Rudolf wrote:
Bob Dubery wrote:
Rudolf wrote:
The article has alot of truth...unfortunately. Very good read.
But not the whole truth. Somebody's got to make a splash playing original music otherwise there'd be nothing to cover.
Bob, nowhere did the article say you/we shouldn't play originals? ?
No it didn't. My point is that the covers that we cover were once originals. So, for those who want to try, there has been and still must be a market for people who produce original work.
However there's long been markets for artists who DON'T perform what they themselves have written. In other days or genres they talk about "the canon" or "standards". Maybe we need to stop being so hung up on the c... word. In the sort of jazz/big band world there are "standards" and they keep on getting re-recorded, hopefully with a new interpretation each time. Nobody thinks that's a cop-out or making one a slave to the audience.
Personally I have a line somewhere but I can't say exactly where... I see a lot of people playing covers (not necessarily "rock" or "pop", might be bluegrass for example), and I don't necessarily reach for the bell, book and candle every time. As long as there's some kind of spark, something other than sheer imitation, a bit of vitality and novelty I usually survive.
Well, depending on what's being covered. Some songs are, in my opinion, so mawkish or just plain bad that they are beyond redemption.
But in the hands of great musicians... you should hear Richard Thompson's version of "Oops! I Did It Again."
In fact there's a great example. Thompson has a side-project (now starting to accquire a life of it's own) called "1000 Years Of Popular Music." The story goes that late 1999 Playboy invited a panel of current stars and artists acclaimed by the critics (Thompson is squarely in the 2nd category) to submit a list of what they considered the best songs of the last millenium. Of course what they really wanted was the best songs since about WW2. Thompson gave them exactly what they wanted - going back to the earliest surviving song in some kind of English, and also chucked in some Gilbert and Sullivan, some olde Englishe proteste songes etc. They declined his list, but he said "hang on! There's the making of a good set list there."
So now he has this show with himself on guitar and vocals, a percussionist and a singer. And they do that list of songs. The show (well the DVD version) starts with a very old song Sumer Is Acumen In, travels through the middle ages, into the industrial era (the scary old union song "Blackleg Miner"), through Victoriana (music hall, Gilbert and Sullivan) and keeps on going more or less chronologically until it climaxes with Britney's big hit (current versions of the show avoid "Oops!" for fear of looking like cashing in on her problems). All covers, but great playing, loads of wit and vitality, and I don't go to sleep.
Shows what you can do with covers.
