of other “fabulous prizes.” It took a hell of a lot of sales to get anything substantial, but in 1983, I used my hard-earned prize bucks to get a voucher for a cassette tape from one of those music places like Columbia House or BMG, only not quite as obnoxious. That first album? I was grooving to “Future Shock” by Herbie Hancock.

I had seen the video for Rockit, of course, and the kicking-pants robots made me want to dance. Or something. The entire album turned out to be really phenomenal, but I didn’t appreciate it nearly as much in 1983 as I do now.

My mom got me the second album I ever owned- we were in a Richway, which was sort of like the larval form of the retail chain now known as Target. Richway’s parent company sold all of their stores to Dayton-Hudon Corporation around 1988, and that company closed all the stores, stripped them for parts, and then reopened most of them as Target stores. The specific Richway from this story is actually some other non-Target store, according to Wikipedia.

But I digress. We were in Richway, in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1984. It was an amazing day for eleven-year-old Steven because not only did I get my first transforming toy there, a red Gobot sports-car named Turbo, but Mom also bought me a cassette of Rockwell’s first album. Again, I was familiar only with the first single released, a popular song called “Somebody’s Watching Me,” which had Michael Jackson on backup vocals. The rest of the album was a lot of fun, though, and I still listen to it sometimes. “Obscene Phone Caller” was always one of my favorites songs, even though it would be years before I actually understood how pervy the song really is.