COVERED DISH DINNER

Steve Casburn, springboarding off everybody, is talking about cover songs. Rather than just listing ones he likes, though, he’s waxing philosophical about them, saying they all basically fall into three categories: Covers that re-make, covers that re-live, and covers that re-ward (financially).

Farbeit from me to argue with one so knowledgeable as Steve, but there’s another, rare category: Once in a great while, there are cover songs which utterly outclass the original, becoming the definitive version of what was originally someone else’s song.

Nobody did this better than the Gear Daddies, the late, lamented Austin, MN band of the 80s. Their versions of Blondie’s “The Tide Is High” and BW Stevenson’s “My Maria” are simply stunning. Debbie Harry was always too detached to sell a lyric. So, when her band finally came up with a sincere tale of longing in “The Tide Is High,” you could just hear her tongue poking out of her cheek. The Daddies layered on wah-wah guitar but stripped down the rest of the arrangement, and lead singer Martin Zellar sang it totally straight, in a drunken 3-AM phone call kind of way. It worked, masterfully.

Their cover of “My Maria” is so superior to the pathetic Brooks and Dunn version, I’d be afraid to bring the two CDs into the same room, fearing a matter/anti-matter kind of reaction that may spontaneously trigger the destruction of the entire universe.

Steve, neither of these two covers qualifies as a remake. They didn’t change a note of “My Maria,” and all they did on “Tide” was ditch the mariachi trumpets. What they did instead was to do the songs better than the person(s) who originally recorded them ever could.

Like I said, this is a rare category. I can only think of a couple other covers which qualify: Bettie Serveert’s cover of the Carpenter’s “For All We Know,” the Sundays doing the Stones’ “Wild Horses,” and They Might Be Giants’ version of Georgie Fame’s “Yeh Yeh.” Normally there’s no reason to cover most songs, but once in a while–a great while, mind you–somebody unlocks possiblities that even the original artist couldn’t find.