"We Can Work It Out" and "Take Me to the River"

First, a programming note: there will be no podcast today, due to the dueling circumstances of post-Midwest Music Summit exhaustion and the beginning of a week-long pre-semester teaching workshop. I go here, not that you asked. Feel free to read my thoughts on the Summit (and add your own, if you were there) here: [Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3]. Hopefully I'll have time to create the 'cast later this week.

Second, today's post is an archival one, but taken from a cover songs group post I contributed to a while back at goodhodgkins.com. Regular new content will resume tomorrow.

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My favorite types of pop cover songs are those that highlight previously unreachable elements of each artist, with a common song as the comparative pivot point. It’s not so much that one version is better than the other as much as the ways the two work with each another to reveal something new. The two selections I’ve chosen here represent two iconoclastic artists on the verge of their respective creative peaks. These two cover versions, in unique ways, manipulated traditional religio-musical elements to open entirely new opportunities for future artists interested in expanding the boundaries of pop music.

Stevie Wonder’s 1970 album Signed, Sealed, Delivered is the final work of his tight-leash child prodigy period, to be followed by the comparatively expansive duo Where I’m Coming From and Music of My Mind and the kaleidoscopic wonder-quartet of Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale and Songs in the Key of Life. By 1977, Stevie had established himself as one of the most accomplished musicians of his generation. But it’s this song, or more specifically what Stevie was able to do with this song, that sounded a faint holler of what he would later achieve, especially on an album with a cover featuring Stevie climbing out of a cardboard box. By this point in his career he was dedicated to studio experimentation, and this track is a prime example of what a brilliant 20-year old with 15 (!) albums worth of material behind him could achieve when given a little freedom.

"We Can Work It Out" starts with a lonely, effected and distorted, and primitive-sounding electric piano figure, wiped clean with the ebullient THUD of simultaneous bass drum, hi-hat, and Wonder’s high-pitched voice all at once—HEY! Then there’s the far-off sound of the clavinet with which Wonder would fall so in love, that same electric piano texture, and most importantly Wonder’s transformation of Paul McCartney’s elegant, somewhat plaintive sentiment into a dense, funky call-and-response between his own multi-tracked voices. Instead of McCartney’s “think of what I’m sayyyyyeeeeeng,” we get “THINKofwhatIMsayin,’” with all due emphasis applied, immediately followed by the affirmative “Heeeeey!” Likewise, Stevie's chorus has specific emphasis on each individual word—instead of McCartney’s “WEcannnworkitout,” it’s “WE. CAN. WORK. IT. OUT!!!”—a direct order instead of polite recommendation. Lennon’s middle section is likewise taken to church, as Wonder, backed now by a rattling tambourine, almost falls over himself trying to fill both Lennon’s low and McCartney’s high harmony parts, before allowing it all to fall back to earth with a buzzy little descending figure, and another “HEY!” But the best part of the song, aside from the appearance of that miraculous chromatic harmonica, is the breakdown at 1:57, when everything disappears save that distorted guitar, a tapped hi-hat and Wonder’s voice, which vamps for a second and is then engulfed by an impossibly high-pitched, Al Green-level Stevie that shines an impossibly bright light on the fact that "it" may well have been worked out.

The Beatles "We Can Work It Out" (mp3)
Stevie Wonder "We Can Work It Out" (mp3)

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In 1978 David Byrne, and to a lesser extent his bandmates in Talking Heads, were undergoing a transformation of their own—from RISD-bred nervy punks to textural, polyrhythmic, art funks. They’d met Brian Eno after recording their first record, and he signed on to helm their second, the amazing-yet-still-transitional More Songs About Buildings and Food. Enough brilliant people have said enough about this album that I won’t belabor the point that it’s fantastic. What I’d like to highlight, though, is the second-to-last song on the second side of the album, their cover of “Take Me To the River,” originally released four years earlier on Al Green’s strangely titled Al Green Explores Your Mind. (He’d already gotten next to you, why not let him in the mind to poke around a little?) Green’s original was very, well, Al Green, with slick Hi Records production values, punchy horn charts and the Hodges brothers on rhythm duties.

What Talking Heads (or, really, Byrne and Eno) did with it is completely drain all of its feeling (Green dedicates his version to the recently passed Junior Parker) and replace it with a cerebral coldness, kind of like a blood transfusion, um, for the soul. Byrne and Eno’s version stands out immediately because it’s….so….much…. sloooooower than Green’s version, with football fields of space between each beat so much that the intro feels like it takes two years to get to the first verse. And let’s not ignore the fact that, complete with what sounds like sonar bleeps, the recording sounds like it’s actually underwater. It actually sounds like a slightly more joyous Joy Division, which I’d think Byrne would have thought as well if I hadn’t learned from Simon Reynolds’ book that none of the Heads had actually heard the music of their trans-Atlantic peers, but only enjoyed reading their record reviews. The most important thing about this song, though, is the content, which is the first place Byrne was able to indulge his fascination with traditional American religion—one that would amazingly continue on the amazingly amazing My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Fear of Music and Remain in Light. This is where it all began, and Byrne is still fleshing out his take on the style: he works in a few high-pitched melismatic wails around Jerry Harrison’s clipped organ riffs, and the result is something not quite inspirational in the traditional sense, but when thought of as representative of a man’s desire to break free of his Nervy McJitter artistic persona (best witnessed as the climax of Stop Making Sense), it’s quite riveting.

Al Green "Take Me to the River" (mp3)
Talking Heads "Take Me to the River" (mp3)

OKAY, THIS ISN'T MUSIC-RELATED, BUT you should seriously take some time and check out the CS Monitor's thorough interviewing (with video imbeds) of former Sunni hostage (and CS freelancer) Jill Carroll at their website. The one that got me is called "Channel Surfing with the Mujahideen." Her hair color is pretty indie-rock, I guess.

THIS ONE IS MUSIC-RELATED: Pete's got another new video up at the Anchor Center:
Voxtrot's "Raised by Wolves."