This Is Your Song For....March 13th, 2014: Break Them Down by Graham Parker

Hiding behind a not very good album....

Welcome back.  Hopefully I can get up enough energy to submit these entries more than monthly soon.  Today...the Angry Young Man of New Wave most people forgot.

....which is a shame because if you consider Joe Jackson The Beatles, and Elvis Costello The Stones, then Graham Parker is The Kinks, the one that helped shape the genre while not getting the credit his peers deserved.  And let’s be honest; like The Kinks, Parker had a tendency towards inconsistency and an annoying habit of trying to chase the American market instead of being true to himself.

This is from a later phase in his career, after he broke ties with his most famous collaborators The Rumor, and was recording as Graham Parker And The Shot (this being the only album he records under that name).  This is a very transparent song about converting native cultures to Christianity and, while it’s not as unsubtle as ‘Green Monkeys,’ a song off the otherwise excellent,return-to-form album Struck By Lightning, it’s pretty obvious what Parker is getting at.  It’s sort of a sad period of his career, when he was flailing about trying to keep an audience that was growing bored with him.  It’s not for nothing that Parker never quite found another sympatico set of collaborators thoughout the late 80‘s onward until he recently reunited with The Rumor for the rather good Three Chords Good.

As you can no doubt tell, I don’t have much to say about this song.  If Graham Parker is The Kinks, then this is from the period in his career analogous to the late 70‘s era that saw Ray Davies produce Low Budget and Celluloid Heroes.

Here’s the song.

Cover-versies: The Smithereens

Last week, The Smithereens released 2011, their first album of original material in years.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

Like many of the bands I've enjoyed throughout the years, I remember vividly when I firest encountered this New Jersey band. I was sitting in Hunter College's old lounge watching MTV when the video for "Blood And Roses" came on. This video was a tie in for the Albert 'He Puts The Peee-yew in Movies' Pyun Dangerously Close, and it had a touch of the strange to it. Still, I eventually picked up their albums in the various used CD stores that dot the Village and liked them.

The thing I enjoyed about The Smithereens is that even though they're an 80's band from New Jersey, it's obvious that lead singer/songwriter Pat DiNizio's head dwells in an old garage in California circa 1968. Hell, the band spent the early years of its fame defending itself from charges that their songs were nothing but rip-offs of The Byrds and The Beatles. I liked how the band was able to keep their influences alive while putting their own spin on it, bringing those old movements forward and recasting them into meat-and-potatoes modern power pop.

And to be fair, The Smithereens never hid their influences from people. Throughout the height of their fame, bolstered by the popularity of alternative rock and 'new music' formats, the band would throw out covers from time to time. Most of these were of the 'respectful recreation' which I can take or leave, but every once in a while they came up with something like this reworking of their early song, "Behind The Wall of Sleep" they did with Graham Parker on MTV Unplugged. A recording of that version later popped up on the rarities album Attack of The Smithereens.

Here's the video for the original version....

And here's the MTV version...I couldn't find an isolated version of it, so it occurs at the 3:40 mark...

What makes the latter version so amazing is that it serves as a form of reverse engineering. By replacing DiNizio's voice with Parker's, it pretty much lays bare the blueprint for The Smithereens' success. It also, quite frankly, gives us a more desperate narrator, as Parker's voice sounds more lost that DiNizio. This is one of the reasons I love cover tunes; when done right, they reveal new things about the writer of the song, and the performers.

So The Smithereens have had the capability in the past to use the power of the cover tune wisely...but then in the '00s, they went and did things like this...

That's The Smithereens' video for "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," from the detestable Meet The Smithereens. This was the first of three albums (Meet The Smithereens; B-Sides The Beatles; Perform Tommy) where this smart and intelligent band ended up acting like those 'Tribute Bands' that play every third pub on Friday nights. These albums are nothing but the band aping their idols painstakingly...and all I hear when listening to these things are a band with no more pride in their own direction, who are perfectly happy to play pretend and grab the money thrown at them by their old fans, fans of the Beatles and The Who who look at this as a fitting tribute, and ironic hipster doofi. And the fact that a band whose original work I used to enjoy forwent this for three years to play pretend.....man, it pissed me off.

But then, maybe the reason they did these three albums is so they can get themselves together and scrape up material for what has become 2011...although I like to think that producer Don Dixon showed up at their collective houses, screamed at them, returned their balls and made them get to work.