The Joy of the Cover Song

or: Five takes on Take Five

When I was a kid I was obsessed with Dave Brubeck. Not that I don’t live Brubeck now, but for some reason, I was hellbent on telling everybody—in early-1990s America—that my favorite musicians were the Beastie Boys, Billy Joel, Diana Ross and the Supremes and Dave Brubeck. I remember finding the Beasties through MTV and Diana Ross and the Supremes was really just my way of saying I loved any Motown song I heard on the oldies station. But my love of Brubeck was based solely on hearing his most famous song, “Take Five,” and correctly thinking it was one of the coolest things I’d ever heard. I was so into Brubeck, that when I was nine and visiting my grandpa in Florida I noticed an ad in the newspaper that Brubeck was playing West Palm Beach and I decided that I was fine forgoing a trip to Parrot Jungle and attending Sunfest instead.

Sadly, I didn’t see Brubeck that day. We got there a little late. But on the way home, my grandpa put the top down on her Mercedes and let me play my cassette tape with “Take Five” on it and that’s a memory I hold with me to this day. It’s likely why “Take Five” is one of those songs I can’t get enough of, but I’ve also always had the feeling that there’s something almost subliminal in the song that made it the biggest-selling jazz single ever. It’s like the musical version of Mike Myers, as the Scottish father in So I Married an Axe Murderer, talking about how Colonel Sanders puts an addictive chemical in his chicken so you crave it all the time.

There’s Brubeck’s 1959 version of the song composed by Paul Desmond, and then there are also the covers. I can’t get enough different versions of “Take Five.” Because of its popularity, it’s one of the standards that musicians from all over have tried their hand at and the results are always fascinating. I find that you can listen to multiple versions of the song in a row and it doesn’t grow stale. Go from the ripping Tito Puente version to the King Tubby dub take on the song and it almost doesn’t feel like you’re listening to the same song.

There are other covers of the song I love. I counted ten different versions in my digital music library, and I believe I have four different versions on vinyl scattered around my house. The Elek Bacsik version would be perfect for a drive through the French countryside while Minoru Muraoka’s version featuring his shakuhachi skills is vibey as hell. Very taking mushrooms and going to a jazz club feel. There’s a version by Ozzie Hall on one of the Numero Group Cult Cargo compilations that’s maybe the wildest take on the song. Hall was a Jamaican-born sax player who made his name when he moved to Grand Bahama and started gigging at a hotel there.

The cover song is something I’m always interested in. When you see a band live and they bust one out, whether it’s a well-known anthem or a rare track maybe five people in the audience know, it often feels like a welcomed detour from the regular setlist. You go to a restaurant and the chances of a cover song playing over the speakers or somebody playing one live on the guitar or piano, are usually high. Sometimes you find yourself at the start of a pandemic and Gal Gadot and her famous friends want to cover “Imagine” and your entire world is rocked by the realization there’s truly no coming back from this, that you can never hear John Lennon’s famous socialist pop song and not think of the celebrity version again. But other times you hear a cover that tries to stick close to the original and it works in a way that you end up understanding the band covering the original a little better. I remember being 14 or 15 and hearing Led Zeppelin’s “Dancing Days” coming out of a window, but it wasn’t the original. A few days later while watching MTV, I saw there was an album out called Encomium: A Tribute to Led Zeppelin, and the version I’d heard was by Stone Temple Pilots. I wasn’t a fan of STP for whatever dumb reason my teenage mind concocted. I think I’d heard they were “fake grunge” or maybe I thought Pavement calling them “elegant bachelors” in “Range Life” meant that since I was so Malkmus-obsessed, I also had to find new and interesting ways to make fun of the band whose songs I couldn’t escape as a teen. (To their credit, Pavement wrote a very lovely tribute to STP singer Scott Weiland after he passed away in 2015). Either way, I closed my ears off to them, but that cover made me face the music, so to speak. I didn’t exactly become a fan, but I started to understand what they were trying to do a little better. I also started to admit publically that a few tracks that would end up on their greatest hits album (“Creep,” “Interstate Love Song”) actually slap.

I have a list of songs in my head that I’m always interested in hearing different covers of. I might like Patti Smith and her band jamming out a raw version of “My Generation” more than the original by the Who (sorry). The Green Day version of the same song at the end of Kerplunk isn’t as good as either the original or Smith’s, but I like what it represents. It’s a rite of passage. It’s Green Day before they blew up and became one of the biggest bands of the last 30 years proclaiming they’re part of a lineage that stretches back to the U.K. mods who took the blues and stretched it out and made it louder and faster and the American kids who heard the British takes on American blues and copied them, usually with less talent. And in a lot of cases, the lack of talent actually added to the appeal. The Chicago band the Rovin’ Kind did a version that isn’t bad, but it also isn’t great, and that’s exactly what I want it to be. It came out a few months after the original, and there’s this rawness and excitement to it that I really appreciate. Like some teenage Midwestern goons heard this song by this British band and had to beat all the other locals to cover it.

The cover can also be hilarious. I’ve spent years second-guessing myself about whether or not “Pickin' Cotton Blues” by the white boy blues rock band the Black Keys Blueshammer is a cover or just some hilarious version of a few blues songs just thrown into a blender. There’s definitely a song called “Pickin’ Cotton Blues” done by Boo Hanks, but it’s not the same song, so I like to imagine that the song you hear in Ghost World is a cover song in spirit.

And then there’s “Hallelujah.” Not the original by Leonard Cohen, but the cover by John Cale or Jeff Buckley. The obsession with that song is wild. I’m not necessarily sure most of the people covering it know who wrote it or care much about the other two artists who recorded it over a decade after the original came out. Cohen supposedly wrote close to 200 verses for the song and, as more than a few folks have pointed out, the song fucks. So when I found myself flipping through the channels and landed on some evangelical church Christmas Eve service that looked just like something out of The Righteous Gemstones and some fake-blonde version of Edi Patterson’s putting those voice lessons to good use, I waited for a second to see how close to the source material she’d get. And sure enough, as she belted “She tied you to a kitchen chair,” I smiled. Hallelujah, I thought. The cover song is good!