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Once a heartfelt vehicle for artists looking to celebrate their roots, cover songs have deteriorated into exercises in going through the emotions.
Blame it on Michael Bolton. Blame it on the glut of tribute albums clogging the bins. Or blame it on the fact that many of the artists recording new versions of old favorites these days value their gold records more than the dusty 45s of their youth. As a result, few acts are brave enough to tackle anything that hasn't already been a proven hit
But Elvis Costello — who still keeps his favorite singles on a special shelf in the music room of his Dublin home — has always relished interpreting little-known songs by his heroes, who range from George Gershwin to George Jones, from Bacharach and David to Sam and Dave.
In the midst of his punk-and-disorderly period, he confounded fans by releasing 1981's Almost Blue, a straight-faced country project saluting Merle Haggard, Gram Parsons, Loretta Lynn and others. He's unearthed such soul-music gems as Sam and Dave's "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down" and the Teacher's Edition's "I Wanna Be Loved."
His singles have been littered with B-sides boasting spirited coven of everything from Betty Everett's "Gettin' Mighty Crowded" and Charles Brown's "Get Yourself Another Fool" to Hoagy Carmichael's "My Resistance Is Low" and Georgie Fame's "Point of No Return."
At age 39, this thriving survivor of the late-'70s British new-wave movement still writes most of his own material. But he also remains faithful to the mission of a good cover song: to introduce his fans to singers or songs they might never have found on their own in hopes that they later will seek out CDs by the original artists.
"The biggest problem with picking well-known titles is getting out of the long shadow cast by the original version," says Costello, whose Kojak Variety, a savage yet soulful collection of obscure R&B, pop and country covers spanning from 1930 to 1970, hit record stores Tuesday.
"For example, if you were going to do a song by somebody whose current image in pop music is one which would dominate the actual song — I don't want to mention any names, but say you decided you were going to do 'Cryin' ' by Aerosmith. You could do a great R&B version of that, as I'm sure they had in their mind when they wrote it. But you'd have to wait a few years before everybody didn't have an image of Steven Tyler in leotards in their head on first hearing."
Recorded in 1991 in Barbados during a two-week busman's holiday, Kojak Variety finds the composer of such hits as "Alison," "Everyday I Write the Book," and "Veronica" tackling songs associated with Memphis soul legend James Carr ("Pouring Water on a Drowning Man"), Aretha Franklin ("Running Out of Fools"), Jesse Winchester ("Payday"), Bob Dylan ("I Threw It All Away"), Mose Allison ("Everybody's Crying Mercy"), the Drifters ("Please Stay"), Screamin' Jay Hawkins ("Strange") and Little Richard ("Bama Lama Bama Loo").
While the arrangements remain faithful to the originals, the band — which includes longtime collaborators Marc Ribot, Larry Knechtel, Jim Keltner, Jerry Scheff, James Burton and Attractions drummer Pete Thomas — takes some inspired liberties: "Must You Throw Dirt in My Face," a 1962 country hit for the Louvin Brothers, is lovingly mutated from a pretty waltz into a passionate R&B ballad; the Kinks' "Days" is turned into a powerful, apocalyptic dirge.
"Often with some of the more sophisticated songs, there are things if you change them, you're actually messing with the compositional structure of the songs," Costello says by phone from Dublin.
"Like you can't take the piano figure out of Randy Newman's 'I've Been Wrong Before' and have the same song, because it really turns on the effect of that piano figure entering right on the lines 'I've been wrong before.' It's more than just a good line in a lyric, it expresses the same feeling in the music. On other songs you can go far away from the original, as we did with 'Must You Throw Dirt in My Face.' So we took both approaches really, but by the time these players had their way with it, there was no sense that we were recreating anything.
"All these songs have got stories to tell, and by approaching them differently you do draw out something that maybe the writer had in the back of his mind, or maybe he didn't have it in his mind at all."
Costello's affection for cover songs started as a toddler. In the '50s, his father, Ross MacManus, was a singer with the Joe Loss Orchestra, which performed live renditions of hit tunes weekly on BBC radio.
Costello's initial exposure to Motown as a teenager came not from Marvin Gaye or Temptations albums but from covers by such Liverpool acts as the early Beatles and the Escorts: To this day, he says he prefers the Fab Four's version of "You've Really Got A Hold On Me" to Smokey Robinson's.
"There was a period when Chuck Berry would have been unusual in recording his own songs in '56, but in '62, the Beatles started a chain reaction that meant if you didn't write your own songs, you were a freak and you didn't get signed," he said.
"And there were very few bands that didn't attempt to write them, even if they didn't have any talent at it. There's a few today that I think might do better to work not with a bunch of hack writers, but maybe to look around. There's a lot of songs out there now. Everybody's writing whole new albums of songs, whether or not they have any talent as songwriters."
Despite the strength of the performances — which feature some of Costello's huskiest, heartiest singing — Kojak Variety wound up sitting in the vaults of Warner Bros. for four years, quickly building a myth as the Great Lost Elvis Costello Album.
Costello says he, not the record company, decided to hold it back because he got involved in original songs again with Mighty Like a Rose, (1991) The Juliet Letters (1992) and Brutal Youth (1994).
Releasing Kojak Variety in 1995 makes sense because Costello is finishing up a musical house cleaning project that includes overseeing Rykodisc's sonically superior reissues of his 11 Columbia albums. He also is preparing to go into the studio with the Attractions this summer and reclaim some of the songs that he originally wrote for — or with — other artists, including "I Want to Vanish" (written for June Tabor) and "Hidden Shame" (Johnny Cash)
But the downside to his timing is that jaded observers might dismiss Kojak Variety as yet another trendy one-person tribute project along the lines of Annie Lennox's Medusa, Duran Duran's Thank You, Shawn Colvin's Cover Girl, Gloria Estefan's Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me or Luther Vandross' Songs.
Costello shrugs off such potential criticisms. He knows that he's not doing anything revolutionary.
"The first time I heard 'Get Yourself Another Fool' was on an album called Nightbeat by Sam Cooke, which I realize now was a tribute to Charles Brown," he said.
"Lately these tribute records have gotten a little out of hand because of the grandiosity of the concept behind them. If they're just done as a bunch of songs, I don't see anything wrong with it. Like Beat the Retreat, the Richard Thompson album....
"There are lots of good versions of his songs, but most of all, it's all about hearing his songs. I can't say that the same thought is always brought to bear on some of these tribute records that I've heard lately. They do sound a little like bathing in reflective glory sometimes, lesser musicians doing songs for no good reason."
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