Standards: Savior of rock and roll

wow, like a mandatory "license to rock" situation? I can see the Rock and Roll DMV, sort of like Guitar Center but with more clipboards, lots of people with pony tails checking "House of the Rising Sun" off the list as various would-bes and no-hopers tackle "I Want to Destroy You" or "Hurricane Fighter Plane" for extra credit. Do the first two albums need to be actually released or would CDRs suffice?

Bands shouldn't write songs at all. There are enough songs! Just pick the ones you like and play them for me.

Hmm, not a bad idea. But I wouldn't want there to be any mandatory songs, especially not House of the Rising Sun.

I do think learning covers, especially learning to nail the arrangements, would teach bands how to play as a band and prevent them from trying to reinvent the wheel.

who is this guy trying to steal my name?!

maybe it should be like figure skating, where there's a compulsory exercise, then a free exercise. the first album would be mandatory covers ("sweet home chicago," "love hurts," "i can't explain," "smells like teen spirit," etc.), and the second album would be the band's choice.

No, I think bands should be required NOT to play those songs.

...and though the second album would be band's choice, each song should be assigned a degree of difficulty, which would be an excellent aid to reviewers. a band might do a kick-ass cover of "i wanna be your dog," but it would have a degree of difficulty of only 1.5, so a the reviewer would dock the album accordingly, and no one would be able to complain, 'cause the reviewer would only be following the rules. likewise, a band that did a so-so version of "master of puppets," with a degree of difficulty of 7.2, would be awarded a pretty good review. this would make it much easier to read magazines, and speed up the process of choosing cd's to buy in large stores.

cuz is OTM about the difficulty rating of some songs: that Flying Luttenbachers cover of a Magma song is surely worth an 8 just for doing it, while the Tater Totz don't get a lot of points for covering Yoko Ono's "Telephone Piece" (but they do for learning the Bohemian Rhapsody guitar solo in full).

I am sensitive on this topic, having just done a covers album. It's usually regarded as the sign of an artist having lost all their inspiration and waxing nostalgic and mustily historical, so I like the perversity of insisting that everybody start their career this way. it's more like a rhetorical exercise in composition, like renaissance humanist schoolboys dutifully imitating Cicero or something . . .

Great songs are more important than a voice.

Everyone OTM ... doing a great cover version of a song with a high DD (degree of difficulty) shows considerable inspiration. Rearranging a song and performing it in a drastically different style from the original is a perfectly legitimate creative endeavour. On the other hand, doing a note-for-note cover in the same style is not.

In classical music, conductors get accolades for doing a different take on a piece of music (repeating or shortening certain sections, changing tempos, emphasing the parts of certain instruments over others, altering the instrumentation altogether, and the list goes on).

OTOH, doing the usual tried-and-true "safe" versions of Beethoven's 5th, for instance, it may be crowd-pleasing, but it's creatively bankrupt.

Classical pieces are notated. Popular music pieces are not (at least not as throughoutly)

But then, I find it cool when somebody is giving new breath to an old classical standard too, but if performed in a "classical" style they should keep to the composer's intentions. If, however, they want to do a "Hooked On Classic" from it (bad example, I know :-) ), then that is a lot different.

Geir do you like the Fucking Champs

No idea. :-)

they should keep to the composer's intentions
Why? The score is notated but there is still a lot of leeway. And why should they stick to the composers intentions? If an artist wants to take a song that was written for a jazz artist and turn it into a rock song, what's the big deal?

At least in the twilight world of online MIDI file downloading, many pop and rock hits *are* now notated in a way that takes a hell of a lot of the work (and creativity) out of doing a cover of them. With a few clicks you can download the General MIDI for "Sweet Child O'Mine", run it through a gnarly acid patch on a soft-synth, and voila- your ironic electro-bashing of Guns-n-Roses is off and running! Huzzah!

Which reminds me, how was that electronic tribute to Iron Maiden album anyway?

Somehow this thread seems to have degenerated into "covers: good or bad?" The idea of the original post though was to propose that bands learn covers to cut their teeth before they could do originals, and I'd assume this would mean doing at least semi-faithful versions of the originals, regardless of whether this is a good "creative endeavour" or not.

xpost: "OTOH, doing the usual tried-and-true "safe" versions of Beethoven's 5th, for instance, it may be crowd-pleasing, but it's creatively bankrupt."

- That's kind of an obtuse criticism of what most classical music essentially is. First of all, any orchestra is performing the music of someone else, whether it's Beethoven or John Cage, and it's usually been done before. Second, most classical music was written in a time without recorded music, hence the need to perform it over and over again.

Third, there is something to be said for simply reproducing, live, the effect of great classical music performed by a great orchestra, even if it is Beethoven's 5th, because this is something that can't be captured on CD (not to mention all the subtleties of interpretation blah blah blah).

But again, the point is not whether the exercise is creatively bankrupt, but whether or not it would help bands become better.

Not to mention that the thread is tongue-in-cheek and I'm starting to take it way too seriously.

I think the whole 'difficult' covers thing is the wrong way to go - who cares how hard something is to play? And they shouldn't have to be standards, just a first album of covers, it's always exciting seeing what a band have chosen. It should be a 'mission statement' of covers, trying to describe the flavour of what you will make.

I like that idea much better.

Great songs are more important than a voice.
i'm a song man, but i'm not sure you can make it quite that black-and-white. in most popular music, it often takes a great voice to make a great song actually be great. i find it really, really hard to separate the two. (and i don't mean great voice in the perfect-pitch, seven-octave range sense. i mean great voice in the holy-shit-that-smokes sense.)

xpost: "OTOH, doing the usual tried-and-true "safe" versions of Beethoven's 5th, for instance, it may be crowd-pleasing, but it's creatively bankrupt."
I know it's a bit off-topic, but I never said that these pieces should never be performed ... something can be creatively bankrupt but still be enjoyable. Such a performance of Beethoven's 5th would be roughly equivalent to a low DD cover version. And obviously the contrast between live and recorded music applies to nearly everything.

Certainly, a band performing low DD songs (but doing them well) would become better (in the fantasy world of this thread). But it would require more talent for bands to be able to perform high DD songs in a new and creative way.

Hmmm...intriguing idea. One problem, however: How to decide what covers to do? If they happen to do covers that their prospective target audience knows and HATES, they risk alienating that audience right away. Not a good way to begin a career.

Interesting how such an idea is considered unusual or even radical - up intil '67 or so, bands routinely filled out their albums with covers. And not just standards or oldies or unearthed/unknown songs, but recent chart hits as well. Wilson Pickett's "Hey Jude", Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through The Grapevine", Ike & Tina Turner's "Proud Mary": All hits, and all released just a year or two after the ORIGINAL hit versions by Beatles, Gladys Knight and CCR respectively.

American artists may have done this, British artists quit doing it sometime in the mid 60s though.

Like, The Beatles were all original from "Rubber Soul" onwards. Rolling Stones were all originals from "Aftermath" onwards. And at the same time, The Kinks, The Hollies, you could name most British bands (at least if you leave out the R&B ones) and they would go for originally written stuff rather than cover versions.