Farmertan

This cover of the week takes a couple influences down with one stone. The Jesus and Mary chain hit the scene in a similar fashion to many brit new wave style post punk bands, and being from the same part of Glasgow, Scotland as the famed CT musical entrepeneur Brian Sinclair, as well as Aztec Camera and Lloyd Cole, they had to be good. Often JMC was compared to a cross between the Velvet underground and the Ramones. They could drone like crazy over fast or slow melodic fuzz induced jams.  They seemed to be out of time, spanning decades through the 80’s 90’s and new millenium with reinvented and listenable grace.

And then we take a left turn….

In college I had a 5CD changer that had a cartridge to fill, you would then stick the hunk of plastic back into the player and it would sputter and have fits as it delivered the CD of choice to the laser. For lack of lubricant, it was whine and rub and sound like a braying donkey and you went from disc to disc. But for much of the end of my college days, The PIxies “Trompe le monde” occupied that opening slot. And on that disc was a cover of “Head on” by JMC.  This cover was a rip roaring return to loud guitars and punk sounds that injected musical steroids into the song from which it could never look back.

Perhaps this song is what a “cover” is all about, the Pixies, take a song from a great band, and make it their own- do it their own way. They don’t try to copy the tempo, the feel, the notes, arrangement- it doesn’t matter. They make it their style. Their own; That is what Farmertan is trying to do with the cover of the weeks we post- Give a Farmertan filter to a bunch of great songs.

When we do this song, we sound more like the pixies version,  and as Bono from U2 once said about Helter Skelter…       The Pixies stole this one from the Jesus and Mary Chain; and we are not stealing it back, but just buying it back from a pawn shop.

“Head on” by the Jesus and Mary Chain; performed by Farmertan.

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