Willie Nelson "Crazy"

For a bit of a change of (blogging) pace, I thought it would be fun to play a game this week. A game I'm calling . . .

The Incredible Imaginary Freaky Friday Cover Tune Switcheroo!

It'll require a little bit of imagination on your part. But you don't mind, right? Letting your brain drift away from work or home or whatever you should be doing, for just a second?

Because these aren't real covers. So to "hear" the songs, you'll just have to imagine them.

I was inspired in part by Peter Gabriel's last project. He did covers of some of his favorite artists. But then he also had those artists cut their version of one of his songs.

For The Incredible Imaginary Freaky Friday Cover Tune Switcheroo! I'm asking you to imagine that two artists who have songs with the exact same title, decided to switch tunes and do the other person's different song of the same title.

Get it? Not really? The explanation is more complicated than the execution. So let's just play the game.

Today's song:

"Crazy" by Willie Nelson and "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley.

This is a pretty easy starting point, in that Willie Nelson has tackled all kinds of cover tunes in his day, and he does it in a very recognizable style.

So it's not too hard to hear in your head, Willie, singing in his somewhat-cracked but still beautiful drawl, "I remember when, I remember when I lost my mind, there was something to pleasant about that place."

Maybe a little harder, but no less fun, to imagine, is Cee Lo Green of Gnarls Barkley, taking on Willie's song that is most closely associated with Patsy Cline.

Can you hear his clear, pointed tenor, with maybe a stripped-down beat underneath, singing, "Crazy, crazy for feeling so lonely. I'm crazy for trying and crazy for crying and I'm crazy for loving you."

What do you think? Could you hear it?

All this week, I'll be playing this game. Some of the match ups sound really promising, others will be total train-wrecks.

Should be fun!


See Willie Nelson on Youtube.


See Gnarls Barkley on Youtube.

William Shanter "F*** You"

I read this book to my kid, called "Olivia."

If you're not familiar with the series, Olivia is a precocious pig.

In one scene, Olivia is with her Mom at an art museum:

"But there is one painting Olivia just doesn't get. 'I could do that in about five minutes,' she says to her mother."

She's looking at a Jackson Pollock.

Yeah, to a kid, I'm sure what Jackson Pollock did seems like anyone could do it.

It's why people make fun of William Shatner's recording career. It doesn't seem like he's really doing anything that the average person couldn't do themselves.

But I maintain that, while seeming simplistic, what Pollock and Shatner do are so a product of their panache that, while you could mimic them, you could never reproduce it.

I mean, c'mon, this performance is ridiculous. But it's wonderfully ridiculous, and I can't really imagine anyone who could do this performance.


Thanks to my friend Teddy, for pointing me to this video. Note that it is uncensored and NSFW!

Dire Straits "Money For Nothing"

We're all familiar with The Grandfather Clause Of Language, right?

A regular, legal, Grandfather Clause, you know, allows the continued practice of a recently banned act, if the practitioner has been engaging in said practice for a really long time.

The Grandfather Clause Of Language basically means that you are willing to give an elderly person a pass on the offensive (or racist or politically incorrect) things they say, if said remark was not considered offensive in "their day," even if it is inappropriate now.

And there is an equivalent phenomenon in music.

Certain songs we play, going back 20, 30, 40 years, may contain a word that was allowed to be broadcast when it first came out. If a song featuring that same word came out today, the word would most certainly be censored.

How else to explain that no station that I've ever heard, ever censors the word "Nigger" in Elvis Costello's "Oliver's Army"? Cee-Lo Green certainly couldn't use that word (or several others) in his Radio Edit of "Fuck You."

And strangely, most Classic Rock stations have always kept the "do goody-good Bullshit" line intact, in Pink Floyd's "Money." But any current radio song with the same lyric, would have to arrive at the station, "Bullshit"-free.

At Christmastime, you never hear the word "faggot" edited out of The Pogues song "Fairytale Of New York." Yet, when KT Tunstall and Ed Harcourt covered it recently, they were requested to alter that line.

Weirdly, if a song has gotten by the censors all these years, it seems to get left alone.

Until now.

What to make of The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council's decision to ban play of "Money For Nothing" unless the word "faggot" is edited out . . . 25 years after the song came out?

Bizarre, eh?

Vance Gilbert "Kiss My A**"

I grew up Catholic, going to church every Sunday, going through the ritual.

If you grew up Catholic, or if you've ever attended a Catholic wedding or funeral, you know what I mean when I say that, compared to many religious services a Catholic ceremony is often very rote, very sedate, formal, and often a bit monotone.

We went to what was called "The French Church" in my town. Back over 100 years ago, the Mass would be in French. This was the only differentiation I could see, from the "Immaculate Conception" which, back in the day, was attended mainly by The Irish.

But really, to a kid, Catholic Church was like McDonalds. The food roughly tasted the same, no matter where you stopped. That was both comforting, and a little boring.

The French Church had the same Pastor for many, many years, but Father Dacier had to retire eventually. Father Plourde came in, and though some of the old school folks felt he was a big shift, from my perspective, there wasn't much new.

It must have been a little boring to the "new" Priest.

Because not too long after he arrived, he gave a sermon, which he'd repeat from time to time, about how, while he was happy to be Catholic and believed it to be the true path to Heaven, he was a little envious of those Baptists who had their congregation hooting and hollering during a sermon. People spontaneous shouting out "Praise Jesus!" "Testify!" and such. He admired the passion for faith.

He'd end he sermon, and on a good day, maybe one Catholic would, speaking loudly but politely, say, "Amen."

Just as often as not, silence.

That's a long way around to get to today's point, which is that the Folk world can be an awful lot like Catholic church. A little staid, formal, introspective.

And secretly, as a devotee of folk music, I look longingly at the Rap world and their "response" songs. You got a beef with someone? You want to address the same topic from a different perspective? Write a Response (or Answer) song.

It just doesn't happen in the folk world.

But in the Youtube world, it's more prevalent than ever. Maybe that's what motivated Vance Gilbert.

So how entertaining, even if he's just screwing around, for Gilbert to write to a reaction song to the biggest (musical) viral sensation of the year, Cee Lo Green's "Fuck You."

Silly, but certainly not staid.


Tonight on mvy Live, the station features Vance Gilbert in concert, from his fall appearance at The Narrows. Tune in at 9pm.

Cee-Lo Green "F*** You"

Would this song have been a success, in the pre-internet world?

20 years ago, if a song didn't get significant radio play, it simply wasn't likely to sell to many records.

And this track, splattered with a certain FCC-unapproved word in its title, verse and chorus, wasn't going to get even the first radio-spin.

But the FCC only governs the airwaves. The interweb is free to say all 7 of George Carlin's Dirty Words, and add pictures.

So this tune has, rightly, become a viral sensation, spawning a much less enjoyable but FCC-friendly version called "Forget You."

But would we have gotten to the point where there was a demand to put this on the airwaves, without the web?

(By the way, despite pronouncements that radio doesn't matter, music sales DO rise and fall, based on radio play. It's just not the ONLY factor any more.)